Novels by I.O PIETRO

Ines gave me a room on the second floor, a clean white box with a bed and a bathroom, and she stood in the doorway while I stared at the hot water running over my hands. I hadn't realized how filthy I was until the water turned gray. When I came out, there was a black suit laid across the bed with the tags still on, and a pair of shoes that fit me better than anything I had ever owned. I did not ask how she knew my size. In this house, I was starting to understand, people knew things."Dinner is at eight," she said. "The whole family attends when Viktor is unwell. It is how they remind each other who is still standing."Do I have to go?"If you hide in this room, they will decide you are afraid. Afraid people don't last here." She straightened my collar with a quick, practiced tug, the way my mother used to before church. Watch everything. Eat only what others eat first. Smile as little as you can manage.I thought she was exaggerating until I walked into the dining hall.It was a lon

Ines made me ride in the trunk. She apologized twice before she closed it, and then there was only darkness, the smell of rubber and old oil, and the hum of the road coming up through my spine. I held the duffel against my chest and counted turns until I lost count. Twenty minutes became thirty. The car slowed, stopped, and I heard her window slide down and a man's voice say her name with the easy familiarity of someone who had said it a thousand times."Delivery for the kitchen," she said. "Mr. Kessler's medicine."At this hour?Do you want to be the one who tells him it's late?A pause stretched long enough for my heart to climb into my throat. Then the engine rolled forward over gravel, and I let out a breath I had been holding without knowing it. I was inside. Somewhere above me, heavy iron gates were closing, and every instinct I owned told me they would never open for me again.When the trunk finally lifted, Ines was standing in a narrow service yard behind a house so large I co

She told me to stay inside the unit with the door down and speak to no one, and she arrived forty minutes later. I know it was forty because I watched the phone's clock the whole time, sitting on the duffel bag with the gun wrapped in cloth beside me, flinching at every footstep in the corridor. When the knock finally came, three quick raps and then two slow ones, I almost didn't answer. A name on an index card was only a name, and I had learned the hard way what people could do with one.I rolled the door up a foot and looked out. A thin woman in a gray coat stood there, somewhere in her fifties, with silver streaks in her black hair and a face that had gone tired in a way sleep couldn't fix. Her eyes were red. She studied me like she was reading something written across my forehead, and her hand came up to cover her mouth."You have his jaw," she said. And Nora's eyes.I stepped back so fast I hit the shelf. The men in the parking lot had said almost the same words, and my body reac

I walked until the sirens faded behind me, and then I kept walking, because stopping meant thinking. By the time the sun was fully up I had ended up at a twenty-four hour laundromat on the edge of the industrial district. It was nearly empty, warm, and smelled like detergent. I dropped onto a plastic chair in the back corner, facing the door, and finally let myself shake.I had nothing. The clothes on my body, a cracked phone, forty dollars in my wallet, and the plastic bag from the hospital. I opened it because I couldn't stand to leave it closed any longer. Her cheap watch had stopped at 11:52. There was a lipstick worn down to a stub, a folded bus pass, a handful of coins, and a tissue she had used and tucked away the way she always did. I pressed it to my face and breathed in, and for a moment she was there, lavender soap and cold air and the kitchen at night. Then it faded, and the grief came back so hard I had to bend over my knees.I don't know how long I stayed like that. A wo

I didn't sleep. I spent the rest of the night moving from one dark doorway to the next, flinching at every pair of headlights, until the sky behind the buildings turned the color of dishwater. My knee had stiffened into a hot, swollen knot. I needed dry clothes, my spare cash taped under the bottom drawer, and the one place on earth where I could sit down and try to think. It was a bad plan, but it was the only one I had, so I walked home.I smelled it three blocks away. Smoke, thick and bitter, with a chemical edge that made my eyes water. Then I turned the corner onto my street and the whole sky was orange.Fire trucks blocked the road, their lights spinning red across the wet pavement. Water arced from the hoses into a building I had lived in for six years. My building. The windows on the third floor had blown out, and flames were pouring through them like something alive and hungry, curling up the brick toward the roof. My window was the second from the left. I knew exactly which

They let me stay with her until the morning staff needed the room. A nurse with red eyes helped me to my feet and pressed a small plastic bag into my hands, my mother's belongings, her worn purse and her cheap watch and a few things I didn't have the heart to look at. I held it against my chest like it was her. I signed forms I couldn't read. A man in a gray suit asked whether I had arrangements in mind for her, and I said I didn't, and he said there was no rush, and I nodded and kept nodding until I realized I was doing it for no one.By the time I walked out of the building it was nearly midnight. The rain had thinned to a cold mist that clung to my face. I stood under the awning for a long while, unable to decide which way to go. My apartment was twenty minutes away, and the idea of walking into those two rooms without her humming in the kitchen made my knees weak. I had no job, no girlfriend, no mother. I had a bag, a warning, and a name I had never worn.I went down the steps and