The assembled men were talking quietly and amicably amongst themselves. They were scattered about the room, twenty of them, all dressed in their finest and wearing their masks.

All talk ceased the moment they saw her.

For a moment, all was still. The men stared at Regina. Regina stared back at them. She resolved to not be the first to break the silence.

Part of that might have been due to her not being able to breathe properly. She was here now. Here, with the men, with a mask on. She could still technically flee the room if she wished. There was still time for that.

But she couldn’t. She felt frozen still, pinned like a butterfly to that spot in the floor. Her heart fluttered in her chest, which felt oddly tight. She was breathing—she knew that she must be—yet it felt like she couldn’t draw enough air.

She had to calm down. Regina sucked in a greath breath and forced herself to hold it. Then she slowly let it out. She did it again. The frozen, lightheaded feeling began to fade. It began to feel like she could breathe properly again.

Regina took a moment to have a proper look about the room. She could not recognize most of the men with their masks on but she did recognize Lord Harrison. It had been foolish of her, she thought, to suppose that she would not know him. Something as simple as a paper mask could not hide him from her.

She knew his bearing. She knew his hair color. She knew the shape of his jaw and the bow of his lips. She knew his preferred style of dress. And she knew his eyes, blue and warm and piercing, staring at her like he could read her soul.

He was over to the side, talking to a shorter man. Regina thought that the other man might be Mr. Denny but she could not be certain.

She also knew Lord Pettifer.

He was seated at the card table of course. But it was his smile that she remembered. It was the same awful, predatory smile he had shown when he had bested her father. It was the smile of a predator who had has just eaten until it cannot even move and then licks the blood off its maw.

Regina’s anger flared up. She wished to smack him.

“How can I help you, Miss?”

It was Lord Morrison. Regina recognized his voice. And of course, as the host, he must come forward.

For a moment she completely forgot what to say or how to say it. She almost let out a kind of squeak. Then she remembered herself.

“I am here to play,” Regina said. Her voice carried the accent that Lord Quentin had taught her.

All the men glanced at one another. It was plain to see that they did not know what to do with her.

“She can’t,” one man said.

“And why not?” Someone else added. “It’s the masquerade. Anything goes, and all of that, wasn’t that what you said earlier Daniels?”

Some of the men nodded, looking at one another with a gleam in their eyes that their masks could not hide. Regina drew herself up. She would not be seen as an easy target by them.

Not all of the men seemed convinced by their compatriot’s argument, however. They looked at Regina suspiciously. Regina could see the fingers twitching on one or two of them. She wondered if they were going to stride forward and yank off her mask, exposing her, sending her away for being a foolish, rebellious girl.

“I say that we let her play as well,” Lord Pettifer said. He was smirking. He thought that he had found easy prey.

The other men shuffled their feet and looked at one another. Regina could read the nervousness in their twitching mouths and their stiff limbs. None of them wanted to contradict Lord Pettifer, it seemed. Regina wondered how many of them owed Lord Pettifer in some way, same as her father did.

When no one contradicted Lord Pettifer, his smirk broadened. He looked at Regina with a gleam in his eyes. Already he was overconfident. That was good.

Regina focused on her anger in order to keep the smile off of her face. Yes. She would play. And she would destroy him.

Lord Morrison seemed torn for a moment. It was still his house and ultimately still his word on what was allowed and what was not. He looked at her, and for a moment, Regina thought he might recognize her. The Morrisons had been great friends of her family for years. If she could recognize Lord Harrison even with his mask, surely it was not impossible for Lord Morrison to recognize the girl whose family he had been entertaining for so many years.

Regina felt that lightheaded feeling returning. Lord Morrison looked her up and down. Would he know her? Would he turn her away if he did? Escort her out? Expose her?

Regina forced herself to look him in the eye. She met his gaze and did not flinch when he looked directly into her face. He looked a little resigned but not angry or surprised.

Then, with a sigh, he stepped back. “If someone would bring a chair for the lady?”

Regina had to remind herself to stay upright and proper and not to slump down in relief. He had not recognized her. She could play.

She sat down in the proffered chair and settled herself. She could feel that everyone was watching her now. She actually wanted them to. She wanted everyone to bear witness to what was about to happen.

For a wild moment, then, panic seized her. It was like someone had dumped a bucket of cold water on her head. What was she doing? How could she possibly pull this off? She was about to disgrace herself beyond reason and lose everything.

Then she got a hold of herself. This was no way to act. She had to win this and she was not going to let the fear have its way with her. She remembered what Cora had said. These were just men, really. Just men.

Lord Pettifer was the dealer to start with. Regina did not recognize any of the other men. Had their faces been exposed, Lord Harrison had told her, he should have warned her how each man played. But with her unable to recognize them, she would have to rely upon her ability to read them while they played.

