My Femboy System-Chapter 49: Guillotine Poker

There are moments in a gambler’s life where time doesn’t just slow—it folds. freewēbnoveℓ.com

A second becomes a stage. A breath becomes a sermon. And right now, I was holding court in the chapel of excess with enough crowns to my name to buy a small vineyard and an appointment with a man who’d murdered gods with pocket change.

My party was waiting at the edge of the second-tier balcony, gathered around a pile of chips so tall it could qualify for noble status.

We looked like royalty about to commit tax fraud.

Willow lounged with a goblet of crimson temptation, leg hooked over the chair like she owned the floor. Miko held up a blade of shadow, twirling it lightly between his fingers. Leo sat quiet, watching the crowd like he expected to need to punch someone in the next thirty seconds.

Aria was counting.

And I mean that literally. One by one, her fingers slid chips into stacks—obsidian, ivory, gold-leafed, rune-etched—and she murmured values like a priest reciting holy verse.

"Four hundred, eight...eleven thousand, five here...another two in the satchels... nine from Miko, fifteen from Leo, six from Willow, thirteen thousand..."

Her voice went tight.

"Total: Fifty thousand and change."

I let out a low, incredulous whistle. "Hells."

"Yes," she said. "All of them."

Willow raised her glass and clinked it against Miko’s ear. "To collective madness."

Miko smirked. "To future trauma."

Leo gave me a look. One of those flat, wordless stares that said you’d better not be planning what I think you are. I smiled back in that sweet, apologetic way that meant I’m absolutely planning what you think I am.

"Right," I said, and inhaled deeply. "Time to challenge the god of good taste and bad intentions."

Willow arched an eyebrow. "Vincent?"

"Who else?" I said.

And then I walked.

Straight into the central pit.

The moment I stepped in, I felt it. Like crossing a veil. The noise dampened. The gold dulled. The walls grew teeth and the Tower itself exhaled—long, low, and utterly displeased. I was stepping into a lion’s mouth with a matchbook and my favorite smile.

He was already waiting.

Vincent stood in the heart of the pit like a man born of shadow and elegance, posture coiled and effortless. His coat hung from his shoulders like a king’s mourning veil, his revolver rested on his hip, and his stopwatch gleamed at his chest. And his face? Blank. Beautiful. Built for last words and long silences.

When he spoke, it was with that dry voice that cracked like porcelain in frost.

"You’re insufferably persistent, Cecil."

I shrugged, slow and loose. "That’s how I’ve survived this long."

He cocked his head slightly. "Most would break by now and yet you keep folding upward."

"That’s because I never learned how to fall properly."

For a moment, his lip curled. Not a smile. A...twitch. Like the ghost of amusement fought its way through the stone of his face and lost.

Then he raised one gloved hand and pointed at the floor between us.

"All of it," he said. "You. Me. Everything we carry. One wager."

It was what I’d wanted and yet it still felt like swallowing a knife wrapped in gold.

"Agreed," I said, voice steady.

A figure appeared between us without sound. No steps. No arrival. Just existence.

An Overseer, but not like the last.

This one wore a cloak so black it shimmered purple at the edges. Their mask was pure obsidian—smooth, no mouth, only a pair of glyphs where his eyes should’ve been. The air bent around them. The Tower leaned around them. Their voice, when it came, was wind over glass.

"Total wager will be confirmed. Display all holdings."

Vincent was first.

With slow, deliberate motion, he began pulling pouches from his belt. Inside them, chips glowed like embers. Twenty thousand in stacked obsidian, another ten in shimmering prismatics, then thirty more in raw-blood red etched with claws. And then—

He reached to his coat and unlatched his revolver. He placed it on the table between us. Then came the stopwatch. I could hear it ticking, steady, patient, and condemning.

"Registered items," he said. "Flintlock revolver, sixteen thousand. Stopwatch, fourteen."

The Overseer bowed their head. "Total on hand: Sixty thousand crowns. Registered total: thirty thousand."

I stepped forward. My bag thumped down. Chip after chip clattered out, stacked with reverence by Aria’s fastidious fingers. Then came my dagger and my pen.

And then—

One by one—

I held up each of my companions. Not their bodies, their tokens. Each with their own value, their own weight. The Overseer straightened.

"Fifty thousand crowns in on hand value confirmed. Registered total: Sixteen thousand five hundred."

