Enna has something in common with the young Lorenzo de' Medici: no one mourns her father's death. But Lorenzo lives in a palace, surrounded by family and friends, holding the future of Florence in his very hands; Enna, instead, has no one and nothin...
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Florence, 1470
He saw... He didn't know what he saw.
He knew what he felt, though. Agony. Each blink left him breathless, like he was being stabbed in the back of his head, over and over.
The man shut his eyelids then, and counted to ten—his numbers went as far as the fingers of his hands. The pain was still excruciatingly throbbing through his skull, but he could at least nail thoughts down.
The last thing he knew was him kneeling on his father's grave.
The old bastard had mocked him even in death. After calling him useless for two decades, the heart of the cranky miller had burst a month before his son's return, barely avoiding having to face the boy's unlikely success. He had fought his way up through the ranks of the Florentine army in the battles against the Venetians these past years, and was now richer than his father ever had, but he could not spat it in the old man's face. His tears had been bitter with irritation, not sorrow. Then he just... Again, he didn't know what had happened. The man had woken up lying on his back, surrounded by darkness and by the echo of the cry of some nocturnal animal.
He felt around with his palms, grabbing only cold dirt. In fact, he himself was ice-cold.
Against his better judgement, the man widened his eyes to slits, and pain flashed back. He put into focus a starry night sky above him, though, and muddy walls as high as one of his legs on either side of him.
Had he ended up in a damn ditch?
The crunching of boots on gravel had his aching arse contracting in the vain effort to pull his legs in. Thank God and the Blessed Virgin he wouldn't die out here—right next to his father's resting place.
The man was about to call out at the stranger, but there was no need of it, as that person perfectly knew he was in there—that person had actually been the one putting him there in the first place, he realised grimly. Only then, it occurred to him that someone had hit his head.
His sight was as clouded as the murky waters of the Arno and he could not bring a single limb to move, not even when he sensed the stranger looming above, pure mischief in the lilt of his eerie whistling.
And then the man's heart jerked in terror and surprise.
The patch of sky he had been silently staring at disappeared, replaced by outlandish figures, dark and pale. He struggled to clear his view, but when he did see, the man thought he was being tricked by his own eyes.
The creatures—there was no other way to call them—circled the shallow pit he was lying into, their movements nimble though they looked like crones. They yanked the man out in a billow of black robes; where they led him or how many of them surrounded him, he did not want to know. What he saw told enough: this was the Inferno. He was dead, and these demons were taking him to the Devil himself.
No tricks after all, only a fair reckoning for a man who had killed and had been proud of it, all for glory and coin, and retaliation. He was indeed going to join his father—because there was no way the jerk had been luckier with his final destination—and the sole crumb of comfort was that he could finally get to swank.
One of the creatures turned its gaze on him, at least the man thought so because it slid its head towards his shaking hands, vainly trying to hide the stain spreading on the front of his breeches. It breathed a laugh, the only hint of its amusement, given the utter lack of expression on its face. In fact, it had not a face—none of them had. They only had a long, pale, pointy protuberance set right below two mirror-like eyes, just like a beak. These beings were... a nightmare in the flesh. Half humans, half vultures.
The man sealed his eyelids, and kept them so until they halted.
He did not open them when the devils lay him down and he heard an alarming clinking.