There were eight of them to start out with: Regina, Lord Pettifer, and then six others. It was a good number for playing a game of loo with large stakes. For ruining Lord Pettifer, not so much. Regina would have to find a way to get the others out of the card game while keeping Lord Pettifer in and not losing it all herself.

Lord Pettifer shuffled the cards and dealt them out. Regina looked at her cards and breathed slowly.

She looked around at the card players. She would play it safe this first hand so that she could get a feel for how they all operated and then she would start to get more aggressive.

Regina focused on her breathing as they began to play. She could do this. She could do this. She could do this.

And then she found out—she could.

In the first round she played it safe. She watched the others as they played—that one gentleman, two to the left from Lord Pettifer, would tap his middle finger nervously when he had a bad hand.

The player directly on her left, he was raising immediately, putting too much money into the pot. She could see the strain around his eyes—he was bluffing.

None of these men, Regina thought, were as good as Lord Harrison. They weren’t even as good as Cora. All right then.

She knew this. She understood what was going on. She could read the players by their nervous ticks and the way their eyes moved and the expressions on their faces. She understood the cards and the different hands and possibilities and how to bet.

The one thing she wasn’t sure that she knew was if she could bluff.

It was something that Lord Harrison had often told her she needed to work on. Cora had noted it as well. Regina was not good at lying. If she had a bad hand at the end and she was up against Lord Pettifer…

No, she would not think about that. If she thought about how she failed, she reminded herself, then she would fail. She had to fake her confidence, Cora had often instructed her. If she acted confident, then others would believe it, and eventually it would become true.

She played, and played, and played. One gentleman, she saw, was playing it too safe. She would have to draw him out by increasing the pot to the point where he could no longer safely bet. Another was chewing his lip when he had a good hand—he was nervous the tide would turn against him. It was an odd tick, as much men showed their nerves when they had a bad hand but Regina was able to figure it out.

Regina affected a nervous habit of her own. She stroked the back of her cards when she had a good hand. When she had a bad one, she rolled her shoulders, just slightly.

It might not be enough to throw off the less experienced players. But then, she would throw those players off herself. It was the better players who would notice and throw themselves on the pyre by ministerpreting her.

The other men began dropping out. It was Loo, but with an unlimited pot. Regina could hardly believe the amount of money exchanging hands. It was flowing back and forth like a river that kept changing course. Regina had cash, given to her by Lord Harrison, that she used to play with. It would all be returned to him at the end of the night of course—provided that she was able to win it all back.

She could practically hear his voice in her head, telling her what to do. Her back was to him but she could feel his eyes upon her as surely as if his gaze were the touch of his hand. It made her feel safe, to know that he was there and silently encouraging her.

As the pot grew, some men became reckless. They bet when they should have folded. They continued on when they should have walked away. For the first time Regina could see firsthand the fever of gambling upon them.

It was terrifying in a way. It was almost as if these men were seized by some spirit that took a hold of them and made them play. They were men possessed.

Regina just tried to focus on her own cards and on her end goal. Some men, she noticed, were just doing this for the thrill of the gamble. They didn’t care about the cards, not really, and they didn’t care about playing well. But others were good. They wanted to win and they enjoyed the skill of the game, such as it was, although there was always a fair bit of luck involved in a game such as Loo.

Was this what her father had been like when he had played? She could see the tightness in the lines of the men’s faces—what of their faces she could see, anyway. There was a wild look in their eyes.

It made her want to get out of the way, like she was standing in the path of a runaway horse. Instead, she kept playing.

If she could just keep her head while everyone else was losing theirs, she’d be fine. But it was harder than she had anticipated not to get caught up in the fervor of it.

Everyone was so intense in a way that Lord Harrison and Cora simply could not replicate. Regina could all but taste the desperation in the air. It was a struggle to stay calm when everyone around her seemed to be the opposite.

The men standing around and watching didn’t help. They were constantly muttering to one another and making whispered observations. Their enthusiasm in watching and their predictions only added to the intensity and risk of the game.

Focus, Regina reminded herself. None of them matter. Only Lord Pettifer.

She squared her shoulders and imagined there was a book balanced on her head, the way that Cora had made her practice nearly all of one afternoon. She was confident. She knew what she was doing. If she said it, if she believed it, these men around her would as well.

Time seemed to both drag on and to have no meaning at all. There didn’t appear to be any clocks in the room and if there were she couldn’t see them from where she was sitting. She didn’t even really bother to look up. All of her attention was on the men around her and the cards in front of her.

Mostly it was on Lord Pettifer.

It was clear that he thought her an amusement at best. He didn’t consider her a very serious competitor. At least, not at first.

Then she started winning.

There were three men left besides herself and Lord Pettifer when she looked down at her cards—and then had to keep herself from alarmingly looking over at Lord Harrison out of habit.

She had a good hand. In fact, going by everyone’s tells, she had the best hand.

