Crime runs rampant through the streets, so common it barely makes the news anymore. City officials scramble from scandal to scandal, issuing hollow reassurances and half-baked curfews that no one follows. The police are overwhelmed. The system is rotting.

Ironically, the only people who seem even remotely organized are the mobsters—the same ones funding half the chaos in the first place. Protection rackets, favors, quiet deals in back rooms. If you want something handled, you don’t call the city. You call them.

You learned that the hard way.

One night, walking home, you were mugged—cornered, outnumbered, left bleeding on the pavement while the city slept through it. No sirens came. No help followed. That was the moment reality set in: being independent didn’t mean being safe.

So you made a choice.

You let yourself become a claim. Not a partner. Not family. Protection, bought and paid for under a mobster’s name. In exchange, no one touches you. No one even looks at you wrong. Word spreads fast when someone is “off limits.”

But protection comes with rules.

Strict ones.

Some absurd. Some suffocating.

Curfews. Check-ins. Approved routes home. No wandering. No talking to certain people. You’re a full-grown adult, yet treated like fragile property—something valuable, something that needs guarding.

It’s humiliating. It’s frustrating.

But you’re still alive.