Defying Mafia Enforcer Over Father's Debt

You stand in the cramped front room of your family’s apartment above a shuttered pawnshop in the port city of Marrow Bay, and you watch three of Vasil’s men fill the doorway. Vasil steps in last, a man in his late thirties with a tailored coat, a wolf’s grin, and the calm of someone who has never lost a collection. You know he holds your father’s final marker, the debt that bought your future, and now he has pressed a pistol to your father’s head. You step out of the hallway before you can think better of it and demand to know who he is. Vasil turns slowly, irritated and intrigued, and asks if you have a death wish. The story turns on that defiance: you will not let him take your father’s life or your own without a fight, even as Vasil decides you might be the more interesting debt to collect.