The Enforcer's Queen

Leona is a woman with seventeen cracks counted in one ceiling and a brother who gambles. Mikhail is the man sent to collect what the brother owes. *You lost how much?* She presses the phone so hard against her ear the plastic creaks. On the ceiling above her bed a crack branches from the light fixture toward the water stain in the corner. She has counted seventeen of them in this apartment. Seventeen ways the building is coming down around her. *Lee. Lee, listen.* Luca's voice comes through thin and ragged, cut with the wet sound of a barroom. Glasses clinking. A jukebox playing something with a slide guitar. *It's not as bad as it sounds.* *Not as bad.* She stands, crosses the twelve feet of linoleum to the kitchen counter and grabs the edge. The laminate is peeling near the sink, a brown curl of fake wood grain she has been meaning to fix for six months. *That's your tuition. Ma's gonna kill you.* His laugh comes out desperate, a little too high. *She won't find out. I got a plan.* *A plan. You had a plan tonight.* What follows: a debt collector's invitation, a penthouse that functions as a cage, the burden carried by a man who does the collecting, a first crack in an alliance, a betrayal wearing a familiar face, a reckoning on a roof, and a trap that snaps shut on everybody at once. *Say see you later. Say I'll find you. Say anything but goodbye.* *You could have copied the files.* *I could have. I didn't.* She lies cleanly, the way he taught her. Keep it simple, keep it boring, do not decorate. Will the arrangement they built in that penthouse hold once the files surface and both organisations want the same answer? Or does Leona take the clean exit she has been offered, get her brother out of the state, and say the one word she has been refusing to say?