The Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

  My orgasm was somehow more powerful than my first, but Katrina swallowed as much as she could and carefully lapped up all the spillage that clung to my shaft while her blue-green eyes stared up into mine.

  Then she stood up, retrieved the nightgown and pulled it back on, and sighed as she stared at my naked body.

  “I’d better go back before Janina wakes up,” she said.

  “Oh?” I raised an eyebrow, since the look on her face indicated that she wanted to stay the night.

  “Yes,” she sighed again. “But… well… goodnight, Hal.”

  “Yeah, it was a good night,” I said.

  “Yes, it was.” Her eyes lingered in my cock for a few seconds more, she bit her lip, but then she turned and tiptoed out of my room to return next door.

  I collapsed across my bed and slept like a baby until morning.

  In the morning, when we went downstairs, everyone was hurrying to finish their breakfasts, since the tournament was scheduled to start early, and last until the evening as the winners of their respective tables were gradually moved together to fewer and fewer tables for progressive rounds of poker until all but one player had been eliminated.

  After that, the streets were full of people dressed in their finest hurrying over in a throng to the town council building that had been set up to host the tournament, filled with tables and temporary railings set up to separate the spectators from the players.

  Once we got there, and piled into the packed room along with everyone else until the security guards stopped accepting any more spectators, we maneuvered our way to one of the railings and with one twin to either side of me, I watched as about seventy or eighty of the players in total were admitted one by one to the space inside the railings. An official checked their names on a list, and then they filed past and paid their entry fees into the till, while two guards supervised and another official counted the sums. Then, they were ushered along to their assigned tables.

  Most of the players were male, and generally appeared to be dignified gentlemen, averaging about fifty years in age. There were a handful of women among them, mostly matrons, but a few of them young and attractive. And one woman, I spotted immediately due to her huge old-fashioned crinoline as she hobbled to her seat, and recognized as the unpleasant great-aunt from supper the night before. Neither of her grandnephews appeared to be playing, I supposed they were standing by the sidelines watching, and hoping that she wouldn’t gamble away too much of their expected inheritance.

  Then Katrina gave a little gasp and shrank behind me. I looked where she was looking and spotted Kennedy Cox, Janina’s ex-fiancé, although it took me a moment to recognize him since he was no longer wearing the same white suit and hat from the day before, now he was in pinstriped gray with purple accents, and a matching gray hat that he had pulled low on his brow. He had a pleasant enough face, with a luxurious brown mustache, but no beard. He didn’t appear to have spotted the twins in return yet, but I suspected that was only a matter of time. They weren’t exactly the kind of girls who blended into the background, neither in appearance nor dress nor behavior.

  Eventually, the players had all been seated at their respective tables, and the clock chimed ten o’clock in the morning, and the dealer at each table, all clad in matching cream suits over brown vests, began flicking cards around the circle. The players clutched their own hands and stole glances at each other and tried to read each other’s luck, or lack therein, as reflected in their expressions, which were of course as impassive as possible.

  A hush fell over the huge room, punctuated by the quiet, monotone repetitions of, “Call,” “Raise,” and “Fold.” The audience members whispered anxiously, sighed, and groaned on the players’ behalf in the background, but even with that added noise, it was quiet enough to be able to hear a cough here, a chair scrape there. The atmosphere was one of intense focus.

  The first time a player ran out of chips, he stood up and dejectedly trudged out of the railed-off stage, to the polite and consolatory applause of the audience. He tipped his hat to acknowledge the clapping and was swallowed by the crowd. Gradually, more and more players ran out of chips and started trickling away from the tables to rejoin the crowd. Most of them exited with just as much composure as they had forced themselves to maintain during the game, when their thousands were at stake, although a few turned red in the face, clenched their fists, and cursed audibly. One fellow even kicked a vacant chair on his way offstage, which then caused him to yell when he hurt his toe, and the audience’s clapping got interrupted by a spate of repressed titters.

  Eventually, each of the tables only had one victorious player sitting in the company of the dealer. At that point, an intermission was called and champagne was served by waiters who expertly navigated through the crowd with precariously loaded trays, while other attendants busied themselves clearing away chips and rearranging the tables and chairs to consolidate them for fewer games in the next round, the intermediate round of the three that were planned.

  The victorious players gathered off to the side, but still within the railing, as the stage was set for their next round. I noticed that the old lady in the crinoline was among them, and so was Kennedy Cox in his gray pinstripes. All told there were about twenty-five players remaining.

  Both twins sipped at flutes of champagne.

  “I hope he doesn’t win,” Janina whispered as she looked at the former fiancé whom she had never truly intended to marry for a second. “I’d feel a bit sorry about robbing him for a second time.”

  “He might think we were ghosts, drop the money, and run,” Katrina suggested, also quietly enough that no one else could hear her, over the now animated chatter of all the other spectators.

  “Maybe that woman will win,” Janina guessed as she indicated a regal dame with her hair piled high in a gray pompadour. “She has a shrewd look about her eyes, and she never shows any emotion.”

