Novels by fred Wright

Leo was crouched over the drain again with his newly recruited friends and had watched him investigate that drain every afternoon for four days and still didn't know what he found so interesting about it. He was down there with Nico now, both of them peering at the flagstones like whatever lived in that drain owed them an explanation, while Petra stood above them with her arms folded in the particular way of a seven year old who had decided to supervise and wasn't going to pretend otherwise.Ava sat on the stone bench with her coffee and let the afternoon sit around her for a minute.The courtyard was on the south side of the mansion, sheltered on three sides by the body of the house, the walls rising two floors above and throwing a long shadow across the flagstones. The sun had just cleared the roofline on the west side and was coming in at a low angle, warming the stone under her feet and catching the old iron ring set into the far wall above the bench. She could hear the fountain fr

Ava waited until after lunch after her meeting with Dante to tell Rafe.Not because she wasn't sure it was worth telling. She'd been sure since the moment the handle released and the footsteps moved away unhurried, that particular patience of someone who had gotten what they came for. She waited because she needed to think first, needed to sit with it through the morning and the rules meeting and breakfast with Leo and get to a place where she could say it without her voice doing anything she didn't want it to do.She found him in the corridor outside the security room at about 1:30pm, coming through the door with a radio in his hand and his jacket already on."Someone tried my door last night," she said.He looked at her. "What time.""Midnight. Maybe a few minutes after.""Which door.""Bedroom. Main one."He turned and went back through the security room door and she followed him in without being invited because she was past the point of waiting to be invited into rooms where her ow

Dante's assistant came to knock at nine exactly to get her prepped for the day. She had been awake since six, sitting in the chair by the window watching the garden come into light with the handkerchief on the nightstand and Sophia's note folded inside it and the memory of a door handle turning in the dark still sitting in her chest like a stone that couldn't shift. She'd heard Leo wake at around seven, heard him pad to the bathroom and back and drop into bed again, while staying in her chair and watched the security man make his circuit in the garden below and thought about all the things she was not going to say in the meeting that was always going to happen. As she had known it was coming since she arrived. You can't just walk into a house like this and not eventually sit across a desk from the man who owned it and hear the terms spelled out. She closed the door of her room behind her and went downstairs. The study felt different in the morning light. Harder somehow, the dark wo

Ava had been in the wardrobe that morning, pulling out the clothes someone had hung in there before she arrived. Designer things, all the wrong size, fabric so soft it felt almost wrong to touch, the kind of clothes that had been put there as a gesture by someone who either didn't know her measurements or didn't care about them. She was stacking them on the chair in the corner to ask about later when Leo appeared in the doorway of the connecting room with something small and white pinched between his fingers. "Mom. What's this?" The room was bright with morning light coming through the gap in the heavy burgundy curtains, enough that she could see what he was holding clearly from across the room. A square of white fabric, folded into quarters, small enough to sit flat in his palm. "Where did you find that?" "Under the bed. I was looking for my pencil." He held it out. "It smells like flowers." She crossed the room and took it from him and he was right, it did, something faint and e

It was eight months before the wedding and a very busy afternoon. The room above the restaurant where they had all chose for meeeting had no windows. That was the point. A long table down the center, low light from a single fixture overhead, the smell of garlic and frying oil coming up through the floorboards from the kitchen below, sitting underneath every other smell in the room like it owned the place. The chairs had been pushed back against the walls before anyone arrived so nobody had to decide where to sit, which told you everything about how many times this particular group of men had done this particular thing.Marco sat two seats from the head of the Moretti side. Close enough to matter. Far enough back to watch.He was thinking about a supply problem on the eastern route when the Romano folder came out.Standard. Every peacekeeping meeting produced its own archaeology, old agreements surfaced and pointed to across the table like relics, proof that something had been settled o

Boone. Boone.The name wouldn't leave. She'd been lying in the dark since midnight with it running in her head the way a song runs, the kind you can't locate the start of anymore because it's been going too long. At first she told herself it was a coincidence. Then she told herself a letter wasn't proof, by the time she stopped telling herself anything at all and just lay there with the ceiling she couldn't see and the card in the dresser drawer and the name going around and around until she couldn't tell if she was still thinking it or just hearing it.Leo padded through the connecting door and stood at the edge of her bed."Mom.""Yeah.""I need to pee.""Bathroom's through your door on the right.""I know but it's dark."She got up.She walked him back through the connecting door and stood in the doorway of his bathroom with her arms crossed while he dealt with the situation, and he washed his hands without being asked which meant he was still half asleep, and she walked him back to