Four Of A Kind

Chapter 81: [2.56] The Tyranny of a Perfectly Folded Pocket Square

I gathered up the scattered poker chips, stacking them into neat piles by color. The clock on the wall said 12:15. I had fifteen minutes to change and meet Vivienne downstairs for whatever mysterious event required my presence today. Something about a talk show and Maison Valentine, according to her texts.

Vivienne’s messages were always precise instructions, never requests. This morning’s had contained an exact timeline, complete with outfit requirements that had already required five changes.

Outfits one through five had been rejected for reasons ranging from “too casual” to “wrong season palette” to my personal favorite: “inappropriately textured for daytime camera work.”

I didn’t know fabric could be inappropriate for specific times of day, but apparently it could.

I left the library and walked through the maze of identical hallways, passing at least three disapproving ancestor portraits before finding the right turn to the east wing.

The Valentine manor was built like a video game dungeon, complete with false paths and random encounters with staff members who appeared from nowhere.

My phone buzzed. Another text from Vivienne.

“Where are you? We leave in 13 minutes.”

I typed back: “Coming. Tutoring went long.”

Three dots appeared immediately. “How did it go?”

I paused. What would Vivienne want to hear? The businesswoman would want metrics, data points, quantifiable results.

“She got an 8/10 on a quiz she got a 2/10 on two hours ago.”

Three dots again. Then: “Acceptable improvement. Please wear option six. The navy with the tan belt.”

Option six. Right. The outfit with the weird pocket square thing that Vivienne had insisted matched her planned accessories. Which meant I had approximately twelve minutes to shower, change, and get downstairs before Hurricane Vivienne leveled the east wing looking for me.

I sprinted the rest of the way to my guest suite.

The shower was still a technological marvel that I couldn’t fully comprehend. Too many buttons, too many jets, and a waterfall feature that made me feel like I was bathing in a rainforest. I hit what I hoped was “normal human shower” and not “experimental water torture” and jumped in.

Five minutes later, I was toweling off and racing toward the closet where outfit option six awaited.

The clothes had been laid out on the bed—navy slacks, crisp white shirt, tan leather belt, navy blazer with subtle gold buttons, and that pocket square thing I was supposed to fold… somehow.

I dressed in record time, only to face the final boss: the pocket square. The silky fabric kept slipping through my fingers as I attempted to fold it into the triangular shape Vivienne had demonstrated earlier. After the third failed attempt, I gave up and stuffed it in my pocket, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

My phone buzzed again: “5 minutes.”

I grabbed my wallet, phone, and room key, then bolted for the door, still adjusting the collar of my shirt. The blazer felt restricting across my shoulders, but Vivienne had insisted it was “perfectly tailored” and any discomfort was “my imagination or poor posture.”

Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one being packaged like a Valentine action figure.

As I rounded the corner toward the main staircase, I nearly collided with Sabrina, who materialized from nowhere like she always did. She wore a deep burgundy dress that matched the book in her hands, her wine-red hair loose around her shoulders.

“You’re late,” she observed without looking up from her page. “Vivienne has checked her watch three times in the last two minutes.”

“How do you know that? You’re up here.”

Her purple eyes flicked up to mine. “I know everything that happens in this house.”

“That’s not creepy at all.”

“Creepy is subjective. Useful is objective.” She closed her book. “You should go. Vivienne’s left eye is twitching.”

“How can you possibly—”

“Go.” She turned and drifted away down the hall, leaving behind the faint scent of vanilla and old books.

I shook my head and continued down the grand staircase, taking the steps two at a time. At the bottom, Vivienne stood with her tablet in one hand and her phone in the other, wearing a tailored burgundy dress that made her look at least five years older than seventeen. Her wine-red hair was pulled back in a perfect ponytail, not a strand out of place.

Her left eye was, in fact, twitching.

“You’re late,” she said without looking up.

“I’m exactly on time.” I gestured to the ornate grandfather clock in the foyer, which showed 12:29. “You said be ready by 12:30.”

“Ready means fully prepared to leave, not arriving at the specified time.” She finally looked up, her purple eyes scanning me from head to toe. “The pocket square is wrong.”

Of course it was.

She set down her tablet and approached me slowly. Her heels clicked on the marble floor with each step.

“Allow me,” she said, reaching for my jacket pocket.

Before I could object—or frankly, finish processing what was happening—her fingers were slipping into my pocket.

The contact was brief as she retrieved the wadded silk I’d stuffed in there this morning. She held it up between us like evidence of a crime I didn’t know I’d committed.

Her face hovered inches from mine as she began refolding the fabric. The faint scent of her perfume drifted between us in the space we definitely shouldn’t be sharing.

“The pointed fold projects authority,” she explained. Her eyes stayed fixed on the pocket square as she spoke, never meeting mine. “It complements the clean lines of this particular blazer. The four-point you attempted would create visual competition with the structured shoulders.”

I wasn’t sure when pocket squares had become a battlefield, but here we were.

She slid the now-perfectly-folded square back into my pocket, her fingers adjusting the angle with the kind of attention most people reserved for defusing bombs. The fabric sat at exactly the right height, folded at exactly the right angle. Her hand lingered there for maybe a second longer than strictly necessary, smoothing an invisible wrinkle that I’m pretty sure didn’t exist.

Then she stepped back, putting a professional distance between us again. Her purple eyes scanned me from head to toe one more time, performing what I assumed was her final inspection.

“Acceptable,” she declared.

But I caught it—the smallest hint of color creeping into her cheeks, a pale pink that hadn’t been there before.

She turned away quickly, retrieving her tablet and phone with movements that were just a fraction too sharp to be completely casual.

“Let’s go,” she said, already walking toward the door. “The car is waiting.”