READ: Brooklyn's Blood Oath

Chapter 1

The Last Fire

The bus smelled of diesel and someone’s forgotten breakfast, a stale warmth that clung to the vinyl seats even after the doors opened. Lexi Albright stepped onto the curb in Brooklyn East Side with her single suitcase pressed against her leg, and the cold hit her before anything else. Not the clean cold of a Missouri winter, the kind that settled over Joplin in dry, predictable sheets. This cold was wet, a wind that found the gaps in her coat and stayed there. She stood still for a moment, letting the other passengers push past her, their bodies moving with the certainty of people who knew where they belonged.

The Greyhound pulled away from the curb, its exhaust clouding the air, and she watched it go. She had watched a lot of things go. The bus was just the latest. She had watched the house on Chestnut Street disappear behind her through the window of Jenna’s car, the charred frame still visible above the tree line. She had watched the last of Joplin shrink in the rearview mirror. She had watched her own hands fold the letter to Judah, the one she left on his kitchen table without a return address. Each departure had required the same thing: a decision not to look back. She was getting good at it.

The street was loud in a way she hadn’t prepared for. Car horns bled into each other, a man shouted at a double-parked delivery truck, and somewhere above her a window slid open and a woman yelled down in a language Lexi didn’t recognize. She tightened her grip on the suitcase handle and started walking. The address was on her phone, a screenshot from the rental listing she’d booked three weeks ago from Jenna’s couch, her fingers moving through the motions while her mind stayed blank. Third-floor walkup. No elevator. No doorman. The kind of building where no one asked questions because no one cared enough to ask them.

She passed a bodega with fruit crates stacked outside, the oranges too bright against the gray sidewalk. A group of teenagers leaned against the wall, their laughter cutting through the street noise. One of them glanced at her, a quick, disinterested scan, and then looked away. That was the thing she wanted most. Not the laughter, not the connection. The looking away. In Joplin, every face had known her name. Every set of eyes had carried the same question, the one no one ever spoke aloud but everyone asked anyway: How are you still standing? She didn’t have an answer. She didn’t want to be asked.

The building was on a corner lot, red brick with a fire escape zigzagging down the front like an afterthought. The door was a heavy steel thing with a buzzer system that looked older than she was. Apartment 3B. She pressed the button and waited, and when no one answered she pressed it again. A crackle. A voice, distorted through the speaker. “Yeah?”

“I’m the new tenant,” she said. “Lexi Albright.”

The door buzzed and she pushed through into a narrow hallway that smelled like old paint and someone’s cooking oil. The stairs were steep, the kind of stairs that punished you for carrying anything heavier than a purse. She dragged the suitcase up one flight, then another, the wheels catching on every lip of every step. By the time she reached the third floor, her arms ached and her breath came in short, sharp pulls. She didn’t stop. Stopping meant thinking, and thinking was the one thing she couldn’t afford.

The apartment was smaller than the photos had made it seem. That was, she supposed, the first rule of renting sight unseen. The photos always lied. The living room was a single square of space with a window that faced the street and a radiator that clanked when she walked past it. The kitchen was a counter, a sink, and a stove that looked like it hadn’t been used since the previous tenant moved out. The bedroom was barely a bedroom, just a nook with a closet and a mattress still wrapped in plastic. But the walls were clean. The floor was clean. The door locked behind her with a sound that was solid and final. That was enough. That was all she needed it to be.

She set the suitcase on the floor and unzipped it. The contents were a catalog of what she’d allowed herself to keep. Three pairs of jeans. Five shirts. A sweater Jenna had pressed into her hands at the bus station, the one with the hole in the sleeve that Jenna swore gave it character. A toothbrush. A hairbrush. A photograph in a frame she hadn’t looked at since she packed it. She lifted the frame now, her fingers moving on instinct, and there they were. Her mother, her father, her younger brother. The photograph was from two summers ago, the one where her mother had insisted on a family portrait even though her brother had complained the whole time. They were standing in front of the house on Chestnut Street, the one that no longer existed. Her mother’s hand was on her shoulder. Her father’s smile was the kind that didn’t quite reach the camera. Her brother was making a face, his tongue caught mid-stick-out. She set the frame on the nightstand, face down.

She didn’t cry. She had stopped crying somewhere around the Missouri state line, and the tears hadn’t found her since. What she felt instead was a hollowing, a sensation like her ribs had been scooped clean of everything that used to fill them. It wasn’t pain. Pain would have been a relief, something sharp and specific she could point to and name. This was just absence. A negative space where her life used to be.

Her phone buzzed. Jenna.

She picked up on the second ring. “I made it.”

“You made it,” Jenna repeated, and the relief in her voice was so thick Lexi could almost feel it through the speaker. “Tell me the apartment isn’t a disaster.”

“It’s small.”

“Small is good. Small is manageable.”

“The radiator makes a noise.”

“What kind of noise?”

“Like someone’s hitting it with a wrench.”

Jenna laughed, a sound that was so familiar it hurt. “So call the landlord. That’s what landlords are for.”

