|work|: Pale Carnations -ch. 4 Update 4- -mutt Jeff- ...

The door closed behind me, and the hallway smelled of bleach and roses. Somewhere deeper in the club, a piano struck up a lazy, familiar tune. And beneath it, just barely, I could hear the sound of someone crying—not loud, not desperate. Just the quiet, practiced sob of someone who’d already folded.

He held out the deck of cards to me. “Pick one.”

I reached out, slow, and drew from the middle. The Queen of Hearts. Her painted smile was the same as the girl’s in the photograph. The same hollow fold. Pale Carnations -Ch. 4 Update 4- -Mutt Jeff- ...

He laughed—a wet, phlegmy sound—and leaned back. The chair groaned under his weight. “Fourth round ain’t about pain, pup. It’s about want . You strip a girl down to her last nerve, and then you offer her a glass of water. That’s the game. The audience doesn’t pay to see her cry. They pay to see her choose to crawl.”

Jeff finally stopped shuffling. He fanned the cards—a perfect spread of kings and sevens, all dead hands—and then scooped them into a single pile. “Pretty thing, ain’t she? Bit of a screamer, though. Not the fun kind. The legal kind.” The door closed behind me, and the hallway

He tilted his head, and a grin cracked his face like dry earth. “You here to threaten me, or to ask me how I train ‘em for that round?”

“The kind that gets a venue shut down,” I replied. Just the quiet, practiced sob of someone who’d

The air in the back room of The Carnation tasted of old cedar, whiskey sweat, and the faint, coppery tang of last month’s takedown. I found Jeff there, not in the kennels where the new stock was kept, but hunched over a scarred card table, the brim of his flat cap casting a shadow over eyes that had seen too many losing hands.