Chapter 2

two

I’maware of two things as I flip through the portfolio that night, beer in hand, my father’s empty Virginia farmhouse creaking and sighing around me.

The first is that this job should be everything I hate. I hate lying, thieving, manipulation—and Mark doesn’t even do that for our country anymore; he does it for himself. That’s greed; that’s selfishness. And that’s even on top of how Mark makes a living, which is with his kingdom of vice.

I flip through page after page of acts of sex and pain and humiliation, having to Google half the things I come across, even with the helpful descriptions printed after each term. I know nothing about this world; I barely know anything about sex that hasn’t come from porn. Porn that apparently was limited in scope if I’m having to research this much.

I’m a walking punch line—a twenty-nine-year-old combat veteran who’s also a virgin. And I’m going to shadow someone who’s made a living out of screwing?

But the second thing is wholly and incontrovertibly this: I can’t live another day as Tristan Thomas, unemployed former soldier.

I can’t stay in my father’s farmhouse, even though I know he’d let me, since he’s moved in with Blanche in the city. I can’t spend my hours trying to read, trying to watch TV, driving around the not-quite-suburban, not-quite-country roads instead. Running until my lungs feel like they’re made of broken glass. Jerking off with my teeth clenched together as if I’m still afraid of waking my teammates.

I have to do something.

Or rather—God help the soldier left in me—someone has to tell me to do something.

It only takes me until midnight to email and accept the job. I don’t bother countering the salary or benefits—after the army, they both look embarrassingly good. Probably to make up for the meager time off, but I don’t care. I don’t want time off.

After I send the email, I take a shower and go to bed in my teenage bedroom, which still smells faintly of cheap cologne and deflated basketballs. I fall asleep to a cold wind blowing against the old house, dreaming instead of wind against new tents. Of a long convoy, a coffee-stained paper map. Bullets spraying through ferns and, just once, through a carotid artery.

Dream me already knows they’ll write up a citation for that bullet, nominate me for something. They’ll say I’m a hero; they’ll talk about courage and valor like they’re lucid, uncomplicated things.

But dream me knows it’ll be a lie, just as I know it’s a lie every moment that I’m awake.

There’s nothing simple about killing. Not ever, but especially when they want to give you a medal for killing your best friend.

* * *

The next Monday,I’m back at Lyonesse. Ms. Lim, wearing no collar this time but instead a set of keys at her narrow waist, takes me behind the desk to a hallway. To my validation, it does indeed lead to a security room, albeit one much bigger than I imagined.

She leaves me with a giant of a man named Goran, who has deep gold-tan skin, black hair buzzed short, and a tattoo of an insignia featuring a grim reaper on the back of his neck, peeking above the collar of his suit jacket. Before he turns to greet me, I catch the lettering around the edges of the insignia—First Battalion, Ninth Marines. The Walking Dead.

“Hello, new guy,” he says cheerfully. He’s older than me by a couple of decades, with plenty of lines around his eyes and a starburst scar on the side of his mouth. He has a broad face with a lantern jaw, and a twinkling gaze. He looks like the kind of guy whose laughter fills a bar—also the kind of guy a bartender looks to for help with an unruly patron. But I don’t miss the quick, efficient flick of that same twinkling gaze over the wall of screens in front of him. A former 1/9 like him would be more than a gentle giant. And Mark doesn’t strike me as the kind of employer to hire someone for their genial personality alone.

“I’m Tristan Thomas, sir,” I say, taking his offered hand and then sitting in the chair next to him. “Ms. Lim said you’d be showing me around today?”

“Kink club orientation, right, right,” Goran says, reaching for a sheaf of papers. “We have a bit of an unusual situation with your position.”

“A bit of one?” I ask as I accept the papers and then a pen. I use the long desk in front of the security screens to start flipping through everything. My employment contract. Another NDA. A direct deposit form. “Everything in this place is unusual.”

Goran laughs, and I’m right, it’s a sound that fills a room. It almost makes me smile, it’s that nice to hear. “Damn right it is, but you’ll like it. You just got back from Carpathia, right? Well, the food is better, and the view too. Plus you’ll never meet a more unhinged son of a bitch than Mark Trevena—never a boring day with him around.”

