Prologue Part 1

Rain was falling on the streets.

Dan stood at the window overlooking 29th Street, staring out in a daze. Nine years since he’d come to New York. He turned over something someone had once said to him, that you know you’ve become a true New Yorker when the sight of your old neighborhood changing fills you with a pang you can’t quite name, and let out a tired laugh.

The reason he’d ended up in New York was entirely his own immaturity: gang fights, a girlfriend’s pregnancy and her threats, driving without a license and rolling a car, assaulting a teacher.

His fists and his recklessness had driven him out of Korea. With no school willing to take him, his parents had no choice but to ship him across the ocean under the pretense of language study and studying abroad.

Coming to New York hadn’t changed Dan much.

If anything, he’d scaled up. He rode motorcycles the wrong way down public roads and swaggered through the Bronx and Harlem at dusk without a shred of wariness, chest puffed out like he owned the place.

He held guns he’d only ever seen in movies.

He did small jobs under the henchmen of henchmen of gang members and got paid for it. As a result, a long jagged scar ran down his left forearm and a faint burn mark settled into his right cheek, and in the end one of his knees started to give out whenever he had to move fast.

Even when the scar appeared on his forearm, Dan hadn’t changed. He kept chasing after impressive bikes and never quite registered that he had one foot planted in actual crime.

It wasn’t until the dark brown burn mark scarred his cheek that he finally started to think something had gone wrong. Once he made up his mind that this couldn’t go on, he began avoiding gang fights and slowly reined in the punches he’d been throwing whenever the mood struck. He stopped drinking and sleeping around without restraint.

Then a motorcycle accident left his knee in a state it would never fully recover from.

Only then did he think of the guy who’d rolled wrong in a brawl and lost the use of his ankle forever. He’d shown his face for a little while, then one day vanished without a word or a trace.

He also found himself remembering, fresh as ever, the girlfriend who’d been tangled up with him and a whole crowd of others they used to run with, who had told him she was pregnant by him. The girl whose face and name he’d long since forgotten had told him that if he didn’t take responsibility, she’d go around telling people the child was his.

The furious screaming of the teacher whose cheek he’d slapped back after the teacher slapped his, that cursing still rang clear in his ears. Looking back, all of it had been the desperate thrashing of people who’d been backed into a corner.

The day he hurt his knee, he realized that he too, if not right at the wall, was only one step removed from it.

Dan quit his one foot in crime immediately. He tried to live steadily, the way his mother had begged him through tears. The scar on his forearm and the burn mark on his cheek became the things that stopped him whenever his temper flared and he was about to act on instinct.

Staring out the window, Dan murmured to himself.

‘I’m being punished…’

Nine years into living in New York, he still slipped into Korea when he was alone or when he was in a hurry. His transformation was close enough to the word “reformed” that his mother and father had been moved to tears, but the world wasn’t so easy.

‘Still.’

Dan tried to trace back where it had all gone wrong. Was it leaving his glasses on the bathroom floor before getting in the shower?

On a normal morning he’d get up, check the time, and head straight to the bathroom, but that morning he’d put his glasses on the moment he woke up because he wanted to check the results of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the season finale of F1.

F1.

The FIA Formula One World Championship.

Formula 1. F1.

The race where the best drivers in the world competed.

There had been absolutely no reason to expect Ferrari, the team Dan loved more than anything, to win either the Constructors’ Championship or the Drivers’ Championship, but miracles could happen anywhere.

In F1 you never knew until the last lap was done, so he’d put his glasses on the moment he woke up and opened his browser. What was waiting for him was that infuriating man’s victory.

That was where the misfortune began. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Dejected, Dan walked to the bathroom still wearing his glasses. It was only a few steps but he couldn’t be bothered to go back, so he slipped them off and propped them against the wall outside the bathroom door. If he’d taken them in with him he’d have had to deal with the annoyance of wiping the fog off the lenses, but then he wouldn’t have stepped on them coming out of the shower either.

Fortunately he had a spare pair. The spare, a pair of thick black frames, didn’t match his prescription but was better than nothing. He put on those absurdly oversized glasses and went to work.

The blurry vision made him miss the first bus. He barely made out the second one and startled at how packed it was and missed that too. When he finally managed to board the third bus and sat down, something squished under him and when he checked he found someone had spilled an entire milkshake on the seat, soaking his pants through.

