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?”
“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.’” Pale Carnations -Ch. 4 Update 4- -Mutt Jeff- ...
“She’s asking about the fourth round,” I said. “The private exhibition. The one not on the club’s books.” He tilted his head, and a grin cracked
“Mutt,” I said, sliding the door shut. The latch clicked with a finality that made his shoulders twitch. “Or ‘Sir
End of Scene.
“The kind that gets a venue shut down,” I replied.
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.”