“Right,” I say. I start signing my way through the papers without giving them more than a cursory once-over. Like I said, the military has ruined me for signing my life away.

“But your position is unusual even for here. See, I’m the head of Lyonesse’s security, but as his personal bodyguard, you’ll report to Mr. Trevena directly. Or put another way, he’s your boss but come to me with all the boring shit, and I’ll handle it.”

“Got it. Are there other people on Lyonesse’s security team?”

Goran leans back in his chair. “There are ten of us—eleven including you—and then an outside team we contract with for larger events. Since Mr. Trevena’s primary residence is here, the team is available for your relief shifts whenever Mr. Trevena is in DC. But when he travels, you’ll be on call twenty-four-seven. All done already? You don’t waste too much time reading the fine print, huh?”

I slide the papers his way, pen placed neatly on top. “Nothing’s worse than where I’ve been.” I mean it in a gallows humor sort of way, like ha-ha, isn’t it funny that I spent the last eight years of my life getting yelled at, shot at, getting scared and scorned and was somehow still lonely even around sixty other people? but Goran’s face goes still when I say it.

“Yeah,” he says, and something in his voice makes me wonder if he was in Carpathia back when President Colchester was there, when the war was still a war and not a conflict.

The Walking Dead re-earned their nickname several times over in Carpathia—highest killed-in-action ratio of any Marine battalion. And for a minute, the difference between Marine and soldier disappears, and we’re just two men hiding scars on the insides of our thoughts, scars in the shape of mountains and forests and too-empty villages.

“Yeah,” he says again, heavily, and then stands. “Come on. We’ll find someone to man the cameras, and then I’ll take you for the nickel tour before I give you to the boss.”

* * *

I’m given a laptop,earpiece, gun, and harness. Then I meet two of the other security team members and get acquainted with the shift rotations—skeleton crew during the day, with increasing shift coverage toward the evening. The club is busiest from dinner till two or three in the morning; Fridays and Saturdays are the busiest of them all, with members drinking, fucking, and making use of private rooms until dawn. I get the impression that Goran runs an amiable but tight ship, and the two team members I meet seem to respect him immensely.

On an upper floor, we stop by some glass-walled offices and meet the club’s manager, Dinah—a slender woman with dark, jewel-toned skin, undercut purple curls, and a cell phone that won’t stop chiming with club business as we make introductions—and Sedge, a fair and freckled young man with nearly colorless eyes, who’s Mark’s administrative assistant. We also meet a pale woman with a wary expression and dark hair in waves over her shoulders. Andrea, the club’s treasurer. I don’t know if she is the treasurer of the club’s money or of its hoard of information. I wonder if she helps Mark with his sometimes-blackmail.

She doesn’t seem to like me.

But Goran’s cheerfulness bulldozes through any awkward moments, and then we’re touring the building: the large open hall in the center, ringed with balconies and with a stage at the front; the private rooms, furnished in the most luxurious depravity and outfitted with panic buttons and cameras for the safety of guests and club employees alike; the decadent, speakeasy-style bar on the second-highest floor.

“They’ll tell you in some corporate bullshit seminar that you can only have one priority,” Goran says as we take the elevators down past the ground floor and to a subfloor. “But you’re better than that, so I can tell you that we have two priorities here at Lyonesse. The first is to keep everyone here safe—guests and employees. The second is to keep this floor locked down at all fucking costs.”

The elevator doors open not to a dank concrete corridor but to a spacious vestibule lit with blue lights. Glass double doors are opposite our elevator, and beyond them, I see a second set. I also see a thumbprint scanner, a retina scanner, and a surfeit of cameras.

I don’t need Goran to tell me what’s down here. “The information.”

“Membership dues,” Goran says, sounding pleased at my deduction. “Servers are down here. All sorts of fancy stuff to keep them cool and air-gapped and whatever else. We don’t need to know all the tech-y shit, but it’s our job to make sure no one comes down here except Mr. Trevena, Dinah, and Andrea. It’s rigged up pretty tight against someone trying to get something, but it’s not foolproof.”

“Rigged up?”

