House Rules
A Blood & Steel Short Story
Early Summer, 2190 | The Silver Spur Casino | Greeley, CA
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“Just so I know you know,” Kitt said from the back seat, “what are you looking for?”
“I’m not playing this game. I heard you the last fifteen miles.”
“Peri, this is important. Just tell me you know what we’re looking for.”
“Gods… I got it.”
“Then just say it.”
Dust ticked against the windshield. The truck rattled over a seam in the road. Cattle fencing ran parallel on both sides, dark fields stretching flat in every direction. Corn stubble waiting for summer to finish what spring had started.
“Um.”
“Peri!”
“I got it, I got it… geez.” She waved her hand. “I promise you, I will find a Hargrove chrome-valadium — “
“Chrome-vanadium blend valve body. Peri!”
“I said I got it!”
“You said chrome-valadium.”
“That was one time.”
“It was five times.”
Peri stared out the window. “Vanadium,” she muttered. “Stupid metal.”
“I got this.”
Kitt sat back and crossed her arms. The look on her face said she did not believe Peri got this.
Peri turned toward the window. “Chrome-vanadium,” she muttered. “Vanadium.”
Greeley announced itself from two miles out. A smear of light on the horizon where no light had any business being, bleeding upward into a sky still holding the last copper traces of sunset. Four blocks of something pretending to be a city. Buildings too tall for the population, facades painted in colors that had faded to suggestions. A feed store. A farrier. A general supply with a hand-painted sign that read HONEST PRICES, which told her everything she needed to know. And at the center of it all, like a heart transplanted from a bigger animal, the Silver Spur Casino. Three stories of glass and light, neon tubing spelling the name in amber and white against the darkening sky. The hum of generators carried across the empty lots. Music and crowd noise bled through the open doors like the building couldn’t hold it all in.
“Who the hells puts a casino in the middle of a corn field,” Peri said.
“Somebody smart.” Connor brought the truck to a stop at the edge of the main street. His eyes moved across the buildings the way they always did — exits, sightlines, rooflines. “Kitt and I will get the rest of the supplies. Should be back in an hour, two at best.”
Peri nodded and reached for the door handle.
“Maybe I should come in first,” Kitt said. “Say hi to Rhowan.”
The grin on her face was evil. Pure, undiluted evil.
“No.” Peri was already out of the truck. “No, no. I got this. Catch you in two.”
She shut the door before Kitt could say anything else and started walking toward the Silver Spur. Behind her, Kitt’s laugh carried through the open window as Connor pulled away.
She found Rhowan Cade at the entrance, leaning against a post like he’d been planted there. Dark coat, dark hair falling across his forehead in its usual mess, that half-finished smile already in place.
“Red.”
“Not my name.”
“You made it.” He straightened, brushing dust from his sleeve that probably wasn’t there. “How was the ride?”
“Long. Kitt quizzed me the whole way.”
“On what?”
“Valve specifications. She doesn’t trust me to remember anything with more than two syllables.”
“Can you?”
“Shut up.”
He laughed. Short, warm. And as he turned toward the door, she saw it — a thread caught on his collar, just above the lapel. Pale against the dark wool. Her hand came up before she thought about it, fingers brushing the fabric at his throat, pinching the thread away.
She felt the warmth of him through the wool.
That —
She stopped. Hand still raised, curled half-closed an inch from his collar.
Rhowan didn’t move. The half-finished smile finished.
Heat crept up the back of her neck. She dropped her hand and stepped back.
“This way,” he said.
The Silver Spur hit her like a wall.
Noise first — not one sound but dozens, piled on top of each other until they became something solid. Mechanical slot machines clanking and ratcheting along the far wall. Roulette wheels clicking. Dice hitting felt. Somewhere a band was playing, brass and piano fighting for space against the crowd, and losing. The roar of two hundred people talking, laughing, arguing, ordering drinks — all of it bouncing off a low ceiling and coming back louder.
Then the light. Incandescent bulbs strung in clusters overhead, warm and relentless, turning the whole floor the same flat gold. Green-shaded lamps hung low over the card tables. No windows. No clocks. Every direction looked like every other direction — the same carpet, the same tables, the same haze of cigarette smoke drifting under the lights. The place was a maze built on purpose.