I breathed in, deep and grounding. I could feel every coin in my veins. Every gamble. Every humiliation. Every kiss, trick, and sleight-of-hand that got me here.

Vincent nodded once. "Shall we?"

The Overseer raised a hand. Then it happened—

The Tower shook.

Not like a metaphor, but a real tremor. A low, seismic growl rolled through the ground beneath our boots. The chips on the table rattled. The air warped. Candles fluttered out. I reached for my dagger on instinct. The Overseer stilled. Even Vincent frowned.

From the shadows, another Tower attendant slipped forth, hooded and pale. He whispered into the Overseer’s ear. And something changed.

A twitch.

Sweat formed along the Overseer’s brow. A single bead. Impossible. Wrong.

I stepped forward. "What is it?"

The Overseer hesitated.

"...The Tower is...unstable," they said. "There has been a disruption. Deeper than the floors we know. Something has broken."

Vincent narrowed his eyes. "Define ’broken.’"

"There is...interference. Warping. The walls are...folding. But the game—must continue."

And just like that, the Overseer vanished, leaving only silence. Vincent turned to me.

"If the Tower falls, this may be our only chance."

I met his eyes. "Then let’s tear it apart ourselves."

He nodded and gestured. The pit emptied without sound. Not by command, but rather by sheer force of awe. Every player, every whisperer, every coin-slicked noble and blade-toting gambler parted. Like churchgoers clearing for a crucifixion. When the center was cleared, they rolled it in.

The table.

Not a card table. An altar made of obsidian carved with screaming mouths, blood gutters, and rune channels. Polished flat, but wrong in every way—like it had been used for things poker could only hope to imitate.

Then came the devices, two of them.

They looked like guillotines fucked by a clockmaker. Five slots. Five blades. Five switches. Each designed to hold a hand in place, finger by finger, blade above each joint, the kind of invention that wasn’t meant to exist outside a nightmare.

Vincent looked pleased.

"This," he said with a voice that made the air colder, "is Guillotine Poker."

He gestured toward the blades with the calm of a waiter offering wine.

"Each hand, we wager a finger. One per round. One hand of poker. If you lose, your finger is claimed by the Tower. Five fingers. Five rounds. First to lose all five..."

"Loses everything," I said.

Vincent nodded, and then smiled.

It was the smile of a man who wanted to die. But only after making sure you did it first. I looked down at my fingers. They didn’t tremble. Not yet, but they would. Because this wasn’t just a game, this was sacrifice made spectacle.

The Overseer stepped back into the pit, robed in layered shadow and authority, gliding toward us with the weight of old law in his voice.

"Per Tower decree," he began, voice calm and cold, "a loss in an All-Out Bet results in immediate expulsion from progressing the Tower due to insufficient collateral. The loser shall be stripped of registered assets, forfeiting all chips, items, and rights to wager further."

Expulsion. Ruin. A clean end for the loser. A perfect stage for a dramatic little exit.

Exactly what I wanted.

Without another word, the Overseer reached into his robes and withdrew a small black box. It looked plain, almost boring—matte-finished, unimpressive, the kind of object one could mistake for a trinket and forget.

But as soon as it touched the table, the room reacted. Air held its breath and the audience beyond us began to shift in their seats.

I swallowed the urge to grin. Because this was the box. My box. The one Willow had lifted for me hours earlier with all the grace of a ghost and none of the subtlety.

Inside was a simple deck of cards, plain-backed, lightly waxed. The kind of deck used only in the most dangerous of games, in duels so grand that they left the floor scorched and reputations salted behind them. No flourishes. No glamour. Just forty-two grams of absolute truth and violence.

Alongside it, the Overseer placed an automatic shuffler: sleek, gold-trimmed, purring softly like a bored panther. He bowed his head slightly. "We begin when both parties confirm readiness."

Vincent lifted one hand. "Wait."

I smiled.

His voice was polite. Not kind—polite. The difference mattered. A blade could be polished and courteous before slicing a throat.

He reached out and took the deck like it was made of glass, his fingers ghosting across the corners, flipping cards one by one. He bent them gently, checked the grain, the weight, even the scent. Gods, he smelled them. Licked one. Ran it across his lips as if trying to taste deception.

I rested my chin in my palm and watched the performance with the quiet amusement of a man who knew the knife was already beneath the table.

