Chapter 3: The Ink and the Host

Leone ran through the alleys of Nivàra.

The cold wind cut across his face, yet he barely felt it. Bachisio’s corpse kept appearing in the darkness ahead—his throat split open, his eyes fixed on nothing.

Behind the Church of San Costantino, Leone braced himself against the stone wall and vomited, one hand pressed to his stomach. His knees shook beneath him.

You think you’re the only one with eyes, boy?

The words he had heard over the telephone would not leave him. They had let him live because they believed he was harmless. Now they wanted to see where he would go.

He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and tried to breathe.

One other person in Nivàra had known his parents since before Leone’s birth: Don Simone, the parish priest who had officiated the funeral that morning.

Leone circled the church without stopping to form a plan and hammered three times on the rectory door.

No one answered.

He struck it again, harder.

At last the door opened a few centimeters, held by a security chain. Don Simone’s tired face appeared in the gap. He wore an old, threadbare wool sweater instead of his cassock. His eyes, heavy with sleep and age, sharpened when he recognized Leone.

“Leone? What are you—what are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Bachisio is dead.” Leone heard the break in his own voice. “Someone killed him. In the shop. They cut his throat, Don Simone, and my mother’s document has another name on it. Elena Valli.” He pushed the words out too quickly. “You have to tell me the truth.”

The priest’s eyes widened.

He did not ask who Elena Valli was.

When Don Simone tried to close the door, Leone wedged his foot into the frame. The wood crushed his toes, but he did not move.

“Please!”

For an instant, he heard the child he had once been in his own voice.

Don Simone looked past him into the empty alley. After a long breath that smelled of sour wine, he removed the chain.

“Come in. Quickly.”

The rectory was bare and almost as cold as the church. On the kitchen table stood a half-empty bottle of filu ’e ferru and a small glass.

Leone tried to steady himself. Don Simone’s hands trembled. There was a sauce stain on his sweater, and his gaze kept shifting toward the window.

Fear, Leone thought. Perhaps enough to make him talk.

He pulled the black ring from his pocket and dropped it hard onto the table.

“This belonged to my mother. I know the Crown is real. I know Don Basilio sent a man to Nivàra.” Leone swallowed. The threat sounded less convincing now that he had begun it. “If you don’t talk, I’ll tell him Bachisio sent me to you before he died.”

Don Simone stared at the ring and then at Leone.

The fear remained in his face, but something harder settled beside it.

“You know absolutely nothing,” he said. “You notice a few details and think that makes you clever. You think you can blackmail me?” He leaned forward. “I have buried three generations of men who thought they were smarter than their masters. Do you know where they are now?”

Leone said nothing.

“Under two meters of common earth.”

The answer struck more firmly than Leone had expected. Don Simone pointed at the ring with a gnarled finger.

“Your mother was not some poor woman who happened to find refuge in Nivàra. Elena Valli was a soldier of the Silent Crown. An accountant for one of its dirtiest branches in Trieste. She stole something

—not money. Names, secrets—and fled here, hoping the granite of Barbagia would hide her.” “And my father?” Leone asked. “He saved her.”

“Your father guarded her.” Leone stared at him.

“Pietro worked for Don Basilio,” the priest continued. “He was meant to watch Elena and make sure she never left Nivàra. The secrets were supposed to remain buried with her. But then…” Don Simone looked down at the table. “Your father fell in love. He chose her over his duty. They built a family and hoped twenty years would be enough for the debt to disappear.”

His finger touched the edge of the ring. “The Crown does not forget.”

Leone thought of his mother’s kisses, his father’s quiet severity, coffee at the kitchen table and Sundays spent gathering olives. The memories had not changed, but another life now lay beneath them.

Pietro had first come to Nivàra as Ester’s guard. Ester had lived there under another woman’s name.

Leone had grown up between them and seen none of it. “No,” he murmured. “That can’t be…”

All the small signs he had spent his life studying had failed to reveal what existed inside his own home.

Don Simone crossed the room to an old vestment cabinet and opened a hidden drawer. He removed a folded sheet of paper, yellowed with age and worn along the creases.

“Your mother came to confession three days before the accident,” he said. “She knew someone was coming. She left me this and told me to destroy it.” His thumb moved across the fold. “I couldn’t burn a mother’s last words.”

Leone took the paper with both hands. They were shaking so badly that the page crackled between his fingers.

The handwriting matched the identity document: elegant, thin and unmistakably Ester’s.

“If we do not return from the coast, burn the house. Leave nothing behind. And protect my son. Leone must not know that the Crown was born for him.”

He read the final sentence again. Born for him.

If the Crown was what Don Simone claimed, how could it have been born for a twenty-year-old raised among sheep and poverty in a small Sardinian village?

“What does it mean?” Leone asked. “Don Simone, what was she trying to tell you?” “I don’t know.”

The priest held his gaze. His shoulders had sagged, and the hand resting on the table appeared suddenly frail.

“But listen to me. If you stay in Nivàra, you’ll end up like Bachisio. Basilio knows you’re alive. If he thinks you know anything useful, you’ll disappear. No funeral, no body. Nothing.”

A flash of white light passed across the kitchen windows. An engine stopped in the alley.

Leone turned toward the sound.

The black sedan might have followed him. Perhaps the noise of his knocking had led them there.

He folded the letter, snatched the ring from the table and pushed both into the inner pocket of his jacket.

Don Simone seized his shoulder and forced him toward the back door opening onto the old parish stables.

“Go to Cagliari. Disappear among the city’s desperate. It’s the only place a boy without a name might last longer than a day.” His fingers tightened. “Run, Leone.”

Leone opened the back door and threw himself into the courtyard. His foot struck a metal bucket, sending it clanging across the stones.

“Shit.”

Urgent voices rose inside the rectory, followed by the crash of the front door being forced inward. Don Simone was still inside.

Leone slowed for half a step. Then he heard the priest’s final order again and cleared the dry-stone wall behind the building. Rusted iron tore through his jacket and opened the skin of his forearm.

He kept running.

He crossed fields of wild hay, stumbled into mud and forced himself upright again. Tears blurred his sight, whether from pain, fear or the cold wind he could no longer tell.

The lights of Nivàra shrank behind him until the countryside swallowed them.

Hours later, he reached the state road as the first light of dawn colored the mountain peaks pale pink. His clothes were filthy with mud and blood. Each movement of his arm pulled at the torn skin.

He slipped one hand into his pocket and gripped his mother’s letter.

The parents he had known had existed. He still remembered their voices, their gestures and the ordinary life they had shared with him. Beneath that life, however, were names, duties and betrayals he had never been allowed to see.

He had gone to Don Simone without a plan. The men at the rectory might have followed him there, and he had no idea whether the priest was still alive.

An old truck carrying livestock slowed along the curve, its brakes whistling in the morning air. The driver, an elderly man with a sunburned face, looked at Leone through the open window.

“You need a ride, boy? Where are you going looking like that?”

Leone climbed onto the running board, using his left arm to pull himself up. He looked along the road descending from the mountains toward the sea.

“To Cagliari.”

The truck started with a jolt, leaving the granite of Nivàra behind. Leone leaned against the worn seat and closed his eyes.

He had underestimated the people pursuing him and overestimated what observation alone could give him. His torn sleeve and the letter clenched in his hand were what remained of the mistake.

He was still alive.

As the truck carried him south, Leone promised himself that this would be the last time he ran without understanding why.