Goran nods at the locks. “Any attempt to open the doors without a valid thumb and retina scan will trigger an alarm. The floor around the servers is built with weight sensors—if there’s any kind of unauthorized approach to the machines, the room responds by sealing itself off with aluminum shutters, and the servers will power down. Nothing online and no way out until we let you out.”

“And that’s not foolproof?”

He scratches his neck. “There’s a lot of machinery to shut down, and it has to go offline in the right way so nothing is corrupted, or something—I don’t know. The upshot is that someone conceivably could have nearly a full minute to connect with the servers and try to get something.”

“But then they’d still be locked in the room.”

“Yeah. Unless they rolled out from under the doors before they came all the way down—but you have less than sixty seconds from triggering the sensor to the room being sealed off. So it’s unlikely someone could get what they wanted and then make it back out in time, but unlikely isn’t impossible, and we’d do well not to forget that.”

I look through the two sets of doors again, able to make out a larger room beyond, lit with more blue light. I wonder what kind of information people surrender when they come—and if it’s worth it, knowing someone has the potential to blackmail you at a moment’s notice.

As if sensing where my thoughts are, Goran says, “It doesn’t have to be information about yourself, you know.”

I glance back at him, confused. “What else would people give, sir?”

“Oh, my sweet army puppy,” Goran laughs. “Information about other people, of course. Or information they’ve gotten from whatever jobs or positions they have. We have a Moldovan diplomat here, for example—he’s not telling Mr. Trevena about the time he cheated on his college girlfriend. He’s telling Mr. Trevena about arms deals. New mercenary groups. Cabinet members who sympathize with the continuing rebellion in Carpathia. That sort of thing.”

I look back at the server room with a new respect?.?.?.?and a new wariness. When Mark and I spoke of blackmail the other day, I suppose I had been thinking of all the shallow and tawdry peccadilloes that people would be desperate to buy silence for. Not state secrets. Not whispers of martial movements, governmental shifts, and all the other tesserae that come together to form a mosaic of a world still dragging itself back from the edge of war.

“Now,” Goran says, shepherding me back to the elevator. “Let’s see your new digs.”

Part of my employment offer was to live here at the club, and it’s something I’ve accepted, since commuting in from the farmhouse would be a pain in the ass, and this place comes rent free. Mark is paying me enough that I could afford a decent apartment nearby, but it seems like a waste to pay for a home I’ll barely be in.

And when I see my apartment on the third floor, I know I’ve made the right decision. It’s in the prow of the building like his office above me, with glass walls overlooking the river, a small but expensive kitchen, and equally expensive furnishings. I walk over to one of the glass walls while Goran explains parking and a few other details to me. The prow doesn’t face the city, but rather the Potomac itself, pointed like a ship about to sail to sea. For a minute, I imagine it is, that the whole building is moving to the open ocean, spreading massive sails above it.

“?.?.?.?and he’ll be expecting you in his office within the hour. My guess is that he’ll go over his rules and requirements and what he’ll need from you then.”

I nod, my eyes still on the place where river meets sky, thinking of Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic beyond.

“?.?.?.?and you should know that no one will think any differently of you. You can’t work at a place like this and not have it change the way you think about things, and if any one of us were in your shoes, we would probably end up doing it too. Mark has that way about him, and this place has a way about it too. Gets into your bones. Makes you want things you thought you would never.” A pause and then a cheerful: “And his last bodyguard never seemed anything but over the moon with the arrangement.”

I turn away from the view and stare at the former Marine, utterly lost. “Pardon, sir?”

Goran’s eyebrows lift and then his mouth slowly closes as his hands come up. He’s the picture of someone saying oh shit, never mind. “You know what, I shouldn’t have said anything,” he says, seeming to fumble a little. “It’s nothing. You’ll hash all that out, I’m sure. Or not. Either way, none of my business.”

I open my mouth to tell him to stop, to explain himself, but he’s already beating a hasty goodbye, surprisingly brisk for such a large man.

Mark has that way about him.

Makes you want things you thought you would never.

Maybe Goran just means working here in general. Here, where the mundane is made of blindfolds and ropes and the extraordinary is kept locked away below the waterline, trapped behind two sets of glass doors.

With a final look around my new home, I leave to find Mark upstairs and start my new life as his shadow.