The thing about watching someone lose is that it reveals their character in ways winning never could—victory makes people magnanimous and forgiving, turns them into philosophers dispensing wisdom about fate and fortune.
But defeat? Defeat strips away the performance and shows you what's truly beneath, whether that's resilience, desperation, or the kind of pathetic whimpering that makes bystanders avert their gaze out of second-hand shame.
I, of course, was putting on quite the show of the latter.
After the second round concluded—another masterclass in my spectacular incompetence—I welcomed defeat with the clinging passion of a long-lost lover. My face didn't merely fall; it staged a tragic opera in three acts.
The wide-eyed shock of a man betrayed by his own reflexes, the sagging disbelief of someone watching their last hope sink beneath the waves of misfortune, and finally, the profound, soul-emptying agony of a creature who'd gambled its very essence and lost, all of it culminating in a shuddering sigh that seemed to leach the warmth from the very air around our table.
The Joker, nestled between my thumb and forefinger like a poisonous blossom, had the sheer audacity to wink up at me, its painted leer catching the lamplight in a way that suggested my suffering wasn't a tragedy but the punchline to a joke only the universe understood.
All the while, beneath this theater of despair, my mind grew crystalline and cold as I narrowed my focus upon the man before me.
On the surface, he remained a monument to decay—fingers like petrified roots, skin hanging in parchment folds, a voice that rustled like dead leaves—but beneath that curated fragility, a terrible vitality was asserting itself, the core of something that hadn't faded with the years but instead concentrated, distilled by time into a purer, more potent vintage.
It was madness, yes. But more than that, it was greed. Not the desperate kind that poor folk displayed when gambling their last coins, but something ancient and patient, the variety that didn't need to rush because it had outlived entire generations and would outlive many more, the kind that knew with absolute certainty it would win eventually because time was on its side.
"Shall we raise the stakes once more?" he proposed quietly, "Three chips from your side—fifteen crowns—and I'll offer fifty crowns in return if you manage to beat me. Quite generous odds, really. Almost charitable."
I nodded with the fervor of someone who'd just spotted the last lifeboat before, with a flourish worthy of a tragic hero, I tossed my three chips onto the table.
Byron's hands, those contradictory instruments of swift and sure motion, began to deal, and I watched the parade of cards with the total absorption of a scholar deciphering a doomed prophecy, memorizing the order of their arrival, tracing the invisible arcs of probability, searching for the flaw in the tapestry until—
Ah, there it was. The Joker. Sliding into my hand like an unwanted houseguest who knew you couldn't kick them out without causing a scene.
I didn't react—didn't flinch, twitch, or show any external sign that I'd identified the losing card—only accepted it with quiet resignation, fumbling it into the fan of its more respectable peers.
Byron's smile grew wider, his cards snapping into place like pieces of a puzzle only he could solve, and we began our turns with me offering my hand for his selection first.
And so began the dance.
Each time his gnarled finger—that bony pendulum of doom—hovered above my fanned cards, it would drift, tremble a bit, then descend with the unerring accuracy of a stooping hawk, always, always avoiding the joker with uncanny precision.
Again. And again. And again. No missteps, no slips, no moments of hesitation or doubt.
Every draw was perfect and unmistakably clean, like he could see through the backs of the cards to the faces beneath, like the worn patterns I couldn't distinguish were apparently readable to him in ways that defied both my enhanced perception and basic logic.
But he wasn't clairvoyant, oh no.
In truth, I'd already figured out the trick to his gambling the moment the first round began, the answer so obvious in retrospect I was almost embarrassed it had taken me until the second loss to confirm my suspicions.
He had an accomplice.
Jazmin, of course. The lovely Jackal woman currently resting in my lap.
The clues had been subtle at first, innocent even, easy to dismiss as random movements or natural fidgeting. A twitch of her left ear—just barely visible in my peripheral vision—when Byron's hand hovered near my leftmost card. A curl of her fingers around my hip, pressing slightly harder, when the Joker occupied my right hand position. The faintest sniff when he moved too close to selecting the losing card and needed to adjust course.
To the average onlooker, these would register as nothing. Background noise. But to me, with my stolen senses and paranoid attention to detail? Textbook coordination. A signaling system so simple it was actually elegant in its crudeness.
It was brilliant in its arrogance. He didn't hide it because he didn't think he had to, didn't believe anyone he was playing against would be observant enough or intelligent enough to notice the pattern.
The sort of technique that would work flawlessly on any uneducated folk from the slums who'd never encountered coordinated cheating, or better yet, on a slave like me.