And the smell. Cigarettes and cheap cologne and spilled drinks soaking into carpet that had given up. Perfume that wasn’t fooling anyone. The warm electrical smell of too many bulbs running off too few generators.
Rhowan moved through the crowd the way water moved through a canal lock. Without effort, without resistance. People made room for him before they seemed to realize they were doing it.
A man at the bar lifted his glass as they passed. Rhowan returned the gesture without breaking stride. A dealer at the nearest table caught his eye, gave a small nod. Rhowan’s chin dipped in response. Two men in cattlemen’s coats near the dice table shifted apart to let him through, and one clapped him on the shoulder like an old friend.
Peri catalogued every contact. The ones who nodded. The ones who looked away. The ones who watched him from the corners of the room with expressions that could have been respect or caution or both.
A waitress crossed their path with a tray of glasses balanced on her palm. Auburn hair pinned up, dress cut lower than the evening required. She caught Rhowan’s eye and held it a beat too long.
Rhowan smiled back. Slower than necessary.
Peri’s jaw tightened. A small thing. She made sure it was small.
“Friend of yours?” she asked. Casual. Perfect.
“Everyone’s a friend in Greeley.” He glanced at her sideways. “Jealous?”
“Disgusted.”
“That’s what jealous people say.”
She let her shoulder brush a man standing too close to the blackjack table. The contact lasted less than a second. Her hand came away with three steel coins. They disappeared into her jacket pocket without a sound.
Three steps later, a woman in a fur-collared coat shifted her weight to watch the roulette wheel spin. Her handbag hung open at her hip. Peri’s fingers found a pocket of steel chits in the gap. Gone.
Rhowan was still talking. “Look at them.” He swept his hand across the room. “Every person in here thinks they’re the exception. They all know the house wins. They all sat down anyway.” He shook his head, but he was smiling. “You can build an entire economy on that impulse.”
A drunk bumped Peri’s elbow. She steadied him with one hand, lifted a silver crown from his vest pocket with the other. Patted him on the back. He mumbled thanks and stumbled on.
“Rhowan.”
“Yes?”
“Seriously. Why can’t you just tell me if you have a valve body or not? You could have told me in Hammison. You could have sent a letter. Instead I’m standing in a casino in the middle of a cow pasture watching you shake hands with every rancher in the territory.”
He stopped walking. Turned. Looked at her with those dark eyes that always seemed to be running calculations she couldn’t see.
“Because I don’t have one.”
“What!?”
“I know who does. And she doesn’t sell to people she hasn’t sat across from.” He tilted his head toward the back of the room. “Excuse me a moment.”
He crossed to a card table in the back corner. Quieter here, away from the worst of the floor noise. Six chairs around a felt-topped table, five of them occupied. A green-shaded lamp hung low, throwing a circle of light across the felt and leaving the rest of the corner in relative shadow. Rhowan pulled out the sixth chair and sat down like he’d been expected.
The four other players looked up. Not surprised.
Peri watched from ten feet away. The loader had been dead for three weeks. Kitt was rerouting cargo by hand. Kataero hadn’t said a word about it, which was worse than complaint.
She blew a copper curl off her forehead. Grinned.
“Let’s do this.”
She pulled the chair out and sat down. Her hand went into her jacket and came out with a stack of coins. Stolen from three different people across a fifteen-minute walk. She set them on the felt in a neat column.
The game was five-card draw, table stakes, no wild cards. House rules, which in Greeley meant whatever the table agreed on before the first deal.
Rhowan handled introductions while the dealer shuffled.
“Maddy Alston.” He gestured to the woman on Peri’s left. Broad-shouldered, weathered hands, silver streaking through dark hair pulled back in a practical knot. She wore a rancher’s coat and sat with the straight-backed ease of someone who spent her days in a saddle. “Runs cattle east of here. Best herd management in the territory.”
“Flatterer,” Maddy said.
“George Fell.” Across the table. Thin, nervous, fingers never still. “Runs the feed operation on the south road.”
“Mr. Cade,” George said, with a deference that told Peri something about prior transactions.
“Dan Alston.” Maddy’s husband, apparently. Quieter. Thick forearms, grease under his fingernails even in a casino. Mechanic’s hands. Peri clocked that immediately.
“And Tess Brogan. Brokerage out of Hammison.” Older woman, sharp eyes behind wire-frame glasses, the kind of stillness that came from watching people lie for a living.
