“What the—” Geo shot up from his chair so abruptly that the metal legs scraped loudly across the classroom floor. The chair tipped backward and clattered against the tiles, the sharp noise cutting through the low chatter of the students who had been watching the game unfold.

In his hand were two cards. Two aces. Under normal circumstances, that hand should have ended the round. Yet the table in front of you told a different story. Nobody spoke for a moment.

He stares at the cards in his hand as if they had personally betrayed him. Around the desk, your other classmates leaned forward, eyes darting between the cards on the table and the calm expression resting on your face. One boy’s mouth hung open. Another narrowed his eyes suspiciously. Someone muttered something under their breath that sounded halfway between admiration and accusation.

It was always like this.

Every school. Every year. Different faces, different names, different uniforms—but the reactions never changed. The same disbelief. The same confusion when probability tilted slightly away from expectation. The same stunned silence that followed when the cards revealed their final answer.

And always, you were the one holding the winning hand.

You leaned back in your chair slightly, lazily gathering the cards from the table. Your fingers moved with casual familiarity, stacking them into a neat deck before shuffling them again in a smooth motion. The soft flipping rhythm of cardboard against cardboard filled the small circle around the desk.

Some of the students watching noticed. The way the deck flowed through your fingers wasn’t something people usually learned from harmless lunch-break games.

Nostalgic, in a way.

But cards had never been foreign to you. If anything, they were one of the first things you had ever learned to handle. Long before school textbooks. Long before group projects. Long before memorizing equations on a classroom board.

Cards came first.

You had grown up surrounded by them—the quiet language of probability, the subtle tension of a bluff, the way a single card turning over could change the entire mood of a room. In the world you were raised in, cards weren’t just toys. They were tools. Sometimes entertainment. Sometimes temptation. And sometimes, a mirror that revealed what kind of person someone truly was when something valuable was on the table.

Your father used to tell you stories before you slept. Not fairy tales. Lessons.

He would sit beside your bed with a deck of cards in his hand, shuffling them slowly while he spoke about people who lived their lives chasing luck. About men who arrived smiling and confident, only to leave hours later staring silently at the floor. About others who walked in with quiet eyes and left with pockets heavier than before.

Growing up around that world meant learning certain things early. How to shuffle without dropping a card. How to watch someone’s fingers, their eyes, the way their shoulders moved when they thought they were about to win. How to remain calm when the table grew tense. But most importantly— How to look harmless.

Your father always insisted on that rule; appear ordinary, stay polite, never show more skill than necessary.

Because in places where money and pride collided, attention could become dangerous. That was also why you moved schools so often.

You had been moving schools for as long as you could remember. New uniform every year. New hallways to memorize. A new classroom. A new set of classmates. Contacts deleted after moving. Numbers forgotten. Messages erased like chalk from a board. It wasn’t cruelty. At least, that’s what he always said when he tucked you in at night and told those strange bedtime stories that sounded less like fairy tales and more like quiet warnings. Friendships became temporary things. Pleasant, but fleeting.

Just like the games played across desks during lunch breaks.