At last, Vincent’s mouth curled—just slightly. A flicker of amusement passed over his otherwise deadpan face.

Then he passed the deck to me.

I took it with theatrical exaggeration, grinning like a street magician about to perform the world’s worst coin trick. I dropped a card on purpose. Picked it up slowly.

Let my fingers slip over the rest, humming tunelessly as I "inspected" them. Then, as I slid them back into the box, I made a single, nearly invisible movement—a nudge so small it barely existed.

Vincent twitched.

Ah. He noticed.

I passed the Overseer the box and he took the deck without further comment, inserting it into the shuffler, and locking the mechanism in place. The machine whirred to life, its soft mechanical hum the overture to something bloody.

We each slid our left hand into the slot of the guillotine contraption placed in front of us.

The clamps sealed with a hiss. No more pretending. No more bluffing.

This was Guillotine Poker.

The first hand came swiftly.

I drew seven and two off-suit. Trash. I bluffed. Vincent didn’t bite.

He won.

The blade descended with mechanical joy. There was no ceremony, no countdown, just the wet sound of steel passing through flesh and bone.

My pinky hit the obsidian altar like a dropped pebble. Pain flooded up my arm in a scalding wave, biting, electric. I flinched. Hard. My body arched, breath caught in my throat.

But I didn’t scream. Willow’s laughter rang across the upper tiers, elegant and indulgent. Aria turned away, pale. Leo clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white. Miko chewed the inside of his cheek until he bled.

I just flexed what was left of my hand—

And grinned.

Second hand. Garbage again. He raised. I matched. He had the edge. I lost.

The blade came down and now my ring finger was gone. I gagged, barely holding back the bile crawling up my throat. The altar drank my blood greedily, and for a second, I swore I heard it hum. Still, I said nothing.

Third round. A straight. I thought I had him—

Then he laid down a flush with the quiet grace of a man closing a coffin.

My middle finger disappeared in a flash of steel. The pain was no longer pain—it was a state. I shook. Sweat poured down my back in rivers. I stared at the stump that was my hand and wondered if I’d still be able to write.

Didn’t matter.

This was the price of a stage.

"You’re bleeding for a lost cause," Vincent said, his tone devoid of triumph. "You’re clawing through rot and calling it strategy."

I met his eyes through the red haze. "And yet you’re still talking to me."

Round four. He overplayed just a little. I caught him bluffing. My pair of eights held.

He lost.

Vincent didn’t flinch as the blade sheared through his pinky. The finger rolled off the altar. He didn’t even look at it. Gods, he was terrifying.

Round five.

He spoke the entire time. Not about the cards. Not even about me, but about my friends.

He described, in slow poetic detail, what each of them would be like when they broke. How Aria would cry for stars that couldn’t save her. How Miko would watch the shadows leave him. How Leo would die with his fists clenched, too proud to beg. How Willow, perhaps, would survive—but never care again.

And he smiled the whole time.

I lost.

Fourth finger gone. I couldn’t feel my arm anymore, just heat and thunder. I stared down at what remained of my hand. One finger. One chance.

The air shifted—subtly, irrevocably.

It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t a machine. It was him.

Vincent had become something else entirely. A singularity in the room, pulling every trace of fear inward like a dying star. The chandelier still glowed, but the light seemed thinner, devoured by the weight of his presence. Shadows stretched longer than they should. The walls felt closer. Tighter. The world itself seemed to hold its breath.

Then he smiled, not with arrogance, not with cruelty. It was the kind of smile carved from prophecy—inevitable, calm, and final. Even the Overseer stepped back a little. I should have broken under it. I should have folded like parchment in flame, but I didn’t.

Instead I laughed.

A bright, maddening laugh—blasphemous and defiant in nature. My smile cracked wide, blood on my teeth catching the chandelier’s gleam like rubies set in ivory.

"Gods," I whispered, my voice trembling under the weight of something vast and rising. "You really are worse than the devil."

Vincent didn’t reply. But I saw it—just for a heartbeat. The flicker behind his eyes. A question. Because he hadn’t noticed yet. He hadn’t noticed the trick. He hadn’t realized that this wasn’t his moment anymore.

It was mine.

Let him bring his guillotine. Let him sing of darkness and fate.

I had already flipped the table.

The real game had only just begun.

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