“And this is Ms. Blackwood.” Rhowan’s voice dropped the performance. Warm still, but professional. “She runs equipment operations out of the northern territory. Hydraulic systems, cargo infrastructure. She keeps things moving that other people can’t.”
Peri looked at him. He didn’t look back.
“Hargrove series?” Dan said, without looking up from his cards.
The table went still for half a second.
“Word travels,” Rhowan said mildly.
“Hargrove-series valve bodies haven’t been manufactured in thirty years,” Maddy said.
“Thirty-two,” Dan said.
“So I’m told,” Peri said. “Which is why I’m in Greeley instead of a machine shop.”
Maddy picked up her cards. “Let’s play.”
The first hand went to George, who won it on a pair of sevens and looked so relieved you’d think he’d just been pardoned. Peri folded early. Watched the table.
George bet scared. Every raise cost him something personal. Tess bet with mechanical precision, her tells buried under decades of practice. Dan barely looked at his cards, more interested in the conversations happening around them. And Maddy played the way she probably ran her ranch: steady, patient, reading conditions three moves ahead.
Rhowan played the way Rhowan did everything. Like the game was just something to do with his hands while the real work happened somewhere else.
Second hand. Rhowan mentioned the south road washout while studying his cards. George jumped on it — two hours added to every delivery, rerouting past the second bridge. Tess, without being asked, mentioned a road crew finishing contracts east of Hammison. George’s head swiveled. Rhowan tossed a coin into the pot and said nothing else.
Third hand. Dan needed a gasket set for a compressor. George had warehouse space he wasn’t using. Tess knew a supplier who owed somebody a favor. Each problem found its answer across the felt, and Rhowan sat at the center of it, threading connections with a few well-placed words.
“You do this every time you come here,” Peri said. Not a question.
Rhowan drew two cards. “Do what?”
“Run the table without playing the game.”
He looked at her over his cards. His mouth opened. Closed.
“I am playing the game.”
She tilted her head. “No. You’re playing everyone else.”
Maddy glanced between them. “You obviously know each other.”
Peri didn’t look at Rhowan, “I’m not entirely certain that’s possible.”
Fourth hand. Tess took the pot on three jacks and the table settled into its rhythm. Peri played conservatively, folding twice, winning a small hand on two pair. Enough to stay in. Enough to watch.
Maddy asked her about the loader during the fifth deal. Casual, the way ranchers asked about weather. How long had it been down? What was the failure mode? Had she tried sourcing through Hammison?
Peri answered the way she answered mechanical questions — precisely. The valve body had cracked along the casting seam. Pressure loss in the main cylinder. She’d rebuilt the hydraulic lines twice trying to isolate the problem before she found it. No, Hammison didn’t have Hargrove stock. Nobody did. Pre-collapse tooling, proprietary alloy.
Dan looked up from his cards for the first time all night.
“Proprietary alloy,” he repeated.
“Chrome-vanadium blend,” Peri said. “Hargrove patented it in ’48. Nobody else ran that formulation.”
Dan studied her. His weight shifted forward an inch. Then he went back to his cards.
The sixth hand was dealt. Peri looked at her cards.
Full house. Queens over eights.
She kept her face still. Scanned the table. George had already folded. Tess was in, but sitting cautious — she’d bet the same amount three rounds running, which meant she was holding something middling and hoping to survive. Dan was out. Maddy was still in, and her betting said she liked what she had, but her posture said she wasn’t certain.
The pot was heavy. Five hands of accumulated coin. Silver and copper catching the lamplight.
Peri looked at the cards. Looked at Maddy. Looked at Dan, who’d gone back to half-watching the table but whose fingers had stopped drumming on the felt when Peri said chrome-vanadium.
She raised. Enough to push Tess out. Tess studied her, studied the pot, and folded.
Heads up. Peri and Maddy.
Maddy raised back. Confident but not reckless.
Peri could end it here. Take the pot. Walk away with more money than she’d arrived with, but no closer to a valve body.
She let her eyes drop to her cards again. Held them a beat too long. Let her thumb shift against the edge of the queen — a small thing, almost invisible, the kind of gesture a player made when they were recalculating and didn’t like the math.
She folded.
Maddy pulled the pot toward her with both hands. Coin clinked against coin.
