Grease was the first thing I remember about that night.

Not rain. Not headlights. Not the old man’s trembling hands wrapped around a black leather loafer. Grease. It lived in the back of my throat after twelve hours at The Greasy Spoon, soaked into my hair, hid under my fingernails, and clung to the cheap polyester uniform I wore until I could not tell where the diner ended and I began. It was fryer oil, hamburger fat, wet cardboard, burnt coffee, and the particular sour smell of men who thought a two-dollar tip entitled them to touch a waitress’s waist while she squeezed between tables.

“You’re moving like a corpse, Wells,” Stan called from the pass-through window as I stacked plates at 11:34 p.m. “Table Four has been waiting for their check for three minutes. You want to live here?”

I wanted to throw the ketchup bottle at his head.

Instead, I took the check, smiled until my jaw hurt, and walked to Table Four with the careful steps of someone whose feet had stopped belonging to her around hour nine.

“Here you go, sir. Whenever you’re ready.”

The man did not look up from his phone. He made a little flicking motion with two fingers, dismissing me the way people dismiss steam from a cup.

That was my whole life then. Small humiliations wrapped in routine. A manager who spoke to me like I had borrowed my own breath. Customers who saw the apron and stopped seeing the person beneath it. Rent two months behind. An online art-history degree paid for in impossible pieces. A studio apartment with a radiator that banged all winter like someone trapped in the walls. A sketchbook under my mattress because beauty felt too private to leave where the landlord might see it during an inspection.

My name was Chloe Wells. I was twenty-three years old, though exhaustion had been trying to make me thirty for years.

At 11:42, I pushed through the diner’s heavy glass door, and Chicago hit me like it had been waiting outside to finish what the shift started.

The wind came sideways, sharp with lake cold. Rain turned the sidewalks silver-black, streetlights trembling in every puddle. Sirens wailed somewhere east, blended with horns, bus brakes, and the low industrial groan of a city that never slept because too many people could not afford to stop working.

I pulled my thin thrift-store coat tighter around myself and checked my watch.

The last express bus to the South Side left in eight minutes.

If I missed it, I would have to wait for the local, which meant forty extra minutes standing in the dark beside a bus shelter with a cracked panel and a man who sometimes slept inside it and sometimes screamed at people who stepped too close.

So I walked fast.

I knew the route by memory. Avoid the puddle outside the closed bakery because it hid a hole deep enough to swallow a shoe. Cross before the newsstand because the drain there had been clogged since spring. Keep your keys between your fingers near the alley behind the pawnshop. Do not make eye contact with men who say, “Smile, red.” Do not slow down. Do not help strangers. Do not volunteer for trouble.

Then I saw him.

At first, he looked like a mannequin dropped in the intersection by some drunk window designer. Dark suit, silver hair plastered to his skull, one shoe missing, rain streaming down his face. He stood against the light in the middle of the crosswalk, staring up at the sky as if he expected it to answer.

A taxi swerved around him and laid on the horn.

The man did not move.

“Don’t,” I whispered to myself. “Do not do it, Chloe.”

The bus stop was two blocks ahead. I could see the express bus turning the corner, headlights glowing through the rain.

The old man raised the shoe to his ear.

“Hello?” he said into the heel. “Martha? The line is bad. I can’t hear you, my love.”

The bus was coming.

So was a delivery truck.

I ran toward the old man.

I grabbed his arm right as the truck roared past, its horn blasting a wall of sound that shook my teeth. I pulled him onto the curb, my shoes soaking through completely as we hit the sidewalk.

“Sir! Are you okay?” I gasped, holding his shoulders.

The old man looked at me, his eyes clouded with confusion and deep, forgotten grief. “Martha?” he murmured, holding out the rain-soaked shoe. “She said she was coming home.”

I looked down the street. The express bus pulled away from the curb, its red taillights fading into the misty rain. I had missed it.

Before I could process the cold realization of my forty-minute wait in the freezing dark, three pitch-black SUVs tore around the corner, tires screeching against wet pavement. They blocked the entire intersection.

Doors slammed open simultaneously. Six men in tailored dark coats stepped out into the rain, hands tucked dangerously close to their chest holsters.

And then he stepped out of the lead vehicle.

He moved with an absolute, terrifying stillness that commanded the storm. Tall, broad-shouldered, with sharp dark eyes and a jawline set in stone, he carried an air of violence wrapped in extreme expensive luxury.

“Dad!” the man called out, his voice cutting through the sound of rain like a razor.

The old man blinked. “Dante?”