  “No, she has an obvious tell,” I recalled from watching her table.

  “What’s that?” Katrina asked curiously.

  “She cocks her head slightly to the left when she’s lying,” I answered.

  “That man, the short one in the vest?” Katrina suggested. “He looks clever.”

  “Taps his foot,” I replied.

  “Does the bearded gentleman have any tells?” Janina asked.

  “Not that I observed, but he doesn’t know when to fold,” I said. “It was a matter of sheer luck that he won the last round. His opponents were timid.”

  “Are you sure you oughtn’t to have entered yourself?” Katrina teased me.

  “Quite sure,” I replied. “It’s easy to diagnose these flaws from here, without being involved in the game. If I played, I don’t doubt that I myself would be guilty of as many or more.”

  “You’re just being modest,” Katrina cooed as she placed her hand on the crook of my elbow. The gesture seemed to catch Janina’s eye, and she laid her hand possessively on my other arm.

  “Well, then, which player do you believe will win?” Janina asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “A lot of it depends on chance.”

  “You’re no fun,” Janina huffed.

  “That’s not quite the impression I got from you two nights ago,” I smirked. Her jaw dropped a little, but she didn’t have anything to say to that.

  Once the second round started, with only five tables of players this time, the elegant gray-haired dame, the short man in the vest, and the bearded man were among the first to be eliminated. Kennedy Cox, on the other hand, was amassing a sizeable pile of chips, that dwarfed the piles in front of his competitors. Every time he glanced their way, the twins nervously hid behind me or covered their faces with their champagne flutes.

  Then, just as the table reached his turn, something made him turn and stare directly at us. Neither girl had the chance to dodge his gaze as they had been doing up until then. They just stared back with matching petrified expressions, a mixture of horror and guilt. Ke
nnedy froze completely. Not even a hair of his shiny brown mustache wavered.

  “Sir?” the dealer questioned him.

  He blinked and came out of his trance and turned back to the game.

  “Er, call-- no, raise,” he muttered and shoved most of his pile of chips into the center.

  “Are you all right, sir?” the dealer questioned the visibly agitated man.

  “Yes,” Kennedy snapped at him.

  The next player stared at Kennedy with evident skepticism that he was, in fact, all right, and proceeded to match his bet. The rest of the table folded. When Kennedy and his neighbor turned their cards over, Kennedy had nothing better than a pair of eights, and his neighbor, who had three Jacks, claimed the pot.

  Kennedy still had a few chips left after that, but he quickly squandered them within two more rounds, as he could barely pay enough attention to the game to decide on his next action, and his competitors perceived his obvious distraction and fully exploited it. Most of his attention was instead fixated on the twins, who clung to me nervously and seemed to be trying to convey their profuse apologies to Kennedy through their facial expressions of eyebrows that peaked high in the middle, bitten lips, nibbled nails, and bowed heads. There wasn’t any point in their trying to hide anymore, he was clearly quite certain of their identities, and their status among the living.

  “Is he likely to get violent over this?” I muttered to them as Kennedy finished out the last of his remaining chips.

  “Oh, I hope not,” Katrina fretted.

  “I don’t believe so, but I don’t really know,” Janina said. “I never really knew him very well, after all… you see, he proposed so quickly.”

  Having been completely emptied out, Kennedy stood up from his table and walked over to the section of railing where I stood with the twins. His face was a storm of mixed emotions and twitched with intensity. Anger, yes, but also longing and hurt.

  “I loved you, and you betrayed me,” he said flatly, to Katrina, who was the wrong woman, but he couldn’t tell the difference.

  Then before either of the twins could respond, he turned and pushed through the crowd to leave the building. The companions we’d seen with him the previous day converged on him and accompanied him out.

  Everyone around us who had been within earshot of Kennedy’s statement was now staring at the twins.

  “He must have mistaken me for someone else,” Katrina said, completely deadpan. “I never had anything to do with that man.”

  There was some amount of muttering and an abundant amount of staring, since once they had caught someone’s eye, the twins’ extraordinary, and perfectly replicated, beauty tended to captivate it, but eventually, the audience returned their attention to the ongoing game, in which people gained and lost thousands through no more than the twitch of an eyebrow.

  Kennedy’s table had been one of the last to determine a victor, and soon, everyone was rising for another champagne-sweetened intermission while the few remaining tables were consolidated down to one single champions’ table.

  “Well, I feel less guilty about him now,” Janina whispered. “Not that I felt terribly guilty before, that is.”

  I made a noncommittal sound of agreement. I wasn’t about to point out that poor Kennedy’s was a mistake anyone could have made, really. I’d already scrutinized the twins’ eye color in the morning and figured out that Janina was wearing yellow silk with sapphires and Katrina was wearing blue satin with some sort of dark pink gemstones, so it was easy enough to tell them apart now. But the particular lighting could easily make either girl’s eyes appear more blue than green or more green than blue, so I wouldn’t have liked my chances meeting one of them alone.

  There were five players participating in the final round. Four were men ranging in age from about thirty to sixty, and the other was the old woman who’d warned her grandnephews to stay away from girls who looked like the twins.

