My Karmic Debt System

Chapter 1: The Weight of Nothing

It was 2:47 in the morning when I finally decided to count the pills.

I had been sitting on the edge of my bed in room 6B of the Ashford Hotel for the past hour, just staring at the bottle in my hands, turning it over and over like it might tell me something I didn't already know. Forty-three pills. I counted them twice just to be sure, spreading them across the bedsheet in neat little rows the same way I used to arrange mise en place back when I still had a kitchen to call my own.

The room was exactly as miserable as you'd expect from a condemned building in the Tenderloin. Cracks running up the walls like veins, a water stain spreading across the ceiling that seemed to grow larger every single day, and a window that let in more cold air than it kept out. Eviction notices were taped to the door—five of them now, layered on top of each other because the landlord had stopped bothering to remove the old ones before adding new ones. I had stopped reading them weeks ago. They all said the same thing anyway.

On the nightstand, right next to the photograph I couldn't bring myself to put away, sat a stack of medical bills thick enough to double as a doorstop. Helen's bills. The final total was burned into my memory by now: $186,000. One hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars for six months of treatment that hadn't saved her anyway.

I should have felt something about that number. Anger, maybe. Despair. Something. But all I felt was empty, like someone had reached inside my chest and scooped out everything that used to make me human.

My phone had been dead for three days now. Not just dead battery—actually disconnected, shut off by the carrier because I hadn't paid the bill in four months. The last time I'd turned it on, there were forty-seven missed calls from various debt collectors. Forty-seven people who wanted money I didn't have, calling a phone I could no longer afford, looking for a man who barely existed anymore.

I picked up the photograph. Vesper's opening night. There we were, Helen and me, standing right in front of the restaurant with matching grins so wide they almost looked painful. We looked impossibly young in that picture, impossibly hopeful, like two people who genuinely believed that hard work and love would be enough to protect them from the world.

That was three years ago. Three years that felt like both a lifetime and yesterday, depending on which way the memories decided to hit me on any given night.

Now Helen was dead, Vesper was gone, and I was sitting in this rotting hotel room arranging pills by color and dosage with the same careful precision I once used for calculating recipe costs. Funny how skills transfer like that.

A car drove past on the street below, and exhaust fumes drifted through my cracked window. For just a moment—one terrible, beautiful moment—I could have sworn I smelled garlic roasting in olive oil. The kitchen at Vesper during prep hours. Helen standing at the counter with a wooden spoon, asking me to taste something, the afternoon light catching the flour dust floating in the air around her. I could see it so clearly it hurt. Her smile. The way she tilted her head when she was waiting for my opinion. The little furrow between her brows when she wasn't sure if she'd gotten the seasoning right.

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through the tightness in my chest.

Somewhere in the building, a baby started crying. The sound cut through the thin walls like a blade, and suddenly I wasn't hearing a baby at all. I was hearing kitchen timers, three of them going off at once during the lunch rush, and Helen was laughing at me from the pass because I was trying to work two stations at once again.

"You're going to burn something," she had said, shaking her head at me with that look she got when she thought I was being ridiculous.

"I never burn anything," I had told her, and I had meant it, and I had believed it.

But I had burned everything. Every single thing that had ever mattered to me had gone up in flames, and now here I was, sitting in the ashes wondering why I was still breathing.

The neon sign outside my window flickered, casting red light across my hands, and for one heartbeat it looked like candlelight dancing across wine glasses. Our anniversary dinner. Helen in that blue dress she knew I loved, the one that made her eyes look even darker than they already were. She was reaching across the table to take my hand, looking at me like I was something worth looking at.

I missed her so much that it felt like a physical wound, like someone had carved out a piece of my chest and left the hole open to rot.

I picked up the first pill.

My hands weren't shaking. I had expected them to shake, had prepared myself for that final tremor of survival instinct, but there was nothing. Just the calm, hollow emptiness that had taken up residence inside me months ago and refused to leave.

This was it, then. This was how the story of Marcus West ended—not with any kind of grand finale, but with a man in a condemned hotel room swallowing pills one by one until the world finally went quiet. I brought the bottle to my lips and thought about how easy it would be to just let go.

And then someone started pounding on my door.

The sound was so sudden and so violent that I nearly dropped the bottle. Pills scattered across the bedsheet as I jerked backward, my heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to escape without me.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Not a police knock. Police had a rhythm, a procedure—three knocks, then an announcement. This wasn't that.

Not a debt collector either. Those people knocked like they were bored, like hassling deadbeats was just another Tuesday. This was something else entirely.

This was desperate. 

"Marcus!" A voice, muffled through the door but familiar in a way I couldn't quite place. "Marcus, open up! Please!"

I didn't move. My legs felt like they were made of concrete, my brain still struggling to shift gears from the quiet acceptance of death to whatever the hell was happening now.

The pounding came again, harder.

"Marcus!" The voice cracked on my name. "They're going to kill me!"

That was what broke through.

I was on my feet and across the room before I even realized I had decided to move, three steps to the door, hand on the lock. My fingers fumbled with the chain for a second before I managed to slide it free. I pulled the door open and found myself staring at Jerome Washington.

Jerome. My former sous chef. The man who had worked beside me at Vesper for four years, who had disappeared eight months ago without a word or a warning or even a goodbye. He was swaying on his feet, blood running down the side of his face from a wound on his head, his shirt stained dark with more blood I couldn't see the source of. He was clutching something inside his jacket like his life depended on keeping it safe.

"Jerome? What the hell—"

He stumbled forward and his legs gave out completely. I caught him before he could hit the floor, dragging him inside and kicking the door shut behind us. He was heavier than I remembered, or maybe I was weaker than I used to be. Probably both.

"What happened to you?" I lowered him to the ground as gently as I could, checking for a pulse. Still there, weak but steady. Thank God. "Where have you been? You just vanished—"

His hand found my arm, fingers digging in with surprising strength for someone who looked ready to pass out. Blood smeared across my sleeve as he pulled himself closer, breath coming in short, painful gasps.

"They did it to you too," he gasped, each word clearly costing him effort to get out. "Everything that happened. Vesper. The bankruptcy. All of it. They did it to you."

"What are you talking about? Jerome, you're not making sense. Who did what?"

He reached into his jacket with trembling fingers and pulled out something small—black plastic, no bigger than my thumb. He pressed it into my palm and looked up at me with eyes that were starting to lose focus.

"Here's proof."

Then his eyes rolled back and he went limp in my arms.

I lowered his head gently to the floor and just sat there, staring at the USB drive in Jerome's blood-stained hand.

Outside, I could hear sirens wailing in the distance.