When she played her cards and raked in her part of the pot for that round, she had to keep herself from screaming. Whether it was in fear or delight, she couldn’t tell. She had the most out of all of them, she was—she was winning.

Regina had to hold in her gasp as she realized that she was actually doing better than all of the other men. She wasn’t just doing better than some of them. She was the current best player, at least going by the pot.

She felt torn between yelling with triumph and running out the door to hide for a few hours. Days. Weeks. But she certainly couldn’t do anything like that.

Now that she was winning, she had to use it to bait Lord Pettifer. She had to finish eliminating the other men and then get Lord Pettifer to overextend himself.

To her surprise, it actually took a while for the men to notice that she was winning. They hadn’t thought for even a moment that she could be a serious threat to them. When she started to take their money they actually didn’t seem to even really see it. It just… went over their heads, almost.

But they couldn’t avoid the truth forever, no matter how uncomfortable of a truth it was for them. Eventually, they saw. They saw that they were getting thoroughly beaten by a young and mysterious woman whose name they didn’t even know.

And then they went after her.

Regina could sense the tide turning against her and knew that the men by unspoken agreement were trying to oust her from the table. She could not let that happen.

She fought, tooth and nail. She could read them better than they could read her. She just had to keep herself blank. She thought of Natalie and how Natalie behaved around men, and that was how she acted. She wasn’t Regina, she thought, she was Natalie. That was all.

Soon the tension in the room was palpable. Regina felt as though if she took out a knife she could cut herself a slice of it. Everyone was watching her. No, more than watching her. Waiting. Waiting for her to fail.

She would not fail.

You have to lie, she thought. You have to lie as you have never lied before. You can do this. You are more than you think you are.

She had to give Lord Harrison and Cora a reason not to doubt her. She had to win back her family’s fortune and honor.

The men eventually seemed to see that it was a lost cause—or at least most of them did. One by one they left the table. One by one, they vanished, leaving their lost money in the middle.

Until it was only her and Lord Pettifer.

Regina and Lord Harrison had been right. His pride was pricked and he was eager to taste her defeat. He wanted to take all that she had and he wanted to prove that he was still the man to beat. He would not be bested by a mere slip of a girl, oh no.

With just the two of them at the table, Regina knew that time was up. There was no further she could go. She would win this hand, or she would lose, and lose all.

One more deep breath.

Lie, she thought. Lie as you have never before lied in your life. Lie with your heart and every fiber of your being. Lie with your soul. Lie until even you believe that lie. Believe that you are a stupid girl with no chance who has gotten this far on luck. Believe it and he will believe it.

“It appears that I have no more cash upon me,” Lord Pettifer said. He smirked at her. “And what of you, dear lady?”

Lie. Lie with everything you have.

“I suppose that I do have some lands that I could put down a signage for.” Regina spoke casually using the accent, and shrugged one of her shoulders. “I suppose that you do as well?”

She paused, as if considering. “Wait. Perhaps, sir, I know you. Are you not the man who they say took the Hartfield estate in a game not a month ago?”

Lord Pettifer smiled. Of course he would be proud at being caught out, rather than defensive and contrite as he ought to be. He spread his arms wide. “I am he.”

“I have long admired those lands. Perhaps you shall wager those while I wager mine.”

“A fine bargain,” Lord Pettifer said. “I shall win more lands with lands I have already won previously.”

“Careful Pettifer,” one of the other men said in a low voice. “You have already written several notes of debt. If she wins, your coffers are empty and the Hartfield lands are all that you have.”

“Nonsense.” Lord Pettifer’s tone was scathing. “You say that as if I do not have the winning hand.”

Regina said nothing. She merely gestured for a quill and paper.

Lord Pettifer copied her, and paper and writing utensils were produced for the both of them. Regina’s heart was in her throat as she wrote out the name for an imaginary estate up in the north. Lord Harrison had at one point suggested that they use Whitefern, but Regina had refused. He was already giving her so much, she would not let him risk even more for her.

Once everything had been written down, they placed their papers in the pot in the middle. The game resumed, but not for long. With such high stakes and only the two of them in, it would soon be time to show their hands.

Regina looked down at her cards. She had good cards and—she looked at Lord Pettifer. He was overextending himself. He was narrowing his eyes, the way he did when his hand was not as good as he would have liked and he was contemplating if he thought his hand was better than hers.

She rolled her shoulders slightly and saw Lord Pettifer’s lip go stiff as he tried not to smirk. He’d bought into her fake tell. He thought she had a worse hand than she did.

But was her hand high enough to beat his? Her cards meant that currently, she would Loo. But if he also Loo’d…

There was nothing for it. Cards was a gambling game, after all. Regina could only play it safe for so long. Eventually she would have to make a risk, take a leap of faith.

So she called him.

