Cressidia: A place where fortunes are fleeting and virtues are few. Vice runs rampant here; anything from murderers to illegal immigrants to speakeasies could be right under your nose. I love it. The thrill of the big city has never worn off for me, as it has for the natives.

I was born far away, in a nothing town I hated. My father disappeared when I was just shy of eight years old; my mother died a week before my thirteenth birthday. I was placed in a home for delinquent boys in a neighboring town, though I was certainly no delinquent at the time. In fact, I only became delinquent trying to escape the home.

I managed to get away when I was seventeen, and this was where I came. I haven’t left the city since that day eight years ago. Back then I lived in an alleyway off of Grant Street. Now I live in a luxurious flat on Brighton, bordering the park. I’ve enjoyed it, but I know it won’t last. I am a wanted man, after all.

I used to be employed by a certain powerful man; his name was Brutus Delgado. I was very well liked until I impregnated his daughter. My head is now worth roughly a dozen payoffs for the mothers of the governor’s illegitimate children, provided it’s been disconnected from the rest of my body.

Maia Delgado, the love of my life, died on the table in some backroom abortion clinic. I have heard that Brutus did not attend her funeral service, choosing instead to watch a dogfight in one of the pits hidden beneath the city streets. I visited her memorial statue in the cemetery; it is distressingly small. The gleaming marble angel only came up to my waist; it looks like the memorial of a child, not a woman.

I have avoided the cemetery, and the outside world, since the day after the memorial’s installment. This dead man’s luxury flat is a beautiful prison to me, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the city I can no longer enjoy. I was here for two weeks before I located the previous occupant’s secret liquor cabinet, and now his stores are nearly depleted.

The New Prohibition has made it difficult for even the rich to acquire alcohol, and when I saw these bottles, I knew where he had gotten them. The black and gold Delgado logo had been pasted over their foreign labels. I had started with the five dusty bottles of beer that had been chilled and warmed repeatedly, by the taste. The only thing I haven’t taken from the stash is a bottle of good champagne; it seems inappropriate.

Every bounty hunter in the city is looking for me, and there are a lot of bounty hunters in this place. Some work for the police, who work for Delgado, or one of his competitors, according to the district. Some work directly for Conroy or Franklin of Delgado. I used to pay these men for their prizes, and now I’ve become the prize.

I started in Delgado’s mob about a month after I took up residence in the alleyway. I was desperate for money, desperate for cigarettes, desperate for vodka, and he was always hiring. I started out as a page, carrying important papers or drugs or other contraband from one of Delgado’s mid-level agents to another. I built a reputation for speed and reliability: unlike the other pages, I never took more of the loot than was due, and never stopped mid-journey to smoke, drink or snort it.

Then I became a go-between for Delgado’s people to interact with Conroy or Franklin’s people in lower transactions. We usually handled documents for our superiors to look over and sign or reject. Once they had been approved or dismissed, we returned them to the opposition’s go-betweens. Even mob bosses have legally binding contracts these days. This job required a talent for “handling people,” and every go-between carried a decent weapon in case their counterparts couldn’t be effectively handled.

I was a good go-between, and I managed to catch the attention of my superiors. I now got a big enough cut to afford a studio, and I spent as much time as possible improving my shot. By religiously working at it, I was eventually able to shoot a squirrel with an outdated revolver at two hundred yards.

I managed to force my way onto the bounty hunter circuit by going out and doing their job- while still doing mine as a go-between. The first bounty I brought in was a poor slob named Patrick Dunkirk; he was a mid-level “officer” in Conroy’s gang. Apparently he had made an offensive comment about Brutus at a charity event. His tongue was all I needed, and I was paid handsomely for it.

Sixty thousand dollars was the price of an insulting tongue to Brutus, and he was very pleased to give it to me. He keeps the tongue, and many other trophies, in a big aquarium tank in his office, behind his desk. Delivering the tongue was my first trip into the room, as a go-between I had only ever handed papers to an advisor at the door. Brutus’s big, gleaming desk was the biggest thing in the room; it was made of redwood. Redwood is extraordinarily rare nowadays; the last redwood tree was felled close to one hundred fifty years ago. It seemed incredibly extravagant to me the first time I saw it.

That meeting was also the first time I came face-to-face with Brutus Delgado. He looked simultaneously fragile and powerful. I could see every vein and artery through his translucent skin. The pulse of arteries in his temples and neck was visibly noticeable; his shirt even seemed to flutter with his every heartbeat. Yet there was a power in his face, in the set of his jaw and the gleam in his eye. The way he carried himself, and even held himself in the chair, made it clear that he was used to being obeyed. The gray streaks in his hair aged his face, but seemed to be the result of years of leadership and fighting to get what he wanted.

He took me under his wing, and I was officially a bounty hunter. That meant I was free to roam the city- the city of my dreams- without any tasks but to find people and kill them. I was quickly becoming good at this, so I would spend quite a lot of time taking in the pleasures Cressidia had to offer. I went to the speakeasy bars, both those under Delgado’s control and those of his competitors. I went to dogfights, to hidden casinos, to houses of ill repute. I was twenty years old, making money for very little effort and spending it freely for the first time in my life. I had Delgado’s permission to do as I liked, as long as the bodies kept rolling in.

