My Karmic Debt System

Chapter 2: Blood and Data

Chapter 2: Blood and Data

The sirens faded into the distance, heading somewhere else, chasing someone else's emergency.

I didn't realize I had been holding my breath until my lungs started burning. I exhaled slowly and looked down at Jerome, still unconscious on my floor, still bleeding, still clutching the front of my shirt even though his grip had gone slack. The USB drive was warm in my palm, slick with his blood.

I needed to move. I needed to do something other than sit here like an idiot waiting for whoever had hurt Jerome to come knocking on my door next.

Pure instinct took over—the kind of instinct you develop from watching too many crime shows during months of isolation with nothing else to do. I locked the door first, sliding the chain back into place and throwing the deadbolt for good measure. Then I grabbed Jerome under the arms and dragged him away from the window, into the corner of the room where no one could see him from outside. He was heavier than he looked, or maybe I was just weaker than I used to be. My arms burned by the time I got him settled against the wall.

He was muttering something, eyes moving behind closed lids. Semiconscious. That was probably better than fully unconscious, right? I wasn't a doctor. I didn't know what I was doing. But I had to do something about all that blood.

I looked around the room for anything I could use, and my eyes landed on the small stack of towels sitting on top of my suitcase. Bar towels from Vesper. White cotton with the restaurant's logo embroidered in the corner. I had taken them home the night we closed for good, and I hadn't been able to throw them away. They were the last physical proof that my restaurant had ever existed.

Now I was using them to mop blood off my former sous chef's face.

I pressed the first towel against the wound on Jerome's temple, applying steady pressure the way you were supposed to. The bleeding was slowing down, which was good. Head wounds always bled like crazy—I remembered that from the time one of my line cooks had sliced his forehead open on a falling sheet pan. Looked like a murder scene, but he only needed six stitches.

Jerome's wound wasn't as deep as I had feared. The blood had made it look worse than it was. But he definitely had a concussion, maybe worse. His pupils were different sizes when I checked them, which I was pretty sure was a bad sign.

As I worked, something strange happened. My hands stopped shaking. My breathing evened out. The fog that had been living in my brain for months lifted just enough for me to think clearly.

I was back in the kitchen. Not literally, but the feeling was the same. A crisis had landed in front of me, and I was handling it. Triage. Assessment. Action. This was what I knew how to do. For five years, I had run a kitchen where a dozen things went wrong every single night, and I had fixed them all. Burns, cuts, equipment failures, staff meltdowns—I had handled all of it without breaking a sweat.

It felt almost good, having a problem I could physically address. Something real and immediate instead of the abstract weight of debt and failure that had been slowly crushing me for the past year.

Once I was satisfied that Jerome wasn't going to bleed out on my floor, I turned my attention to the USB drive. It was still in my hand, still warm, still covered in drying blood. I wiped it clean on my shirt and turned it over.

There was a label on the side, written in Jerome's handwriting. Messy, slanted letters that I recognized from years of reading his prep lists and inventory notes.

VESPER—THE TRUTH.

My hands started shaking again.

I crossed the room to where my laptop sat on the nightstand, its battery icon blinking red in the corner of the screen. Dying, like everything else in my life. But it had enough power left for this. It had to.

I plugged in the USB drive and waited.

The files loaded slowly, the little spinning wheel on the screen taunting me with each rotation. Finally, a window popped up showing the drive's contents. Folders and folders of them. Spreadsheets. Emails. Photographs. PDFs of legal documents. Hundreds of files, maybe thousands, all organized with the same meticulous attention to detail that Jerome had always brought to his mise en place.

I clicked on the first folder and started reading. The screen was dim and the text was small, but I couldn't look away. Each document pulled me deeper into a nightmare I hadn't known existed.

By the time I finished the third document, my entire understanding of my life had turned inside out.

The files showed a systematic scheme targeting small businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods. Not random bad luck. Not market forces. Not my own failure as a businessman. A deliberate, coordinated attack designed to destroy restaurants like mine so that the buildings they occupied could be bought for pennies on the dollar.

Vesper hadn't been struggling because I made bad decisions. Vesper had been sabotaged.

The supplier contracts I thought I had negotiated fairly were rigged with hidden clauses that triggered massive penalties the moment I missed a single payment. The building inspection that had found all those code violations—the one that had cost me fifty thousand dollars I didn't have—was falsified. The inspector's name was in the files, along with records of payments he had received from a shell company. Even my business loan had hidden terms buried in the fine print, terms that made default inevitable no matter how well the restaurant performed.

I had been set up from the very beginning.

And the names attached to this scheme made my blood run cold. David Lowell, my business partner. The man who had convinced me to take out that loan, who had introduced me to our suppliers, who had recommended the building inspector. Victoria Harrington, my investor. The woman who had written the check that got Vesper off the ground, who had smiled and told me she believed in my vision.

There were other names too, people I didn't recognize. Lawyers and accountants and real estate developers. A whole network of people who had worked together to destroy my life.

But then I saw a name that stopped my heart completely. A name that made everything else in those files seem trivial by comparison.

Helen Chen-West.

My wife. My dead wife. The woman I had been ready to die for less than an hour ago.

Her name wasn't listed as a victim. It was listed as a participant.

I opened the folder with her name on it and found emails. Dozens of them. Correspondence between Helen and someone named T. Brennan, discussing me. Discussing my restaurant. Discussing my vulnerabilities, my weaknesses, the pressure points that could be used to manipulate me.

The dates on the emails went back two years before Helen got sick. Two full years. Back when everything between us had seemed fine. Back when I thought we were happy, building a life together, dreaming about the future.

She had been reporting on me the entire time.

I read email after email, each one worse than the last. Helen describing my stress levels. Helen noting which suppliers I trusted most. Helen confirming that I had signed documents without reading the fine print, just like they had predicted I would.

My vision blurred. I couldn't tell if it was tears or something else entirely. The room felt like it was spinning, the walls closing in, the floor dropping out from under me.

I looked at Jerome, still unconscious in the corner of the room. Still breathing. Still alive, unlike the woman who had apparently been lying to me for our entire marriage.

The laptop screen glowed in the darkness, Helen's name burning into my retinas like a brand.

I had been ready to kill myself over her. I had been counting pills, measuring out the exact dose that would let me join her wherever she had gone. I had thought losing her was the worst thing that could ever happen to me.

But this was worse. This was so much worse.

Because the Helen I had loved, the Helen I had mourned, the Helen I had been willing to die for—that woman had never existed. She was a fiction. A performance. A carefully constructed lie designed to get close to me for reasons I didn't understand.

I closed the laptop slowly and sat in the darkness, the weight of everything I had just learned pressing down on my chest until I could barely breathe.

"Who the fuck was my wife?"

The words came out as a whisper, swallowed by the silence of the empty room.