He managed to protect the bag with his documents but had to ride all the way to the office in an awkward half squat, neither able to sit nor stand properly. The entire commute, every person on the street got a good look at his backside.

He had a client meeting the moment he arrived, so there was no time to buy new pants or get his glasses fixed. He had no choice but to receive the clients with a massive wet stain near his rear end and those absurdly oversized thick black frames on his face.

The tragedy began when, mixed in among those clients, there turned out to be someone Dan had crossed back in the days of riding bikes and handling guns and knowing the henchmen of henchmen. A stocky man started trouble with him, bringing up the name of a shooting range Dan hadn’t set foot in since before university.

‘I’m such an idiot.’

Back at that shooting range, Dan used to swagger around on his massive bike and act like he was king of the place just because he was a good shot. He was average height with no real muscle to speak of and a face that was thoroughly ordinary, but back then nothing scared him. He was a genuine fool who never stopped to think about anything.

It was fine when the other man said he looked familiar, said his hair had changed, said he’d changed so much he almost didn’t recognize him, all presumably because Dan had bullied him back then.

It wasn’t the first time Dan had run into someone tied to a past he’d rather forget. Every time it happened, Dan had let most of the provocation slide without reacting. Sometimes he’d even apologized to people who’d picked fights with him, and sometimes he’d let people with bad memories of him get a few hits in.

‘Damn Yankees.’

The man at the client meeting tugged at Dan’s oversized glasses and snickered. Dan let it go, figuring it wasn’t worth it. He quietly swallowed the little jabs the man slipped into every other sentence.

As the meeting was wrapping up, the bastard, apparently eager to show off his pasty skin, smirked and launched into some spiel about Asians while grabbing and prodding at the forearm Dan had rolled his sleeve up over. It wasn’t like Dan had put it out there for someone like him to touch, but touching it wasn’t going to wear it away, and Dan had done wrong by him once, so he gritted his teeth and endured.

The problem came when they were saying goodbye. The man turned to leave, caught sight of Dan’s pants and cackled, pointing at him before grabbing the wet patch of fabric and shaking it around.

Dan didn’t hold back anymore. He flung the document file he was holding straight at that damned face, and the thin edge of the file happened to catch the man in the eye.

‘My luck is absolutely rotten.’

The man, his eye bloodshot with fury, did not let it go. Pressure came down on the company and Dan was let go on the spot. Technically it was a voluntary resignation, but the atmosphere made it clear that if he didn’t leave on his own terms, tomorrow wouldn’t be pretty.

The recession was in full swing. The company had seemed like it was looking for any excuse to cut someone and if anything appeared quietly pleased by the whole situation. Either way, Dan was swiftly shown the door.

But if losing his job had been all that happened, he wouldn’t be standing here now.

Whoever he’d clashed with apparently had some connection to the henchmen of henchmen of henchmen, because by the time Dan was heading home after clearing out his desk, the man was stationed in front of his building with a crew of heavies. The thought did cross his mind, he’d already made a mess of things so why not go ahead and really lay into someone, but he’d decided not to live that way anymore.

Dan quietly turned and slipped away.

He’d lost his job and had nowhere to be tomorrow, so he told himself to treat it as a little vacation and booked a loft room for $1,499 a night. With nothing to do come morning, he stood there staring endlessly at the rain coming down on the street below.

That was the moment someone knocked at the hotel door.

His vacant expression snapped to attention as his shoulders stiffened, the heavies from outside his building flashing through his mind.

‘I didn’t used to be like this… I really have changed a lot. I should’ve just gone at them earlier. Pathetic.’

Dan muttered, frowning. It might have looked cowardly, but what mattered was staying alive, nothing else. The swagger and the pride and the baseless arrogance of his past were long gone. He told himself there was no way they’d followed him all the way here, he’d already called to apologize after getting fired, but the unease wouldn’t shake loose.

“Who is it?”

He approached the door and asked quietly. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Silence from the other side. Instead of an answer, three knocks came back. He had a bad feeling.

Dan scratched his cheek and asked once more, carefully.

“Who is it?”

He told himself his voice had dropped because he was demoralized from losing his job. The other side of the door stayed quiet. Again, instead of an answer, three knocks came back.