A few agonizing moments passed—the kind where time decides to get creative with its flow and stretch seconds into subjective eternities—before Jazmin suddenly paused, her trembling coming to a complete halt.
Byron stared her dead in the eye, his barely-visible pupils fixed on her face with laser focus as he waited for the confirmation he'd been conditioned to expect.
The room seemed to hold its breath—or perhaps that was just me projecting—before Jazmin sighed. Not dramatically, not with the weight of ages, just a simple exhale that sounded almost resigned, almost defeated, the kind of breath you release when you've made a decision and accepted whatever consequences were about to follow.
Then, with a reassuring smile that looked so perfectly calibrated it could've been pulled from a catalog of "expressions to deploy when lying to authority figures," she flicked her ear toward the card on the right, the movement so subtle and practiced it barely registered as motion at all.
Byron's face lit up, triumph blooming across his ancient features with such pure, unadulterated glee I briefly wondered if joy at his age carried cardiac risks.
His gnarled fingers reached forward with trembling eagerness, closing around the indicated card with the delicate care of someone handling something precious and breakable.
The air began to thicken as the room collectively leaned forward, breathing as one organism united in morbid curiosity. Every eye was locked on that card, every spectator waiting to witness what they assumed would be my final humiliation, the capstone moment where the desperate fool learned his place and got escorted out in disgrace.
Byron began to lift the card with excruciating slowness, savoring the moment the way a serial killer might savor their victim's last words, drawing out the reveal because he wanted to drink in every second of my impending devastation before it could escape into memory.
The tension was exquisite, really—the card rising inch by inch, his smile widening with each fraction of movement until—
I smiled, slow and intentional, the kind of smile that split masks from the inside out and announced to anyone paying attention that the script had just been flipped.
"Are you sure?" I asked, my voice dropping into a register somewhere between casual curiosity and existential threat, each word landing with the soft precision of a dagger finding flesh.
It landed hard, shattering the illusion in a single second like someone had taken a hammer to stained glass and discovered the pretty picture was painted over rot.
Byron paused mid-motion, his hand frozen in that awkward space between table and reveal, the card hanging there like a condemned man waiting for the noose.
His eyes snapped back to mine with such velocity I heard his neck creak, and in that fraction of a second—that beautiful, crystalline instant where certainty met doubt and lost the fight—I saw it.
Fear. Not the surface kind, not the mild anxiety of someone worried they might lose a hand of cards, but something deep and primal, the kind that seeps in when the foundation of control begins to crack, when the prey you thought you'd butchered starts baring its teeth and you realize you might've miscalculated rather spectacularly.
His pupils quivered inside the bloodshot whites, darting between my face, the card, and back again like they couldn't decide which threat to prioritize, and for a moment—just a sliver of it, just long enough for me to catalogue it and file it away under "images to revisit when I need cheering up"—he looked small.
A man caught in the act. A liar seen through. A cheater one step from collapse. The emperor with no clothes realizing the crowd had stopped pretending to be blind.
"You..." he began to hiss, his voice strangled somewhere between rage and panic, the syllable stretching out like taffy pulled too thin. "You little shit."
The words came out trembling—not with weakness exactly, but with the rage of a king whose kingdom had just been mocked by a jester in rags, the fury of someone whose carefully constructed world was developing cracks they couldn't explain away.
His voice swelled, gaining volume and venom in equal measure. "You think you're clever, don't you?" Byron snarled, spittle flying with enough enthusiasm to qualify as biological warfare. "You think you can shake me, rattle me with a smirk and some cheap parlor line? Is that what this is? Some pathetic attempt to unsettle me, make me doubt myself, introduce hesitation where none exists?"
His face had gone an alarming shade of purple that clashed magnificently with his robes, creating a monochromatic nightmare that would've made any fashion designer weep in horror.
"I've been playing these games since before your grandfather's grandfather learned to count, boy! I've broken men twice your size with half your arrogance!"
I said nothing, just sat there watching him unravel with the detached fascination of an entomologist observing a particularly aggressive wasp.
My smile never wavered.
Gods, it must've infuriated him. My silence was gasoline on his ego's funeral pyre, each second of my quiet amusement stoking his rage higher until he was practically vibrating with the need to justify himself, to prove that he wasn't rattled, wasn't concerned, wasn't experiencing the first whispers of doubt that maybe—just maybe—something had gone terribly wrong with his foolproof system.
"You're a man on the last legs of desperation," Byron continued, "A loser who licked boots, who cried in front of a room of strangers like a mewling child begging for scraps—and now you have the audacity, the sheer unmitigated gall, to sit there pretending you're anything else? To act like you've got some secret, some hidden card, some clever trick that makes you special?!"
He was nearly shouting now, projecting his insecurity across the entire room with all the subtlety of a fireworks display in a library. "You're nothing! A slave playing at being dangerous! A fool who thinks himself clever!"
He began laughing then, but it wasn't joy—wasn't even close to genuine amusement despite his best efforts to sell it as such. It was self-defense wrapped in mockery, desperation dressed as confidence, the kind of laugh a drowning man gives to a boat just out of reach.
