Chapter 1 - Prologue

Two years in Kegans State Jail wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to Damian, but it was no walk in the park either. He knew how lucky he should feel that he hadn’t caught another charge in there and had time added to his sentence, or worse, gotten moved to federal.

Like the guy he’d mouthed off at a few months into his sentence, who’d declared in retaliation, to the surrounding crowd of inmates, “Hey, I got five soups for whoever beats the shit outta this guy!” Or the guy who’d delivered the beating in exchange for five soups.

Damian had metal plates in his skull thanks to that incident, but at least he was free.

He’d been on the outside for a couple of days now, squatting in a house that was under construction, but looked like it was going to be mighty fine and fancy when it was done. He didn’t know where else to go. Damned if he was going to call his sister. Before his arrest, he’d been with a girl named Christyn, but he didn’t have her number committed to memory.

It was late, and he was standing at the self-checkout of a 24-hour grocery store, paying for a single pack of ramen noodles with small change he’d found on the sidewalk and roadway throughout the day. It made him think of that beat down for those five soups, and of something someone had once said to him: If you look for pennies all day, you’ll find ramen. Who had said that? He racked his brain...nothing.

Just as his receipt printed and he prepared to go back to the half-finished house and eat his noodles dry, a beep from the next checkstand drew his attention. He wouldn’t have looked twice, but the woman standing there looked just like Christyn…

No. It was her. Her hair was dyed a darker shade of blonde than he remembered, but other than that, she looked almost the same. Red lipstick, dark eyeliner, black button down on black slacks. She must have just gotten off work. She was a little thinner, and he didn’t like it. He knew her well enough to know it was a sign that she was under a tremendous amount of stress. He’d gotten thinner, too, without her to take care of him, not to mention other inmates taking his food in the lockup (although he never dared say a thing about it, or they’d take his ass, too.) Her eyes were downcast and she was listening to music in her earbuds.

He approached her cautiously from the side. He hoped maybe that in seeing him, she’d take pity on him and buy him a soda. He hoped he hadn’t run out of chances with her, after everything that had happened between them over the last few years. He hoped, at the least, that she would look at him. He just wanted to look in her eyes again.

She didn’t startle as he touched her lightly on the arm. For a second, he expected to find he’d made a mistake--either he had the wrong woman, or he was wishfully hallucinating. But it was her, alright. She turned her head, only her head, appraised him up and down, blinked slowly, and took out one earbud. In the relative silence of the supermarket, he could hear the old 80’s song she was listening to. “Well I’ll be fucked,” she muttered. Then, more audibly, “It’s been a hot minute, Damian. And boy, do you look terrible.”

He winced. “You look beautiful. But you’d look terrible, too, if you were homeless.”

She glanced away for a second. Paused to pay for her single purchase: a 24-pack of dish soap--and hoisted it over her left shoulder like a dinner tray. Looked back at him, deliberated for a long moment, and said, “You’re out early.”

“I have a few tricks up my sleeve, thanks to you. You don’t sound happy.”

“Of course I’m happy! I just...well, the house is a mess. I would have done something about it if I knew you’d be out. That is, if you even want to come back and stay with me?”

“You don’t have to--”

“I do, though,” she said. “I know when you lied to the cops, you were trying to have my back. Be fucked up if I didn’t get yours.”

He walked a couple paces behind her until they were out the automatic door; then, she wedged a black linen restaurant napkin out of her back pocket and said, “Put this over your eyes.”

“What--?”

“I’m involved in something now, something bigger than you or me, and, well, I don’t want to take too many risks. So you don’t get to see which car is mine.”

“I still remember your car, Chris.”

“You mean the one you crashed? I bought a new one.”

His cheeks flushed hot. “It was that bad?”

“Just put it on.”

The question burned in his mind like a hot knife: what had she gotten herself into? But he didn’t ask, just went along in compliance. He’d done her so dirty, and he wanted to win her trust back. He couldn’t fit the makeshift “blindfold” all the way around his head, so he held it in place with his hands until she set down her box of soaps and came up behind him with something else, probably another restaurant napkin, tied it to the ends and secured it in the back. “Jesus Christ, Christyn.”

One of her hands closed around his wrist and she led him in the dark across the parking lot. He heard a car door open, and she pushed him gently into the seat. He felt a significant weight settle into his lap which he guessed was the box of soaps, and then the door closed. “Don’t drop that, now.”

