Prologue
Breaker Heights.
Divided. A split, right down the damn middle.
A place where dreams are made, or come to die.
You're either from the northside or, with the southside.
You’re either eating caviar as a snack or wondering where your next meal will come from–sometimes finding it in the dumpster behind Benny’s Diner.
Breaker Heights is one town with two very different worlds. The most outspoken law… you can’t have both. Northsiders can come and go as they please. Daddy's money can buy you anything, even a way out. Normally, though, it provides luxurious vacations, mansions in the countryside, or worst case scenario, a get-away using a private jet.
Southsiders never leave, you don’t get to escape, there’s one way out and that’s usually in a body bag. For some shitty reason, here I sit. In a fancy limousine that’s bigger than the trailer I grew up in. Crossing the border from heaven to hell, and heading deep into the richlands of the northside. Fuck. Me.
I belong on this side of the tracks about as much as a hooker belongs in a church. There definitely isn’t going to be a welcoming committee waiting for me. The girls will be catty bitches, the guys will be degrading assholes. It’s just the way it goes. Southsiders don’t belong on the Northside. It’s a fact. They will think they can break me, send me back to pack my bags and return to the appropriate side of town. If anyone from this side of town even breathes in the direction of the Southside, we chew them up and spit them back out, so in a weird way, I get it. A known mediocre rivalry at its finest. Northsiders take it a little bit more seriously than we do. Of course, they have a reputation to uphold. Besides us Southsiders, the only other enemy they have is the bank telling them they have reached their max spending limit for the day.
Southside has bigger and more pressing issues than the rich kids living in their world of nirvana. Starvation is a normal occurrence for us. We have gang wars and drive-by shootings daily. Just surviving another day is defying the odds. Barely existing classified you as rich where I’m from, you’d be one of the lucky ones.
The Southside Scorpions, a pernicious gang, run our side of town. It's nearly impossible to stay alive without gang life. You either rely on them, bow to them, or become them. If you don’t, you end up dead. One way or another, you eventually end up with your hand in their bowl trying not to lose your fingers. Lucky for me, I grew up with the Scorpions without ever becoming one. I have their protection, I have their love and support without bearing their mark. I’m considered family. I’m a fucking anomaly.
Let these prestigious assholes come at me. Let them push every button I have, because at the end of the day, they might bark, but I bite–hard.
