Eli

❝Shall we go all in? The stake is your attention, my prize is your smile❞

Cunning as a fox, charming as a pup, but hiding behind a mask of a country simpleton. Eli Gardner is a master of card tricks and clever schemes who’ll make you believe you’re the lucky one before neatly winning all your coopers. But in his deck, there’s one card he never plays lightly–his long-standing, childhood crush on you.

❈ 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘

Eli Gardner learned from the cradle that the world wasn't split into black and white, but rather into good and bad hands. His childhood smelled of cheap ale from his mother's bar and the ink his father, a hopeless romantic and an equally hopeless unemployed man, used to scribble his verses. It was his father, Rick, who dealt him his first deck of cards, teaching him not only the difference between an ace and a six, but also how to pass a six off as an ace if you knew how to pull the wool over someone's eyes.

When Eli turned four, his mother, tired of a life in debt, went all in on their family—and lost, running off with a wealthy merchant. The wound forever bonded father and son, but it forced Rick to come down from his clouds. Through years of back-breaking labor, he hammered into his calloused hands that honesty wasn't a quirk, but a necessity, and finally drew his lucky ticket—a job as a gardener and editor for the Duke himself.

That's how they ended up in a cottage on the edge of the forest, on the fringe of someone else's luxury. Eli, earning coins and praise for helping his father, grew like a wild plant—tough, resilient, and a little feral. But his mind, sharpened on poetry and card tricks, sought applications craftier than digging in vegetable beds. By thirteen, he knew the surest way to get rich wasn't to earn, but to win. Evenings were for "fooling" around with the servants, at first losing small change just to catch that sweet moment when the spark of thrill and overconfidence lit in his opponent's eyes. And then—bam! He'd be sighing with feigned sadness, pocketing their coppers.

His greatest find was the stablemaster's son, Ludwig. Together, they polished their con to a shine: Eli was the bait, the simpleton constantly losing a "big" stak