The sound rattled through the room, bouncing off silk and stone until it became physically oppressive. Several of the watching men shifted uncomfortably because even they could hear the hysteria lurking beneath the performance.
Byron's gaze snapped back toward Jazmin then, seeking confirmation, needing reassurance that his system hadn't failed him, that the signal had been clear, correct, and everything was proceeding according to plan.
But her face was unreadable now—no smirk, no playful edge, no hint of the seductive performer or the broken victim, just stone. Blank. Neutral. Giving him absolutely nothing to work with, no comfort or certainty, just an empty canvas where he desperately needed answers painted in bold.
I watched him hate that, watched the doubt burn in his eyes as he searched her expression for something to cling to and found only the void staring back.
I leaned forward ever so slowly, moving with the deliberate care of someone reaching toward a skittish animal, and when I was close enough that only he could hear me clearly I whispered, "You're sweating, Byron."
His eyes widened for half a second—pupils contracting, breath catching, every muscle in his face betraying the hit—and then he snapped like a dry twig under pressure.
"Enough!" The word exploded from him with enough force to make several spectators flinch, his hand shooting forward to seize the card with movements sharp enough to qualify as violence.
His fingers closed around it with white-knuckled intensity, yanking it toward him in a motion that spoke of desperate reclamation, of seizing control through sheer force of will.
The room relaxed slightly as the tension broke like a fever, the collective breath released in a wave of nervous energy that rippled through the spectators.
The moment had passed, the confrontation resolved, and now all that remained was the reveal. Several of the watching men leaned back, shoulders dropping, confident that normalcy had been restored and the strange interruption was over, just another desperate bluff from another desperate fool who didn't know when to quit.
Byron's trembling fingers hovered over the card he'd just plucked from my hand and slammed onto the table with theatrical finality, not daring to flip it just yet, as if even touching it might snap the last thread of his sanity.
All around us the ragged men began to stir, murmuring encouragement, urging him to complete the reveal and end this farce so they could all get back to their regularly scheduled debauchery and exploitation.
"Flip it!" one called. "Show the fool his fate!" another added, their voices building into a chorus of bloodthirsty anticipation.
Byron tapped the back of the card with one yellowed fingernail—just once, just enough to make a sound that rang through the incense-heavy air like the start of a sermon delivered by a particularly vindictive priest.
His eyes, bloodshot and glistening with anticipation, locked onto mine with the intensity of someone about to witness their greatest triumph.
"You've got a fine face for failure, boy," he rasped, his voice thick with smug rot and the accumulated cruelty of someone who'd perfected the art of kicking people while they were down. "It's the kind they carve into cautionary statues, the sort of expression future gamblers see in nightmares before they learn to fold."
I said nothing, maintaining my smile with the serene patience of someone who knew something he didn't, which only made his next words come faster, harder, more desperate to fill the silence I'd weaponized against him.
Byron chuckled—a wet, phlegmy sound. "You ever watch a man break from the inside out?" he asked, clearly settling into what he thought would be his victory speech, his coup de grâce, the monologue he'd probably been rehearsing in his head since the game started.
"Most scream when it happens. Some laugh, that high hysterical giggle that says the mind's gone ahead and evacuated the premises. The smart ones don't make a sound—they just look down, really see themselves for the first time without all that protective delusion, realize they were never special, never clever, never anything but ordinary fools playing at being exceptional, and finally shut the hell up."
He leaned in closer, the edge of the card trembling just slightly between his fingers despite his best efforts at projected confidence "I've seen a thousand fools like you parade through here, boy. A thousand desperate gamblers who thought they had an edge, who convinced themselves they were different, special, blessed by fortune, skill, or destiny. Every single one of them sat where you're sitting now, wearing that same expression of false confidence, that same smile that says 'I know something you don't.' And every single one of them learned the same lesson you're about to learn—that the house always wins, that systems built over decades don't crumble because some child with pretty eyes walks through the door, that men like me don't survive centuries by being gullible enough to fall for cheap tricks and cheaper manipulation!"
Byron smiled then, wide and terrible, revealing that unsettling surplus of teeth. His hands steadied as confidence flooded back, doubt evaporating under the heat of his own rhetoric, certainty restored by the sound of his voice echoing through a room full of people who'd learned not to contradict him.
"So go ahead," he whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Keep smiling. Keep pretending. When I flip this card that expression is going to crack like cheap pottery, and I'm going to enjoy every moment of watching you realize just how thoroughly I've destroyed you."
With hands steady and swollen with certainty—arthritis apparently cured by the power of vindictive triumph—Byron flipped the card with enough force to make it bang against the felt, the sound sharp and final as an executioner's blade.
Then his smile died.
Not faded, not diminished—died, murdered by what his eyes were seeing, collapsing into something that looked like a scream trying to escape through his paralyzed features.
His eyes blew wide, pupils contracting to pinpoints, breath stuttering to a dead stop mid-inhale as his brain attempted to process information that shouldn't exist, an impossibility that had somehow manifested in front of him.
Because what stared back at him was not merely an unlucky draw or a momentary setback, but the unmistakable shape of finality itself, the kind that arrives quietly and leaves no room for argument.
It was the joker.