The flight to Sicily was not a journey; it was a descent into a past that had refused to stay buried. We traveled on the private jet of a man whose name was a ghost—one of the last "blind" favors Alessandro had banked in the years he spent playing the Architect of Ashes.

Leo sat across from me in the pressurized silence of the cabin. He had cleaned the soot from his face, but the smell of the farmhouse fire—the scent of burning lavender and old paper—seemed to have seeped into his pores. ...