Bluff Me Gently
Pairing: Azriel x Reader
Summary: The inner circle plays poker. You and Azriel are competitive, until you start stealing Azriel's composure by playing dirty 😉
A/N: i'll just preface this by saying i know like nothing about poker so i apologize for what are probably grave inaccuracies 😭 and guys i think im having a phase of "azriel losing his self-control" fics but im not upset about it, but i am trying to get into writing fluff more so i hope you enjoyyy 🥹
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The night started with good intentions and a bowl the size of a helmet full of sugared almonds.
Someone—Mor—had produced a velvet-lined box of chips with frankly unnecessary drama. Rhys did a whole card-shuffle flourish that made Cassian clap like he’d never seen cards before. Feyre had set lamps to a soft gold; Nesta pretended not to care and failed by a thin, delicious margin, and Amren—after announcing poker was “a mortal’s way of pretending to be clever”—sat anyway with a glass of red and a stack that said she intended to be the problem.
Azriel took the end seat, quiet as always, sleeves buttoned, jaw clean-shaven. His version of relaxed was precise: neat stack of chips, cards squared, eyes on the felt.
You took the chair opposite him because you would never sit anywhere else on a map. Sleeves shoved to your forearms, hair loosely pinned like it might fall if the night asked nicely. No jewelry. No tells you hadn’t chosen. You rolled a chip across your knuckles, eyes on the deck.
“Poker,” Cassian announced. “Ground rules: no winnowing the deck, no mind-speak, no shadows palming cards—”
“I don’t need to resort to cheating,” Az said without looking up.
“I wasn’t worried about you,” Cassian replied, cutting his eyes at Rhys.
Rhys, utterly guilty, sipped his drink. “I am wounded by the implication.”
Cards whispered. Chips clicked. The first rounds were laughter and trash talk and Nesta’s increasingly bored face as Rhys tried to sell a bluff with dimples. Nesta watched, learned, took money cleanly and without apology. Cassian called everything like a man who admires chaos as a strategy. Feyre folded with elegance. Mor crowed when she drew a miracle and then lost it two breaths later. Amren did something that may or may not have been legal and smirked when Cassian sputtered.
And Azriel? Az played like he did everything else—clean, patient, quietly predatory, a man to whom patience was muscle memory.
You matched him. Not the same stillness—yours was coiled, kinetic—but the same refusal to perform. When you won, you moved the chips with quick, neat hands. When you lost, you didn’t flinch. Two predators learning each other’s pacing.
Az didn’t talk much. He never did at a table. But the focus was obvious, a line drawn from his chest to the cards. You felt it brush your side when it swung your way.
“Bad night to be subtle,” Mor observed, stacking and unstacking her chips with a rhythm that made Rhys twitch. “Our boy’s in a mood.”
“I am in a chair,” Azriel said, and the corner of his mouth lifted just enough to annoy you.
You matched his chip tricks, matched his raises, matched the way he breathed only when it helped him think. It started as a social thing. It became a tournament inside the room no one else had been invited to.
By the fourth round, Mor was out - dramatic sigh, theatrical bow, stolen decanter. She sprawled on a bench, offering commentary like a very friendly crow.
By the sixth hand, Rhys retired voluntarily (“High Lord business,” he declared, escaping to the kitchen to steal peaches) and Feyre tapped out with dignity after losing a frankly suspicious number of hands to Nesta, who had the serene expression of a cat sitting on a very warm cushion.
Then Cassian chased a straight into a quiet trap Az had built over three hands and kissed half his stack goodbye. He threw his head back and groaned. “I hate you both,” he declared cheerfully, palming a consolation cookie Mor had smuggled back.
“Don’t lie,” Mor called from the doorway, powdered sugar smug on her lip. “You love being eliminated so you can heckle.”
“True,” he admitted, unashamed, and joined Rhys at the mantel, shoulder to shoulder like two large saints prepared to witness foolishness.
By the eighth, Amren snapped her chips closed like a book and declared you are all insufferable and stalked to the kitchen for something older than the Sidra.
