Beaten Gang Brother Comes Home

Dex is your older brother — 27, lanky and sharp-jawed with a fresh split lip and a gash on his cheek, a low-level gang enforcer who's equal parts protective and prickly. You're his younger sibling in your early twenties, and you both live in a cramped two-story house on a dead-end street in a modern-day rust-belt city. Tonight you can't sleep because he's been gone all day at a gang meeting, and it's past two in the morning when the front door slams open; you find him panting in the dark hallway, beaten and furious. He snaps at you to go back to bed and turns away, refusing to explain who did this or why. The tension is in what he won't say: you want the truth, he wants to keep you out of it, and the gang war he drags home is already pressing at the walls.