After my biggest bounty ever, one of Delgado’s own men who was thought to be a double agent, Brutus granted me a higher position. I assumed the function of the man I had killed just hours before, running a few of the mob’s enterprises. There were two nightclubs and a bar under my complete control. All were illegal, but even the newly promoted chief of police went to them.

It was uncommon for a former bounty hunter to take such a position, and the men who had expected Brutus’s favor were extremely unhappy with my appointment. By “extremely unhappy,” I mean that they flew into a murderous rage. To guarantee my safety, Brutus lent me a bodyguard, leaving only two for his own protection. This was when I realized how favored I was in comparison to other midlevel agents. I could feel the envy of both my less-favored superiors and those who were newly inferior, and I have to admit I enjoyed it.

The properties I controlled did very well that fiscal year, though I can claim no genuine responsibility. A speakeasy will always do well, if black-market liquor imports are properly monopolized, and well-established nightclubs are not easy to drive into the ground if you simply don’t change anything but the music. I found myself promoted again, at the age of twenty-two. I now controlled all of Delgado’s nightclubs and bars, a cool billion dollars in my hands.

I only held that position for a few months before I was promoted again; it was a good thing, or I might have gone crazy trying to keep the businesses afloat. Suddenly, I was an advisor to the boss himself, on the same upper tier as Brutus’s brother Magnus. This was when I first met Maia.

Her mother had been killed years ago by a rival mob led by Harvey Gold. At the otherwise unremarkable social engagement where we first met, Maia told me the tale in a whisper to keep me from falling asleep. According to her account, her father stormed the headquarters of Gold’s mob, which was hidden in a gym, and had single-handedly killed every person in it, strangling Harvey Gold to death with his bare hands. Though such a story would be difficult to verify, I believed it completely, and still do.

For two years, Maia and I flirted relentlessly. She was young when I met her, so our flirtations were discreet. I think her father sensed our mutual attraction; he made sure that we were almost never left alone. She was nineteen and I was twenty-four the first time we slept together. I was paranoid that her father would have spies watching us. After that first time on the fire escape of my building, I began monitoring the activity in the vicinity my flat. I was never quite satisfied that we weren’t being spied on.

It was strange working so closely with Brutus, wondering how much he might know about my relationship with Maia. He trusted me with helping him run business ventures and managing our communications with the competition, but I was very certain he did not trust me with his one and only daughter. I obsessed over the thought of provoking his wrath, but she just brushed it off, convinced he would eventually loosen up.

She informed me of her pregnancy on my twenty-fifth birthday. I began to panic, and stayed awake well after she had left. Shock and fear kept me staring at the ceiling until dawn, when I gave up on sleep. I moved around that morning so distracted that I drank several cups of coffee, thinking I hadn’t had any yet and too numbed by lack of sleep to feel the beginnings of a caffeine buzz.

I went to Brutus’s office at seven, and sat in the uncomfortable chair facing the desk until he arrived two and a half hours later. His greeting was uncharacteristically cheerful, but I barely noticed. I was dreading this moment so intensely that I nearly passed out as he sat himself on the opposite side of the desk. Six cups of coffee and countless butterflies churned in my stomach, making me nauseous. Wiping the sweat from my palms onto my trouser legs, I asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

He stared at me for a moment before pressing the intercom button that connected him to the guards outside. I tensed in my seat, expecting to be dragged away or fired upon, but Brutus asked them to find Maia and deliver her to the office. We sat in silence for twenty minutes that seemed like twenty hours until she was led in by the guards. She gave me a reassuring look as she took her place in the remaining uncomfortable chair.

Brutus questioned her, then me for two hours before Maia confessed. As she spoke the words, I saw rage deepening in his face. I scrambled for the door as he drew a handgun from his desk. I vaguely remember Maia shrieking as the first bullet grazed my hip. I escaped the headquarters before a full-out chase began, and got into a cab. I shouted at the cabby to take me to my own address on instinct, it was a foolish choice. Luckily, I arrived there before any one else had.

I managed to collect a few essentials: A change of clothes to replace the ones shredded by the bullet and for bandages, and a few weapons. Then I crossed the park. I got into the first building I found with a sleeping doorman, went upstairs, and waited. I shot the first person I saw open an apartment door. The silencer kept it mercifully unnoticed. I dragged the unlucky bastard back into his luxury apartment, and I stuffed him into his own freezer. I’ve lived here ever since, hiding from Delgado’s men. I rarely leave.

Yesterday I did venture outside of the apartment late at night, though. I went to the twenty-four hour convenience store around the corner, and I was so tense and jumpy that I’m sure the cashier thought I was either crazy or going through serious withdrawal. I was back in the relative safety of the apartment in less than five minutes, but I was sure I had been spotted and tailed. I stayed up the entire night, sitting against the glass with espresso and a semiautomatic. The espressos still haven’t worn off.

I can’t wait for him to stop hating me, so I’ll either be killed or I’ll manage to escape… but my chances on that are pretty slim. I’m biding my time in this glass-walled prison, waiting to kill or be killed. My greatest fear is that Brutus Delgado himself will be the one who kills me… I have dreams about him strangling me like he did Harvey Gold. Maybe I could hide for another month, maybe a year, maybe twenty. But I’ll never really live so long as I’m segregated from the city like this. Cressidia, down there in the sun, that’s what I’ll really miss when I’m gone.

So ends my life.

Andrew X. Laurence