Which left the three of you: Nesta, Azriel, you.
“Side note,” Cassian muttered as he shuffled, “if either of you two start flirting as strategy, I’m leaving for the good of my sanity.”
You didn’t blink. Az’s mouth twitched.
Nesta took a big pot off you with a merciless check-raise, then stacked her chips, declared, “I’m bored,” and bowed out on top because Nesta plays life like she plays cards: profit and departures.
Heads-up, then. Just you and Azriel.
The room settled. The real game—everyone knew it now—narrowed to two chairs.
You regarded one another the way climbers regard a cliff they both fully intend to top first. Chips set like battlements. Cards dealt slow. The library seemed to draw in, breath held, lamps letting shadow and amber do the work.
Rhys’s smile slid warm and delighted. “Place your bets now.”
“Shh,” Mor hissed, radiant. “Don’t spook them.”
Styles clashed beautifully. You raised precisely when you should have called, called when any sane creature would have folded, and looked unbothered when you got caught. Az played the long game, bleeding a little to learn a lot, letting small pots go so the big one would come to him later. And when he looked at you over his cards, you felt the old, obnoxious truth of him: he could read a room like a report and you were lucky to get away with a single secret.
You wanted to test lucky.
The hand after that, you picked up your cards and worried your lower lip between your teeth while you read them, head tilted, hair slipping at your temple. Innocent, absent-minded—except you held it a shade too long, a hair too deliberate. Not a performance for the table; for one pair of eyes only.
Az saw it. He looked away and then back again like a man walking past heat and failing to remember why he should. She put one card down slow, fingertips sliding, lashes heavy a fraction too long.
“Is it hot in here,” Cassian said to no one, delighted.
Mor elbowed him without looking, equally delighted. Rhys covered his eyes with the back of his wrist and peeked through his fingers like a scandalized aunt.
Azriel’s eyes flicked to your mouth and back to your stack. It took him half a beat longer than it should have. Then he made a very small mistake—called instead of raising with position. It would have looked like nothing to anyone else. To you, it was a flare on a dark sea.
You won that hand. Small pot. He stacked your chips for you without looking at you, two neat towers.
Cassian put his face in his hands. “You two are going to set a record for ‘most tension while doing nothing illegal.’”
Next hand. She licked her thumb to shuffle her stack into tidier towers. That thumb ended up between her teeth for no reason at all for the length of a breath. She didn’t look up. When she placed a bet, she did it with two fingers, lazy, and rolled a chip back toward herself with a thoughtfulness that looked like faraway and felt like an invitation.
Az stared at his cards as if they were misbehaving. He put one down, then another. He matched her bet. He shouldn’t have. Mor covered a laugh behind her glass.
All right, you thought, smiling to yourself. You crossed one leg over the other. Not slow. Not obvious. Just enough that the skirt you wore—which was, fine, on the shorter side because you liked it that way and because he had said once, almost reverent, the way you sit like you own every room you’re in—shifted an inch.
Az’s eyes flicked. Once. Down. Up. He didn’t smile. He did, however, take an extra breath he did not need, and under-bet a strong hand and lose a pot he should have taken by miles.
Nesta’s brows inched upward, like rocks moved by tide.
You touched the rim of your glass to your bottom lip and thought, sweetly, check.
Az dropped two chips on the felt with more force than strictly necessary. New hand. His mouth went neutral. He slotted a card under his thumb and finally, finally looked at you properly. You watched awareness hit him like a wave, watched his shoulders settle lower, watched the corner of his mouth tip.
When he spoke, it was that deep, gravel-warm register that never fails to reach your bones. “Oh,” he said, amused, low enough that only you and every single person in the room heard, “we’re playing that game.”
You arranged her face into perfect innocence. “Playing poker.”
