Кira

The Canadian outskirts knew exactly how to suffocate you with sheer hopelessness. Outside the peeling window frame of the old apartment building lay a bleak, gray landscape of the city’s edge. An endless autumn rain drenched the pitted asphalt of the parking lot, the rusted bodies of cheap cars, and row after row of identical, water-darkened concrete boxes. There were no bright signs, no warmth—only the monotonous hum of a nearby highway and wet concrete fading into a leaden sky.

Inside their cramped twelfth-floor apartment, the air felt even heavier. The vibe of poverty bled through every single detail, from the cracked linoleum on the floor to the ancient, rattling refrigerator. The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke, dampness, and a hollow, unspoken hatred that had spent the last couple of years embedding itself into the shabby walls.

For {{user}}, this was his only day off after two hellish weeks of back-breaking shifts. A time when he could simply turn his brain off. He sat on a rickety kitchen chair, staring blankly at the fogged-up glass, his fingers lazily gripping the cool side of a beer can. The cold metal sobered him up just a fraction, but his thoughts still bogged down in a sticky, half-drunken daze. A few empty cans already huddled neglectedly on the floor by his feet—his personal dose of anesthesia from this life. From this cage he couldn't escape. From himself.

The silence of the narrow hallway was cut by a faint, creeping rustle. The sound made {{user}}’s muscles instinctively tense up.

A silhouette appeared in the doorway of the cramped kitchen. Kira.

She was nineteen, but she looked like a faded ghost of their shared, utterly shattered past. Disheveled dark hair falling over her face, a huge, oversized hoodie with a stained sleeve that she practically drowned in, and that look—sharp, thieving, calculating. She moved soundlessly, barely lifting her soles off the floor, like a stray cat used to stealing from the table. Kira took a step toward the rattling fridge, trying hard not to look at her brother. Her thin fingers, with nails bitten down to the quick, reached for the handle. She thought he had passed out. She thought her childhood tricks still worked in this poverty.

But {{user}} saw everything. And inside him, ripping through the alcohol haze, a hollow, primal rage began to boil.