Rooster’s Reckoning

Cleo needs money for the gambling debt her husband Jared Foster has run up, and the one thing she can do that pays like that is the thing her father made her promise never to do again. He was the handler people called the Cockfight Sage, and he used the pits to argue men out of gambling. His own student wanted what he had and killed him for it, then came after Cleo, who was ten. Her father held the man off long enough for her to get out of the house, and the last thing he said to her was that she was never to touch a fighting cock. Fifteen years later she walks into the cockfighting house and puts her name down for matches. She takes the ranked handlers there one at a time and pays the debt down bout by bout. The man running the place is her father's student. What her father had told her about the game was that anyone who plays long enough loses and the only way to win is to stay out of it, and Jared has not stopped playing. She keeps taking matches, and the last one on the card is against the student.