‘Calling’ was the term which meant that she was essentially forcing Lord Pettifer to show his hand. Then she would show hers, and they would know who had won.

The air seemed to sweep out of the room. Everyone was poised, watching. She could feel Lord Harrison’s gaze on her like a brand.

“I call, sir,” Regina repeated.

With a smirk, Lord Pettifer set down his cards.

Relief filled her. Pure, sweet relief, such that she had never before tasted.

She had suspected for some time that Lord Pettifer’s cards were only middling. She had faked a tell early on, a nervous tap of her finger, that would make him think she used when she had a bad hand. She had noticed that Lord Pettifer would blow his hands out of proportion, acting as though they were better then they actually were in order to fool others into folding.

Personally Regina would have thought it better if he faked having poorer hands in order to trick his opponents into thinking he was doing more badly than he actually was. That way they would bet more and be overconfident.

But that was too smart for Lord Pettifer, at least in Regina’s opinion. Now she was going to take advantage of his foolishness.

Regina set down her cards.

She had loo’d. She’d won the hand.

For a moment, everyone just stared. It all sank in gradually, the realization of what had happened.

A woman, and an unknown woman at that, had just beaten the biggest card shark and rake in the country. More than beaten him, in fact. She had taken everything that he had.

There was a moment of silence.

Then—well, the room did not erupt. These were gentlemen, after all, and it would not do to yell and make a scene. They were English, not French or, God forbid, Spanish.

But there was a sudden outburst of murmuring. Everyone was muttering to everyone else. People were outright staring at her. They stared at Lord Pettifer as well.

Lord Pettifer sat there for a moment longer. It was as though he could not truly believe what had just happened to him. Then, in a rush, he stood up—so violently, in fact, that he knocked over his chair.

“You little snake,” he hissed. His face had gone an alarming shade of red. “You must have cheated. How did you do it?”

“She did not cheat, sir,” Lord Morrison said. “We all watched both of you with much scrutiny. And you were the dealer more often than she was. If you wish to blame anyone for cheating perhaps it should be yourself.”

Lord Pettifer pointed an accusing finger at her. “Do not think that I shall forget this. I will find out your identity and there shall be no escape for you then. I will—”

“You will leave her alone, or the consquences upon your person will be far more dire than a loss of fortune.”

Regina stood up abruptly, caught by surprise. She turned, her skin tingling at his presence. Lord Harrison.

He stood just behind her, and even with the mask on his face was thunderous. It was the fire that she had seen directed at Cora before, and now it was burning even hotter when directed at Lord Pettifer.

Cora was a friend, Regina realized. Of course Lord Harrison’s anger, although fierce, had been somewhat tempered when directed at her. He had known that her intentions were pure.

Lord Pettifer, on the other hand, was an enemy. A dangerous one. There would be no quarter or withholding from Lord Harrison against this opponent.

Regina’s heart beat rapidly. She could feel the heat off his body and smell him, masculine and oddly calming. She was safe. He wouldn’t let Lord Pettifer do anything to her.

“Are you protecting this lady?” Lord Pettifer scoffed.

“One month ago you took all that a man had,” Lord Harrison replied. “I was there, Pettifer. I saw it. You showed no mercy. When he protested you mocked him, even though he had five unmarried daughters.

“And now that you are in his shoes you seek revenge? You think that you have any moral ground to stand upon? If you forced that man to honor his debts then you must be put to paid to honor yours.

“If you do not—if you lay any harm upon, of all people, a woman—she is not even a man, Pettifer. And yet you would threaten violence upon her? Shameful, even for a man such as you.

“The first person that shows his hypocrisy and violence and dares to raise a hand against this woman will have that hand cut off. I am also available for a duel, if someone wishes to settle the score in that manner.”

Regina’s blood ran cold at the thought of Lord Harrison putting himself in the path of a gun. But none of the men looked liable to take him up on his challenge.

Many of them, in fact, were looking at Lord Pettifer with disdain. Regina could read it in their eyes even though their faces were mostly obscured.

They were on her side, she realized. Her father could not have been the only person that Lord Pettifer had ruined. He must have quarreled and treated ill dozens of men by this time to claw his way into the sort of social position that he occupied.

Regina squared her shoulders and drew herself up. She was in the right—and the men knew it. Lord Harrison was at her back and the room was with her rather than against her.

She saw the moment that Lord Pettifer realized that the tide was against him. He shifted, his rat face growing tight and his eyes darting about.

Finally, Regina gave into her anger completely and allowed a sardonic smile to grace her lips. She remembered the darker side to Puck, the side that played with mortals and men and left them gasping and humiliated.

“I will not stand for this,” Lord Pettifer said, but his words sounded weak and desperate.

Regina let her smile grow. “Thou coward, thou art bragging to the stars.”

She flicked her gaze over to Lord Harrison and saw that he, too, was smiling.