"Excellency," he said, and the title made no sense until I realized he was addressing me, granting me the honour due to the woman his master had loved.

  "Tell me," I whispered. I already knew.

  He told me everything.

  They had taken him that night—not to the Pozzi, but to a private chamber in the Ducal Palace. His rivals on the Council had accused him of treason of consorting with foreign powers, of using his position to line his own pockets and witch craft. The charges were lies, every one, but the Council did not need truth. They needed silence.

  The trial lasted three hours. The verdict was delivered at midnight. He was condemned to death by poisoning—a "mercy," they called it, compared to hanging or beheading.

  They gave him the poison in his own cell, surrounded by the men who had once called him colleague. He drank it without complaint, without begging, without giving them the satisfaction of seeing him break.

  Stolen story; please report.

  But before he died, he spoke. His voice was weak, the poison already working, but he made sure they heard him.

  "This woman I love," he said. "Dark brown hair. Ancient eyes. If any of you touch her, if any of you even look at her, I will return from the grave and drag you to hell myself."

  They laughed, of course. Men who have just murdered a colleague are prone to cruel laughter.

  But the servant told me that the laughter died when he died. In the moment his heart stopped, every candle in the room flickered and went out. The torches on the walls guttered. For three full heartbeats, the chamber was plunged into absolute darkness.

  When the light returned, his body lay still. But the men who had killed him would not meet each other's eyes for weeks afterward.

  His body was found in a canal the next morning—a final humiliation, dumped like refuse despite his rank. The official records were scrubbed of his name, his deeds, his very existence. To this day, historians pore over the Council's archives and find gaps where he should be, mysteries they cannot solve.

  But the people remembered. The poor he had fed, the orphans he had saved, the families he had quietly lifted from despair—they remembered. They left flowers at the spot where his body was found. They whispered his true name to their children, passing it down through generations like a prayer.

  The moth had finally burned.