Chapter One

It was the worst hangover Chloe Decker had ever experienced in the history of her existence. Worse than after the cast party for Hot Tub High School. Worse than after the Tribe Night she'd shared with Maze, Linda, and Ella—seventeen minutes of which Chloe still could not account for to this day. Hell, it was even worse than the morning after Dan text-dumped her and she woke up naked in Lucifer's bed.

Speaking of which, that was probably where she was right now. Only he could've convinced her to party hard enough to make her head pulse like a bomb about to go off and her stomach roll like the ground during a 7.2 earthquake. He was probably standing over her right now, smiling like a gigantic ass, getting ready to administer his sworn-by hangover cure: hot coffee, cold air, hair of the dog that bit you.

She hoped she was in Lucifer's bed. That way, if she puked, it would soak into his brand new, blood-red Italian silk sheets, ruining them for all eternity. Serve him right.

"Detective?"

The familiar British accent came from somewhere above her. To Chloe's fragile ears, the usually welcome tone of her partner's voice sounded like a cymbal crash. She moaned and turned her head away with an exaggerated "Shhhh!"

"Detective?" he repeated, a little more urgently.

God, she wished her head would just explode already. Let him try to clean that out of the sheets.

Come to think of it, though, this didn't feel like Lucifer's bed after all. It was cold and hard and a little bit damp. Bathroom floor maybe? Praying to the porcelain God instead of the real one, who happened to be Lucifer's actual Dad? Chloe might've laughed at the thought, if she weren't afraid some blood vessel in her brain might burst from the effort.

Why, why, why had she let him talk her into drinking so much? He knew she was a lightweight. Especially compared to him and his bloody "supernatural metabolism" or whatever he called it. Wait, did she just think the word "bloody"? Was she talking like him now, too?

Warm fingers traced the side of her face.

"Wake up. Chloe, please."

It wasn't so much the "please" but the use of her name that made the first sense of wrongness prickle inside her. He always called her "Detective." Never "Chloe." Not unless something really serious was going down. The next thing that hit her was the smell—a very familiar one that she couldn't quite place, but made her inexplicably uneasy.

She forced her eyes open. A blurry blob coalesced into Lucifer's face, hovering a foot above hers, looking pale and anxious. He broke into a smile when he saw her looking at him, but the worry didn't leave his eyes.

"There you are."

Chloe squinted up at her partner as her brain slowly, much too slowly, began to boot up. She tried to remember where they were, what they'd been doing, but everything was so hazy, so fuzzy around the edges…like streetlights in fog.

The last truly clear memory she had was of working with Lucifer at the precinct, trying to chisel a hole in the brick wall that had formed in their latest homicide case. Staying late into the night because their main suspect suddenly had a rock-solid, concrete, 100% bulletproof alibi, and all the evidence they'd collected against her seemed to be slipping through their fingers. The whole case was slipping through their fingers.

Someone was going to get away with murder, which Chloe couldn't stand, and the person who'd killed Lucifer's favorite marijuana grower was going to go unpunished, which Lucifer wouldn't tolerate. So they'd kept hammering away, looking for something, anything they might've missed. And then…and then…

Chloe frowned, reaching, searching…

And then they'd gotten the phone call. A friend of the victim who promised new information about the murder, but was scared to meet out in public. It did sound a little suspicious, but the woman's desperation seemed sincere. Plus, this witness had details about the case that hadn't been released to the public. Hell, she even knew the name of a new, secret strain of weed the victim had been engineering, which was something they'd already been looking at as a possible motive for the murder: a rival pot grower, trying to get ahold of one of the special plants.

So, Chloe and Lucifer had gone to the apartment to meet with their new source. It was at this point that things started getting very murky. Chloe remembered knocking on the door, feeling it swing inward under the force of her knuckles. She remembered a lamp without a shade, its bare bulb burning her retinas, making her blink and shield her face.

She thought she remembered a sudden movement of shadow at the corner of her eye. And then…that smell. That smell that was grating on the very edge of Chloe's consciousness, clawing at her skull, over and over, pounding with every beat of her heart. Insisting with every roll of her stomach that she recognize it, because she was a detective, and it was important, and it was—

"Oh, shit." Chloe abruptly sat up, and came thisclose to vomiting all over Lucifer's favorite Prada suit as he reached out to help steady her.

"Easy, Detective."

His gentle voice and hands should've soothed her, but they couldn't because now she understood the worry shining in his dark eyes. The witness's apartment, the last place she could remember being, was long gone. She and her partner were now in a big, empty warehouse.

And that smell was chloroform.