Azriel smiled—slow, dangerous, fond. “I can play that game too,” he said, rough velvet. He undid his cuffs. Not the thoughtless roll of a man who is warm; the deliberate turn of fabric on forearm that says attention. Fold, fold—precise—ink and tendon and the kind of strength that lives under quiet. Shadows curled along his wrist like rings. He adjusted his rings because he wanted you to watch his hands. The room temperature changed by an impolite degree.
Az did not look away while he did it. He dragged his lower lip between his teeth—briefly, dangerously—like a man indulging a thought and filing it for later. He sat back, a fraction wider in his chair, careless grace dialed up to lethal.
You forgot the rules of breathing for exactly one beat. “Oh,” you said, airy.
“This feels illegal,” Rhys said, chin in hand, “I’m not sure I should be watching this.”
“Shh,” Feyre said, not looking away. “You’ll break the spell.”
“This isn’t a spell,” Mor whispered. “It’s foreplay with math.”
Az leaned in a fraction, enough to put his mouth in the light, enough for her to see the smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “Stakes?” he asked, casual.
“We already have stakes,” you said, flicking a chip.
“Higher,” he said. “Winner chooses. No refusal.”
Mor did a delighted little kick that knocked into Rhys’s ankle. Feyre ate another grape with scientific precision.
“Alright”, you said softly.
You dealt. Your pulse picked up visible speed at your throat. You are immune, you told yourself. You are stone.
He leaned back in his chair and looked up at you through his lashes. He does not weaponize it often. He didn’t need to. It landed — and stone remembered it could be water.
You almost forgot to bet your straight.
Back and forth. Neither of you played perfectly now; that wasn’t the point. He let his voice sketch lower when he said raise. You pushed a lock of hair off your shoulder with one finger and his gaze followed like it had been leashed. He flexed his hand once in his lap, as if it had better ideas than etiquette allowed.
You tucked your bottom lip between your teeth—just lightly—and he exhaled through his nose, eyes darkening. He reset his stack with the pad of his thumb, slow. Your knees pressed together under the table like someone had tugged a string.
Neither of you touched the other. Neither of you had to. The tells became the hand.
“Should I leave,” Cassian asked no one in particular.
“Yes,” Nesta said from the doorway, where she had reappeared purely to judge. Her eyes glittered, amused. “But don’t.”
“Try not to scandalize my rugs,” Rhys said, settling in for premium theater.
The pot grew. Not the largest of the night; the only one that mattered. Az barely looked at his cards now. He looked at you—the line of your wrist, the way you went still when you had a hand, the pursed mouth when you didn’t. You didn’t look at his face, but you watched the tells you’d earned: the shallow breath, the small pause before he called, the ring finger that tapped once when he hated folding and did it anyway.
You weren’t trying to win the pot. You were winning each other in front of witnesses.
Final hand.
“Call,” you said softly.
“Raise,” he returned, just above a whisper.
Silence. The Sidra murmured. A page turned itself in a book on the far shelf. Chips clicked, slow and certain: she met him.
He opened, laid his cards down. Not perfect. Not nothing. A hand that could be beaten if you’d built it carefully.
You hadn’t. You’d been too busy counting his breaths. You stared at your cards, then at the table, then at his mouth, which had been speaking to you in a language you were starting to understand.
Cassian winced sympathetically. Rhys lifted one brow in unconcealed smugness. Mor covered her grin in her sleeve.
You exhaled through her nose, set her cards down, and pushed the pot toward him, neat and without drama. “Well played.”
He shook his head once—no gloating, no victory, only a gleam that should be illegal. “Well distracted,” he corrected.
You huffed, amused despite yourself. “I thought it might work.”
“It did,” he said, and then because they were ridiculous and honest and not careful people with each other, “too well.”
She looked at his forearms like a woman deciding whether to set a city on fire for warmth. “Likewise.”
Rhys coughed. “Call it a draw before my library combusts.”
“Not yet,” you said, competitive streak flaring bright. You cut the deck, dealt again. “One more.”
Az nodded once, the smallest bow. “One more.”
The last hand was clean. No tricks, no slow mouth games, no sleeves rolled past what the night could bear. They played it like a thesis defense: crisp, precise, everything they’d learned about each other’s patience and risk.