  Once the cards had been dealt and they started playing, the crowd whispered about them with a greater intensity than they had whispered during any of the other rounds, now that this was really it, now that it was about to be determined which individual out of the nearly eighty hopefuls would be walking away with five thousand gold coins in prize money.

  “That’s the fellow who won last year, isn’t it?” one man was asking his companion.

  “Think so… Fred Jefferson wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, in the spectacles.”

  “And Grandma there, that’s Mathilda Hodgson, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Heiress to her father’s fortune. She’s been playing all the major tournaments for decades now. Nothing else to do with her time, I suppose. She must be over a hundred by now.”

  “Fortune from potencium mines?”

  “No, coal.”

  “Who’s that man with the sideburns? I don’t recognize him.”

  “Nor do I, but look, he’s completely sweated through his shirt.”

  “Well, it is rather stuffy in here,” a lady sighed as she began fanning herself.

  There was a brief lull in the chatter around us as one of the chairs scraped back, a defeated player stood up, and the audience applauded him as he exited.

  “What would you buy with five thousand dollars?” a nearby woman asked her friend.

  “A diamond necklace.”

  “You could get a lot more than one necklace with that!”

  “But I only have one neck, don’t I?”

  “You could get a herd of horses, for five thousand,” a man remarked.

  “A farmhouse and a generous plot of land.”

  “A fleet of carriages.”

  The only thing that I for one could picture was the vast quantity of potencium that five thousand dollars could buy. That was really the only thing I didn’t have that I constantly needed, that I always consumed and craved more of. And five thousand dollars wouldn’t buy vials, it would buy vats upon vats of the purple liquid that clarified my thoughts and invigorated my limbs. I had most recently had a vial with breakfast, but now at the mere thought of it I already wanted more. I wasn’t about to take out a vial to drink with so many people watching, though. Magic users weren’t really very uncommon, but we were still in the minority, and although non-magic users claimed to accept our existence they generally preferred not to be reminded of it.

  Soon there came another scrape of a chair being pushed back, and then another, until only two players remained, and both of them were all in.

  The audience fell silent as the grave as the dealer instructed them to turn their cards over, and both players complied simultaneously.

  One of the finalists revealed a full house. The other finalist, the ultimate champion of the tournament, the destined recipient of five thousand dollars, revealed a royal flush, which evoked audible gasps of awe throughout the room.

  It was the crone in the crinoline.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Yes! Yes!” I heard ecstatic male screaming verging on sobs of happiness and looked across the railing to see the winner’s grandnephews jumping up and down with glee, as if they were the ones who had just secured the prize money. Which I suppose, in their minds, was exactly the case.

  I felt both twins’ hands tighten their grip on my arms and glanced at their expressions, from which I judged that they were also pleased by who the victor had turned out to be, albeit for entirely different reasons than her grandnephews. Their slight smiles of anticipation had a faintly sadistic cast to them, really, as they must have been imagining Great-Aunt Mathilda’s reaction when she soon fell prey to them.

  Even Mathilda Hodgson herself, whose face was wrinkled into a perpetual scowl, displayed a faint, smug smile when the officials awarded her the chest full of money. It probably weighed more than she did, having withered away to a bag of bones, and she certainly couldn’t have carried it. Her grandnephews, however, rushed over and were more than happy to take charge of it. Even the two healthy adult males, working together, groaned under the weight of
the chest full of gold. But I don’t think that any in the audience pitied their struggle.

  They quickly departed, presumably to secure their treasure, and the remaining audience gradually followed suit, although a lot of folks lingered to drink more of the complimentary champagne. It was late afternoon by then, and the twins and I headed back to the inn for an early supper.

  “Well, that’s awfully convenient,” Janina purred as we settled down at a table. “All we have to do is come down especially early tomorrow morning and wait.”

  “How do you know they haven’t left already?” Katrina asked. “I don’t see them anywhere down here.”

  “I doubt she’d want to travel by dark or camp outside, and it will be dark in a few hours,” I said.

  “Because I saw her carriage parked outside,” Janina said.

  “How do you know it’s theirs?” Katrina asked.

  “I saw one of her grandnephews talk with the driver-- not like you would a stranger, but familiarly, and as though he were giving him instructions,” Janina explained. “So all we need to do is have the horses saddled, and wait outside, and keep an eye on the carriage until it departs.”

  “That won’t be the hard part,” Katrina said nervously.

  “There won’t be any hard part,” Janina said confidently.

  “What about… you know… taking it?” Katrina whispered.

  “I’m sure we’ll find an opportunity,” Janina replied. She cast me a smile which prompted me to remind her of our agreement.

  “I am in no way obligated to exert any force to assist you in conducting a robbery, and in fact I refuse to do so,” I stated.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Janina waved her hand dismissively. “We can do it ourselves.”

  With all the confidence bestowed by knowing that I would fend off anyone who came after them for the crime, was the part that she left unspoken. But I understood by now that that was probably the main reason the twins had really hired me.