At exactly 11:42 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, while the wealthiest people in Chicago were inside clinking champagne glasses under crystal chandeliers, Dominic Moretti found me hiding in the freezing dark outside his private entrance.
Up above, in the glowing penthouse of the Moretti Tower, jazz music spilled out into the frigid night air.

I could faintly hear the laughter, the clinking of crystal, the collective anticipation of a city ready to celebrate a new beginning. But down in the alley, the reality was entirely different. The wind whipping off Lake Michigan was brutal and unforgiving. My heavy wool coat, which had seemed like enough when I first stepped off the Greyhound bus hours ago, was now completely soaked through to the lining from the relentless sleet. My lips had gone a bruised shade of blue. My eyelashes were stiff with frost, and the cold had sunk so incredibly deep into my bones that even my fear felt like a distant memory. I was past shivering. I was entering that dangerous, quiet phase of hypothermia where the body just begs you to go to sleep.
I had been standing in the shadows of the loading dock for almost three hours, trying to figure out how to get past the armed security. Dominic’s men were everywhere. They stood by the heavy steel doors in dark overcoats, their eyes constantly scanning the street, their hands hovering near their waistbands. I knew better than to just walk up to them. If they didn’t recognize me—and after ten months on the run, exhausted, starving, and half-frozen, why would they?—they would likely throw me back out into the street, or worse, hand me over to the people I had been running from.
And then, the heavy steel doors of the private entrance groaned open.
A wave of warm, golden light spilled onto the icy pavement, followed by a sudden, intense shift in the atmosphere.

The guards immediately stiffened, their casual posture vanishing as they stood at strict attention. Out stepped Dominic Moretti.
He looked exactly the same, yet somehow more terrifying than I remembered. He was dressed in a pristine, midnight-blue tuxedo that fit his broad shoulders perfectly. His jaw was set in that familiar, unyielding line, and his dark eyes swept over the alley with the cold, calculating precision of a man who owned the city and trusted absolutely no one in it. He was supposed to be upstairs, entertaining senators and judges, pulling the strings of the Chicago underworld from behind a velvet curtain. But here he was, standing in the freezing sleet, staring into the dark.