Then Maddy stopped. Her hands went still on the felt. She looked at Peri’s cards, face-down on the table, and she looked at Peri, and her eyes narrowed the way they probably narrowed when a horse moved wrong in the pasture.
“Turn them over,” Maddy said.
Peri didn’t move.
“Please.”
Peri turned them over.
The table went quiet. George let out a breath. Tess’s eyebrows lifted behind her glasses. Dan looked at the cards, then at Peri, then at his wife.
Maddy studied her. Not the cards. Her.
“You had me beat,” Maddy said.
“Probably.”
“Not probably. You knew.” Maddy leaned back. “So why fold a winning hand to a stranger?”
“Because winning the pot wasn’t going to fix my loader.”
Maddy held her gaze. Five seconds. Ten. The floor noise washed around the table like water around a rock, and none of it touched them.
“Stop by the Alston farm off Route 22 tomorrow morning,” Maddy said. “Ask for Jersey.” She tilted her head toward her husband. “He manages the warehouse for us. Filled with parts from the old hydraulic works. Pre-collapse stock. We got what you’re looking for.”
Dan looked at Peri. Nodded once.
“I’ll let him know you’re coming,” Maddy said.
Rhowan leaned back in his chair. He didn’t say a word, but his mouth was doing the thing where it tried not to smile and lost.
Outside, the air had cooled. Stars visible now, thick and close the way they only got in flat country far from real cities. Cattle lowing somewhere in the dark. The casino’s neon hummed behind her, throwing long shadows across the dirt street.
Peri walked beside Rhowan in silence for half a block before she spoke.
“You already knew Dan had the part.”
It wasn’t a question.
Rhowan kept walking. “Dan Alston has the largest private collection of pre-collapse hydraulic components west of Kyjorh.”
“So why didn’t you just ask him?”
“I did. A couple of weeks ago.”
She stopped walking. He took two more steps before turning back.
“Dan doesn’t sell,” Rhowan said. “Not to strangers. Not for money. That warehouse is thirty years of his life. Every part in it, he found, cleaned, catalogued, and stored himself. You don’t buy your way into that collection. You earn it. Maddy is the gate keeper.”
“And the poker game — “
“Was the only way I could think of to put you in a room with Maddy Alston and let her see what I already knew.” He paused. Hands in his coat pockets, starlight catching the edge of his collar. “That you’re the kind of person who folds a winning hand for the right reason.”
She stared at him. Opened her mouth. Closed it.
“You could have told me,” she said. “Any of that. Before tonight.”
“Would that have made a difference?”
“Yes. Maybe… I don’t know.”
“Exactly.” He smiled. Not the performance. The real one, the one that looked like it cost him something. “You would have tried to solve it yourself. Rebuilt the lines a third time. You needed to be in the room, and you needed to not know why.”
He turned and started walking. Back toward the casino, toward the light and the noise and whatever other deals were waiting in that room full of people who thought they were the exception.
“Hey! Why do I have this feeling you got more out of tonight than I did?”
Rhowan’s smile widened. “Another time, Red.”
Peri stood in the dark street. Stars overhead. Stolen coins still heavy in her jacket pocket. The sound of cattle settling for the night.
Shit.
She turned back toward the casino doors. The same waitress from before was working the entrance crowd, tray balanced, auburn hair catching the light from inside.
She pulled the steel coins from her pocket. What was left of them after the game. She lifted a drink from the tray with one hand and pressed the stolen money into the woman’s palm with the other.
The waitress looked at the coins. Looked at Peri.
Peri tilted her head toward the casino floor, where Rhowan’s dark coat was already disappearing into the crowd. “Don’t trust that man.”
She turned and walked. “And put some damn clothes on.”
The drink was cheap whiskey, warm and rough. She finished it in four long pulls and tossed the empty glass into a bin at the corner without breaking stride.
The truck was idling at the edge of town. She could see the headlights from here.
Another time, Red.
She let herself hold that. Just for a second. The way he’d said it. The way he’d smiled.
“Not my fucking name,” she muttered.
But she was smiling when she said it.
House Rules takes place in the summer of 2190, between the events of The Broker’s Gambit (The Palisade Journals — Volume V) and Wilted Crowns (Ironforged Book One).
Wilted Crowns is available now.