Chapter 4 - Beyond The Employee Exit
The alley behind the restaurant smelled of damp brick, stale cardboard from the produce delivery boxes, and the faint, sweet exhaust of idling delivery vans. The metal fire escape stairs rose up into the dark shadows of the brick wall, casting jagged geometric lines across the pavement where the single amber security bulb flickered above the heavy steel door.
I pushed the door open with my shoulder, my canvas backpack slung over one arm, wearing my gray zip-up hoodie over my work shirt. The shift had ended ten minutes ago, but my legs felt heavy, weighed down by the invisible tension of the last four hours on the floor.
He was leaning against the fender of a black sedan parked by the brick wall, his coat collar turned up against the damp night air. The car blended into the shadows, sleek and anonymous, but there was no mistaking the silhouette. Salvatore pushed off the metal frame as the door clicked shut behind me, his movements deliberate and unhurried.
I stopped by the edge of the concrete step, my fingers tightening on the strap of my bag. "If you left something inside, Marcus is still clearing the bar, but the kitchen's closed."
"I didn't leave anything inside," Salvatore said, his breath pluming slightly in the cool night air. He closed the distance between us slowly, stopping a few feet away so he remained outside my immediate personal space, respecting an unwritten boundary. "I wanted to see if you always look like you're carrying the weight of the building when you punch out."
"It's been a long week," I said, though I didn't step back. The streetlamp at the end of the alley cast a long shadow between us. "And people usually don't wait by the garbage bins for their servers."
"I don't usually wait," he replied, a faint, dry shadow of a smile touching the corner of his mouth—just enough to soften the hard line of his jaw and draw attention briefly to the scar near his eye. "You're an exception to several routines, Tessa."
The way he said my name—using it for the first time without the formal padding of a restaurant title—made the hair on my arms prickle. It didn't sound like a customer trying to charm a waitress. It sounded like someone keeping count of details.
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"I have to catch the cross-town bus," I said, nodding toward the avenue where the yellow lights of traffic smeared against the wet asphalt.
"Let me drive you," he said, not as an order, but as a plain statement of fact, his hands resting easily in the pockets of his dark coat.
