Pale Carnations -ch. 4 Update 4- -mutt Jeff- ... ★ Genuine

“That’s Mister Jeff to you, boy,” he growled, not looking up. He was shuffling a deck of cards with hands that were all knuckle and gristle—the hands of a man who’d broken bones for sport and then nursed the same bones back wrong. “Or ‘Sir.’ Your old man always remembered ‘Sir.’”

He turned his back to me then, a clear dismissal, and began shuffling once more.

I didn’t take the bait. I pulled the folded photograph from my inside pocket and laid it face-up on the table between us. A girl. Pale hair, dark roots showing. A gaze that wasn’t pleading, but calculating. She’d been a runner, once. Before Jeff got his hooks in.

I left the card on the table.

“She’s asking about the fourth round,” I said. “The private exhibition. The one not on the club’s books.”

“The kind that gets a venue shut down,” I replied.

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. Pale Carnations -Ch. 4 Update 4- -Mutt Jeff- ...

Jeff nodded, satisfied. “There it is. She’ll break again. They always do. The only question is whether she breaks for the crowd… or against it.”

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.

End of Scene.

I didn’t move.

“Your little blonde,” Jeff continued, tapping the photograph with a yellowed nail, “she crawled. Fastest I’ve ever seen. Didn’t even make her beg. She just… folded. Like a paper hat in the rain.” His eyes flicked up to mine, and for a moment, the showman’s mask slipped. Beneath it was something hollow. Hungry. “That’s the part they never put in the contracts. The folding.”