The stag’s mouth opened. It didn't speak. It chewed . Slowly, deliberately, it crunched on something that glittered—a shard of a broken teacup, the one that would never come back together. The sound was wet, musical, and obscene.
The rain over Florence was a curtain of needles, each one stitching the grey sky to the terracotta rooftops. Will Graham stood at the window of his borrowed office, watching the water sluice down the gutters like blood thinning in a sink. He didn't see Florence. He saw the stag.
"You're not real," he whispered.
Three years. Three years since he’d pushed them both from that cliff. The water had been cold—a baptism of rock and foam. He had felt the shatter of his own spine as a distant echo, like hearing a vase break in another room. He’d woken up in a hospital bed with Abigail’s ghost standing at the foot of it, shaking her head.
Will’s phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: "The Uffizi has a Caravaggio. A beheading. Your favorite kind of chiaroscuro. Dinner at eight. I'm cooking." Hannibal Serie
It stood in the corner of the room, antlers scraping the frescoed ceiling. Its coat was the color of wet ash, and its eyes were the exact brown of a tailored three-piece suit. It didn't breathe. It never did. It was a collection of antlers and absence, a ghost wearing the shape of a beast he’d once tried to cage.
He looked at the stag. The stag looked back. Then it turned and walked through the wall, leaving a faint trail of hoofprints filled with something dark and sweet-smelling, like amaretto and decay. The stag’s mouth opened
Outside, the rain stopped. Florence gleamed like a knife under fresh oil.