This Time, I'll Kill the Game

Hans is back at the tables under a name nobody there ties to him, sitting across from Matt, who reads minds and uses it at cards. Matt is the boy he brought up. Hans made his name young on card sense. He gave it up after the friend he had grown up with lost his household and his life to the habit, and he took the friend's son in and raised him and never taught him the real method, which Matt understood as an old man keeping the good part back. In the life Hans is remembering, Matt sat him down at a table, read him through the whole game and left him with nothing, and his wife was carrying their child when she was put through what came after and killed herself. He is living the same stretch a second time. He wants the woman he loves kept clear of it, he wants Matt to lose the way he lost, and he knows the place where the mind reading stops working. In front of people he is calm about all of it.