Which begged the fascinating question of just how far Byron—let alone Oberen himself—was underestimating me. How completely they'd bought my performance as desperate, naive, too stupid to recognize manipulation even when it was happening directly against my body.
And yet, deep down, in the part of me that made terrible decisions and called them strategy, this was exactly what I wanted. Perfect, actually. Couldn't have planned it better if I'd orchestrated the situation myself.
I continued playing the desperate fool with too much drama in my bones and not enough crowns in my pocket, my performance escalating with each loss until I was practically vibrating with barely-contained frustration.
When the third round ended with—shocking to absolutely no one—the Joker clutched in my trembling hand, I slammed my fist down onto the table with enough force to make the chips jump and scatter.
The crowd watching from their various cushions and couches pulled slight amusement from my tantrum, a few ragged chuckles emerging from the men who were likely past players now that I actually thought about it—former marks who'd been cleaned out by this exact routine and were now trapped in Byron's service, praying for another's downfall with the bitter hope of people who'd suffered and wanted company in their misery.
A few worried looks came from the beastfolk slaves being used on the furniture, their eyes meeting mine with expressions that mixed pity, warning, and something that might've been hope if hope hadn't been beaten out of them years ago.
Several more rounds passed with increasing speed, Byron's confidence growing with each victory until he wasn't even bothering to maintain the pretense of concern for my financial wellbeing, my chip stack dwindling with mathematical certainty until finally, inevitably, I threw my last two chips onto the table after the final losing hand.
"Damn it!" I roared, "This is bullshit! How is this even possible?! I can't be this unlucky! There has to be—this has to be—"
Byron leaned back in his seat, rolling his shoulders with the satisfied stretch of a well-fed alley cat. His smile spread across his ancient face like oil slick on water—wide, gleaming, absolutely repulsive in its smugness.
"Well, well," he drawled, his voice taking on the quality of someone delivering a sermon they'd rehearsed extensively. "It appears you've run out of chips, young man. Completely and utterly broke. Not a single crown left to your name in this establishment. How... unfortunate."
He steepled his fingers together, the gnarled digits pressing against each other with deliberate precision. "You see, Oberen's Den has very specific policies about patrons without funds. Can't have people lingering on the premises when they've got nothing left to wager—creates poor optics, clutters up valuable real estate, encourages the kind of desperate behavior that disrupts legitimate business operations. House rules, you understand. Nothing personal."
His eyes gleamed beneath their folds of skin. "So I'm afraid, having exhausted your resources and demonstrated a rather spectacular inability to play even the simplest of card games, I'm now obligated—no required, really, by casino regulations—to have you escorted from the premises immediately. Permanently, in fact. You'll be banned from re-entry, your name added to our list of undesirable patrons, and should you attempt to return you'll be removed with significantly less courtesy than I'm currently offering."
The pieces clicked together in my mind with satisfying precision, the full picture emerging from the fragments I'd been collecting. So that was his actual aim—not primarily to win my meager chips, though he'd certainly enjoyed that, but to manufacture a legitimate reason to kick me out of the casino before I could cause any chaos to Oberen's carefully controlled operation.
Clean, legal, defensible under house rules. Just another broke gambler being shown the door for violating the minimum stake requirements.
Byron raised his hand slowly, fingers beginning to curl into a gesture I recognized as a signal, probably meant to summon whatever guards lurked beyond my immediate vision and have them drag me out by force if necessary.
"Wait!" I burst out, my voice cracking with desperation. "Wait, please, just—just give me one more chance! I'm begging you!"
Byron's hand paused mid-gesture, his eyebrow raising with curiosity. "You have no chips remaining. Nothing to wager."
"I'll do anything!" I pleaded, leaning forward with my hands clasped together in prayer. "Anything at all! Just one more game, please, I can win this back, I know I can, I just need one more—"
"Anything?" Byron interrupted, his voice taking on a quality that made my skin crawl despite knowing this was exactly where I'd been hoping to steer the conversation.
He leaned closer, so close I could smell the rot on his breath—decay, old meat, and something sweet underneath that made the combination even more nauseating. His barely-visible eyes gleamed with malicious amusement, his smile widening even further now.
Then he settled back into his chair with deliberate slowness, savoring the moment, letting the anticipation build while the watching crowd leaned forward with growing interest.
"Fine then," he said finally, his smile turned absolutely feral then. It was a predator's grin, one of pure, unadulterated satisfaction that seemed to radiate from every wrinkle and fold on his well-crinkled skin.
"Lick my boots."