Watchman's Harem: 3 servers and 1 bar owner (Sandy Laine Serialized Novels) by Sandy Laine

Author:Sandy Laine [Laine, Sandy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: PMI
Published: 2024-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

I stood in the middle of my secret studio atop my old red brick building and slowly, feet shuffling, turned around and around. In every direction, I saw my paintings slashed open and scattered across the floor. They were cut violently. They were torn angrily. Their stretchers were busted. It was a rampage, not a methodical attack — a rage, not a message.

But I wasn’t worried about the paintings. I didn’t have reason to think any more highly of them than if they were cartoon cutouts from the funny pages I’d glued all over my walls up there. Painting was only a way to momentarily turn the voices off. It was a method that worked better than drinking, and with less hangover, too — that was all it had ever been.

The only overriding thought I had, scanning the horizon of carnage up there, was that I had tried so hard to keep Christina, Tara, and Ariel away from the world I grew up in, away from the vitriol and the bullying, the petty and the not-so-petty crime, and the ugliness of the pointless violence and scatter-brained rage, but I failed. After relenting to their pressure and letting them move into the empty units below, someone with extreme ill-intent got into the building and up into the secret space above their units where they violated that inner sanctum — and I had no idea it was happening or who it was. I would have been equally unable to protect the girls if it was them who were the object of the invader, it shook me to realize. I had exposed them to that blind raging force and I left them unprotected from it. I had allowed them into the darkness that was my life, and I promptly let them down as the first challenge came along.

No matter how hard we try to hermetically seal off the portals between the different worlds we move through, those worlds seem always to find a way to leak through into each other somewhere and somehow. My brothers and dad might be ineffectual and paranoid criminal losers, but that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of bringing irrational levels of violence to situations that even mildly frustrated them. I tried to keep my studio secret from everybody, but the girls discovered it. I tried to keep the girls secret from my brothers, but they discovered them. And I tried to keep both secret from . . . . from who? Who found out about the secret studio on top of the building?

It most likely was Joe and Don, but I had to make sure. If it wasn’t them, I had to prepare for a far greater threat to my girls than two dumb but brutal brothers. The girls worked in my bar on the ground floor, they now lived in the units above the bar in the building I owned, and they were creating a future business office on the top floor of the building where they also did their college course work.

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