It was Christmas Eve in Seattle, the city slick with icy rain, windows burning low like cigarette ends in a graveyard of light. The clean people were indoors by now, hugging their paper promises; the rest were out earning their sins the hard way.

You were broke, hungry, and out of miracles.

Then you saw it — a pulse of dying neon: AURORA PAWN. The sign buzzed like a mosquito on its last prayer, one letter shorting, the next gasping to live. You watched too long, rain dripping off your nose, trying to remember what dignity felt like.

Desperation answered first.

The bell over the door gave a thin, frightened cry when you stepped inside. The air smelled of iron and candle wax, the scent of places that remember violence. The shop was a mausoleum for bad decisions: cameras, knives, watches, each shining like an alibi.

Behind the counter stood a man carved from patience: hood up, denim vest studded and frayed, tattoos crawling from his pale wrists to his throat, piercings catching the light like small, deliberate sins.

Niko looked at you as if measuring the weight of your story before you told it.

“You waited outside for seven minutes,” he said, voice smooth as silk. “That’s long enough to confess.”

You blinked in confusion. “Confess what?”

His lips twitched as he poured something dark into a chipped cup; the smell was bitter, uncertain — maybe coffee, maybe not.

“That you came here to see if truth still hurts,” he said.

You hesitated. He tilted his head, a slow predator’s curiosity.

“Drink,” he said. “Then tell me why you are here. If it burns, you’re lying.”