“Look at that, she still got jokes.”

She let herself into the driver’s seat, yanked his seat belt across him, and keyed the ignition. It wasn’t comfortable, but there were worse things she could have done.

The radio was tuned to the rock mix station she used to play in her old car. The first bump they hit jarred him. Either she’d become a more reckless driver, or--as he suspected was the case--this new car had almost no suspension. “Are you still at the mansion in Richmond?” he asked her after a while.

“Yes.” Just one word, so succinct. The Christyn he remembered liked to talk a lot, but he supposed things had changed.

“Is Alex still there?”

“Yes.”

“And Auralee?”

“Yes.”

They drove for a while in silence, before Christyn said, “Hey, look, Auralee is on the radio!” Indeed, he recognized their friend’s voice as she belted out a song which, if he had to take a guess, was titled, Love Will Mess You Up. “The original lyric goes, ‘my love will F you up,’ but I guess they had to edit it for the radio. She and Alex are actually touring now.”

“You been lonely at the house?”

“Nah, it’s never quiet at the Server House.”

“The what?”

A guitar solo on the radio reverberated through the car. They hit another bump, then another. Then, the road was flat for a while. Damian began to relax. Blindfolded head laid back against the headrest of the seat, he asked, “What’s the Server House?”

She didn’t answer.

After a while, he said, “I never stopped loving you.”

She took two sharp turns in a row. “I figured; nothing says ‘I love you’ like a charge of obstruction of justice.”

He gasped. “They charged you? You didn’t have to do any hard time, did you?”

“Nah. Zeke got me off. And without you, if you hadn’t said what you said, I’d have been charged with a lot worse.”

“That’s right, Zeke’s a whole lawyer now, isn’t he?”

She didn’t answer, just drove for a while. “I’ve always loved you,” she finally said. Her words melted him inside, gave him an aching satisfaction, like sitting down to a warm meal after being starved, but he heard a ‘but’ in her tone of voice.

“You want to know why I’ve never said it back? Because I was always holding my breath, waiting for the next disaster to strike. I guess I was scared to bear my heart, in case we got ripped apart again, and get left in a vulnerable position. We always seemed to be two of those good people that terrible things happened to. But I’ve solved that problem now. I realized that in order to make it in the world, I had to become one of the terrible things.”

“What do you mean?”

She didn’t answer. “You know, if you want some real food, one of my roommates made chicken sandwiches and macaroni salad for lunch today, and there was a ton of leftovers when I left for work. There’s probably still some in the fridge.”

“So, you want to pick up where we left off, then?” he said. Then, “Exactly how many roommates you got, now?”

The car abruptly stopped. Damian felt the door open, felt the soap box lifted off his legs, felt Christyn take him around the arm and lead him out of the car, down this way, down that way, then straight down a path. “Hey, it’s me,” she said.

“I know--”

“Shh, I’m on the phone,” she hissed, and he bit his tongue. “Yeah, I’m back. I have company, but he’s a friend, there’s no reason to be alarmed. Tell everybody, hold your fire.”

“Hold your...what?” Damian murmured.

Christyn ripped off the blindfold then, and Damian’s jaw dropped. Before him was the mansion Christyn had inherited from her uncle, except it was a lot different than he remembered it. Where there once stood a towering beacon of affluence in an otherwise empty field undisturbed by neighbors for miles in every direction, there now was a noisy, lit up behemoth of activity and sound and chaos. The once pristine white brick facade was vandalized, the grass was unkempt, and the lawn was strewn with all manner of cups, bottles, and evidence of depravity. From a couple windows, he could make out fires burning. In the not-so-distant distance, he thought he heard the dull thud of a human-sized weight hitting the ground. The outlines of people came and went, to and from the house, to the yard, to beyond--to the mailboxes, maybe? To the dumpsters? He couldn’t say for certain how many went in and how many went out. “Welcome to the Server House,” said Christyn.

“Are those...all servers?”

“A few cooks, a few bussers and barbacks, but mostly front of house staff.”

“How many people are there?”

“Ninety, including me. Ninety-one, now, if you want a cot and a roof."

From somewhere nearby, a scream reached his ears.

The front door opened, and though he was apprehensive, he squared his shoulders, not wanting to give away his fear. “You said you got chicken sandwiches?"