Unfair Play

Precise. Patient. Playing the wrong game. Tommy Turtello is careful beyond reason. He studies his targets for weeks. He knows their habits, their vulnerabilities, the precise words that will coax them closer. He has spent a decade behind bars refining the craft of disguise — chemical powders that alter his features, fragrances that soften suspicion, manipulations of expression that make strangers trust what they shouldn't. Now free, he operates through a city that speaks of him without knowing it, and the work he does has made him something close to a legend with no face attached. He has always trusted his methods. They have never failed him. But every ritual, no matter how refined, carries within it an assumption: that the world operates on rules he already understands. A work of dark literary fiction steeped in noir atmosphere and touched by the uncanny, Unfair Play is a story about precision, obsession, and the quiet arrogance of mastery. For readers of weird fiction, psychological horror, and narratives that arrive somewhere you never agreed to go.