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.

Will put on his coat. The hook in his chest, the one Hannibal had driven there years ago, gave a familiar, painful tug. He didn't go to save anyone. He didn't go to arrest him. He went because the meal would be exquisite, the conversation would be a scalpel, and the only honest thing left in the world was the monster who had taught him to love the dark.

"You're not real," he whispered.

Outside, the rain stopped. Florence gleamed like a knife under fresh oil.

And Hannibal? Hannibal had simply vanished . Not to prison. Not to a morgue. He had dissolved into the spaces between heartbeats. Until a week ago, when a postcard arrived. No message. Just a charcoal sketch of the Palazzo Vecchio, and on the back, a single spatter of something that had dried the color of rust.

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.