“I will.” She wouldn’t. She didn’t want to talk to anyone in this city longer than she had to. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s fine. She asked about you again.”

Lexi didn’t answer. She knew what Jenna’s mother asked. The same thing everyone asked. How is she holding up? Has she talked to anyone? Is she eating? The questions that turned her into a patient, a case study, a thing to be monitored.

“I told her you were good,” Jenna said, and the lie was so easy, so practiced, that Lexi almost believed it herself. “I told her you found a place. That you’re starting fresh.”

“Fresh,” Lexi said. The word felt wrong in her mouth, like a stone she’d been asked to swallow.

“You are. That’s the whole point, right? New city. New life. New Lexi.”

“New Lexi,” she echoed. She didn’t know who that was yet. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out.

They talked for another ten minutes, Jenna filling the silence with stories about her classes, her professors, the boy in her sociology seminar who kept asking her out even though she’d told him no three times. Lexi listened and made the right sounds in the right places, and when she hung up the silence rushed back in like water through a crack in a dam. She stood in the middle of the empty apartment and let it fill her. The radiator clanked. The street noise filtered through the window. Somewhere below her, a door slammed and a voice called out a name she didn’t recognize.

She walked to the window and looked out. The street was still moving, still loud, still full of people who had no idea she existed. That was the point. That was what she’d paid for. Anonymity. Invisibility. A place where no one knew what she’d lost because no one knew her name.

And then she saw it.

Across the street, set back from the curb behind a wrought-iron gate, was a building that didn’t belong in this neighborhood. It was too grand, too deliberate, a structure that had been built to be noticed. The facade was pale stone, the kind of stone that looked like it had been imported from somewhere older than Brooklyn. Arched windows lined the front, their glass dark and reflective. Above the entrance, carved into the stone itself, were the words: Italian Villa Restaurant. The letters were gold, or had been once, before weather and time had dulled them to a muted brass. Ivy climbed one side of the building, thick and dark, and the front door was a heavy wooden thing with iron hinges that looked like they could hold back a siege.

Lexi stared at it. She didn’t know why she stared. The building was just a building. A restaurant was just a restaurant. But something about it pulled at her, a low, quiet tug she couldn’t name. It wasn’t curiosity. Curiosity was a clean feeling, a simple desire to know more. This was something else. A pressure in her chest. A sense that the building was looking back at her, that it had been waiting for her to notice it. She shook her head, a quick, sharp motion, and the feeling broke. She was tired. That was all. She was tired and hungry and her brain was making patterns where there weren’t any.

She turned away from the window and finished unpacking. The clothes went in the closet. The toothbrush went in the bathroom. The photograph stayed face down on the nightstand. She didn’t turn it over. She wasn’t ready to turn it over. She wasn’t sure she ever would be.

That night, she lay on the mattress still wrapped in plastic and listened to the city breathe. The radiator hissed. The street noise faded and then rose and then faded again. Sirens somewhere in the distance, a sound she was already learning to ignore. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about the house on Chestnut Street, but the house came anyway. It always came. The flames. The smoke. The phone call from the neighbor she’d never met, the one whose voice had cracked when she said the words I’m so sorry. The drive back to Joplin, the highway blurring past her, the certainty that this was a mistake, a nightmare, something she would wake up from if she just tried hard enough. She hadn’t woken up. She was still waiting.

She opened her eyes. The ceiling was cracked in one corner, a thin line that ran from the wall to the light fixture. She counted the cracks. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. She counted until the numbers stopped meaning anything, and then she sat up and reached for her phone. No messages. No calls. Just the time, glowing in the dark: 2:47 a.m. She had been in Brooklyn for fourteen hours. It felt like fourteen years.

She thought about the restaurant across the street. The Italian Villa. The name was too fancy for the neighborhood, too proud. It was the kind of place that hired people like her, she told herself. Hostesses. Waitstaff. Someone to stand at the front and smile and pretend the world wasn’t on fire. She could do that. She had been doing that for months. She pulled up a search on her phone, her fingers moving before she could talk herself out of it. The restaurant’s website was simple, a single page with a phone number and a photo of the dining room. White tablecloths. Candles in glass holders. A chandelier that looked like it weighed more than she did. She stared at the photo for a long moment, and the pressure in her chest came back, that same low tug she’d felt at the window. She didn’t have a reason to walk in there. She didn’t have a plan. But she had a need, and the need was simple: she had to keep moving. If she stopped, the grief would catch her. If she stopped, the fire would finally consume what was left.

She set the phone down and lay back against the mattress. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she would walk across the street and ask for a job. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t even a decision. It was just the next thing. The next step. The next door she would push open and walk through without looking back. She didn’t know what waited for her on the other side. She didn’t know that the building had been watching her, too, that the ivy and the iron gates and the gold letters were part of a world she couldn’t see yet. She didn’t know any of it. All she knew was that the radiator was still clanking, the city was still breathing, and she was still, against every odd, alive.

The window rattled in its frame. The cold crept through the glass. And Lexi Albright, twenty-three years old and hollowed out by a fire that had taken everything, closed her eyes and waited for morning.

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