Gio

“N-no.” my voice came out shaky, betraying me.

“Yeah, didn’t think so.”

“Luke, did you find anything?” one of the other men yelled.

“Nothing.” The man I now know as Luke, replies.

“Me either.” Another one yells back.

All three of them gathered back in my living room. My place was far too small to fit the group of them. I felt claustrophobic as they backed me onto the sofa in the corner.

“So, we have a problem.” One of the men whose name I don't know starts. He’s too close to me. I can smell the onion on his breath and his knees bump against mine as he sits on the coffee table across from me.

Normally the muscle who comes chasing after my father’s debts aren’t this tough-looking, and Danny had never managed to rack up quite as much.

“Seems your brother owes my boss some money he can’t pay, and you have nothing worth a shit here.”

I flinch at the insult.

To me, this whole place is priceless, and now most of it is destroyed.

“So what are we going to do now?” he asks, leaning in closer. The pungent smell of cigarettes attacking my senses

“I, uh, a payment plan maybe?”

This makes all three of the men laugh.

“How long would it take you to pay off fifty g’s with your job, sweetie? Twenty, thirty years?” he asks menacingly.

“About that.” I sigh. He’s not wrong. I barely make enough money to pay bills and tuition, let alone put money towards Johnny’s debt.

“See why that’s not an option?” he scolds.

I nod.

He stands up, dusting off his jeans and looking down at me intensely. “You have forty-eight hours to figure this out, sweetie. Or your brother will be paying with his life. Got it?”

I swallow down the golf ball-sized lump in my throat.

“Got it.”

“Oh, shit.” Johnny’s words echo through the apartment.

My apartment, my sanctuary is disheveled. More than disheveled, its a disaster.

The space isn’t big, it’s a small one-bedroom apartment I rent

in a somewhat nice area of downtown Providence. The building is old, built in the 1920s, with an ancient elevator that has classic scissor gates. The apartment itself has cream-colored walls, crown molding, and hundred-year-old hardwood floors that have seen better days. The whole place is a little dated, but for the staggering price of one thousand a month, it was the best I could afford. Plus, I loved the charm of the old place.

The creamy walls were looking a little scuffed and dirty after my visitors and the only piece of furniture not overturned in the living room was my trusty old gray couch that my brother was now sitting on.

“Listen, Annie, they were just joking around, honestly it’s fine.” Johnny smiles crookedly from his spot on the couch. He has a wild head of ashy blonde hair, slightly darker than mine. He normally covers it with a baseball cap but today it’s an unruly mop on top of his head. He looks messy in ripped jeans and a baggy t-shirt.

Next to him, our cousin Rob is slumped back on the sofa. We’d been a trio since we could crawl, but of the three of us, Rob was most likely to get us into trouble. The two of them had been brought home in a police car more times than I could count.

Not that we had a good set of parents to correct us, anyway. I had spent most of my childhood taking care of the two of them. Rob’s mom was in and out of rehab, and like our mother his father took off when we were young.

The three of us were mostly left to our own devices.