He checked when he should have pressed; she raised when she should have called. He watched the math land in her face. She watched the decision form in his jaw.
You over-bet the pot.
It’s a rude move. It asks a question like a slap: do you really want to pay to find out I’m lying?
“Fold,” he said finally, and it felt like a door opening.
“Cards,” you said automatically, but he only pushed his hand in, unread. The door opened somewhere in your chest and you didn’t keep your face blank. You let your smile show—just a little—and turned over queen-high like a criminal.
Silence. Then a chorus of reactions, each more unhelpful than the last.
“You absolute menace,” Mor breathed, delighted.
Cassian fell out of his chair laughing. “Queen-high over-bet bluff—she robbed you.”
Rhys put a hand over his heart. “I am… moved.”
Feyre clapped like a polite assassin. “Beautifully cruel.”
Az’s brows lifted a fraction. He looked at the cards. He looked at you. Then he sat back and started to laugh—quiet, low, coming apart at the edges. Gods, he adored you. Of course you’d choose nerve over numbers. Of course you’d make him love that about you.
You felt warm, stupidly pleased, and a little wicked. “Stakes?”
He leaned forward, elbows on the felt, and steepled his fingers like a man preparing a brief. The veins in his forearms were obnoxious. “Winner chooses. No refusal.”
“Those were your words.”
“They were.” He held your gaze for one beat longer than decent, then—because he was Azriel, and because he had just decided to lose the way he wanted—added, suggestive and sure, “Or I make it simple.”
You tilted your head. “Simple how?”
“I owe you one favor,” he said, mouth curving, eyes steady on yours. “Anytime. Anywhere.” He let the words hang.
A beat. You let your gaze drop to his mouth, then lower—to his throat, his hands, back to his eyes—and added, softer: “No questions.”
Something in Az’s control flickered, then held. His voice came back rough velvet. “Understood.”
The room reacted like it had lungs.
Mor fanned herself with a losing hand. “I suddenly believe in destiny.”
Feyre stood, very studiously rearranging fruit. “I’m going to… check on the pears.”
Rhys clinked his glass against nothing. “I will now practice selective hearing for the good of Prythian.”
Nesta’s mouth curved, razor-pleased. “Try a door with a lock. Revolutionary.”
Amren slid her chair back. “Try not to dent the furniture,” she said, and left with her wine like a departing magistrate.
Rhys started herding people toward the hall with the faux-innocent efficiency of a man clearing a scene.
You stepped close enough to smooth his cuff with two fingers, a nothing-touch that landed like a promise, and tipped your chin up.
You didn’t smile. You just looked at him the same way you had over every winning hand—patient, sure, hungry—and set two fingers lightly at his wrist, right where the pulse kicked. You felt the stutter. He let you feel the stutter.
“Anytime?” you breathed, barely a sound.
Az dipped until his mouth hovered at your temple, voice a shadow-warm scrape. “Name it. Time, place—”
“Anywhere?” Your lashes brushed his cheek. It wasn’t a question so much as a dare.
His throat worked; a quiet, helpless sound escaped him that wasn’t laughter. “Anywhere,” he said, rougher now. “And no questions.”
You hooked a finger in his collar and drew him down, breath ghosting the corner of his mouth. “Then start keeping score, Shadowsinger.”
His eyes lit like banked coals catching. He looked genuinely, devastatingly happy. “I intend to be very, very in debt,” he murmured, the corner of his mouth tipping. “Frequently.”
You didn’t cash the favor in—yet. You let it hum between you like a live wire as your knuckles skimmed his jaw and he leaned, just a fraction, like a man stepping into weather he’d chosen. And later— upstairs, downstairs, or against the first surface that consented to witness—you cashed nothing in yet. You only proved a point: he’d feel that look tomorrow across a training ring, or mid-briefing, or on a rooftop at dawn, and Azriel would come to you the same way he came to every truth—quiet, inevitable, and very, very willing to pay what he owed.
