Palatial Intimacy

XV - The Truth

Five Years Ago
Florence, Italy

Will didn't remember calling for help. Maybe it was Hannibal. Maybe he'd planned to hurt Will like this for hours, perhaps days, and he knew to call for help before things got too bad. Maybe he'd called for help before he'd come around the corner, confronting Will in the kitchen and making him think that this was actually going to happen, they were actually going to run away together--

No. Someone was shouting questions at him, someone was carefully lifting him up onto a stretcher, he was flying across the pavement. He was soaring above the streets of Italy, sirens singing in his ears. He was bombarded by a blinding light, and he wondered if he was finally facing the gates of Heaven.

He was closer to Heaven than he would have been in America. All of the hospitals here were named after saints. But that was like being in an abyss, as opposed to the trenches.

They had to surgically stitch him up and monitor the wound for infection. He stayed in the hospital for days, staring down at the cut in his stomach that would leave a massive scar. He would forever be reminded of what Hannibal had done to him.

But he didn't have to be.

He kept his final option hovering in the back of his mind. It would be a violation of every rule at his job, but he'd already crossed the line many times. It wasn't like Pazzi would be around to catch him.

The next day, a coworker called to tell him of Rinaldo Pazzi, his boss. He had been found late the previous night. He was hanging out of a window, hung by the neck, with his torso cut open and his intestines hanging down to brush the cobblestone streets. Will took the news with as much dignity and false grief as he could muster. He cried for a moment, but he wasn't sure why. It may have been for his lost love, rather than his lost colleague.

The police had a lot of questions for Will. There was no DNA found on Pazzi's body, and they suspected that his death was correlated to Will's attack. They wanted any clues that Will had to offer, as this could be the final connection to the Monster of Florence.

"Were you right all along?" One of his coworkers, a woman who simply went by Bev, asked him. She had stuck with him for a long time, even through his false arrest. She believed him that he wasn't a murderer, but she hesitated to say that the real culprit was Roman Fell. He had a clean record. But now, it seemed like she was questioning herself. "Could it have been Roman? Where is he?"

Will sighed. "It was Roman," he decided to admit. "But that's not his real name. He told me that much, but he didn't tell me the real one. I was trying to convince him that we were similar. That we saw the world in the same way. He believed it, for a while. But he found out the truth, and he took action."

"You got too close, Will." Bev frowned. "You were trying so hard to lure him into your trap that you didn't notice the rope around your neck. He was waiting for the right opportunity to strike, I bet. And now you nearly died."

"I'm alive. He's not." Will turned to look at her, trying to convey strong honesty through eye contact. He wasn't great at either of those things. "Roman carried me for a few blocks. He set me on the ground. And then I watched him throw himself off the Ponte Vecchio." His eyes watered. "He wanted me to watch. I never saw him surface."

"You watched the man die."

"It was too late for him. I think he was in love with me." He let one tear drip artfully down his cheek. "When I didn't want him, there was no point in him continuing on. He'd been caught. And he was alone."

He told the same story to the police. Nothing about it was true. Will had indeed been found slumped against the Ponte Vecchio, but only because it was an important relic to the both of them. He and Roman -- Hannibal -- had had many conversations on that bridge, many intimate glances and brief touches. It was right by Hannibal's home, which was convenient for late night walks. Will had mustered the strength to drag himself to that bridge, convinced that it would be the site of his death. On the way to the hospital and into the night, he crafted a story around that to keep Hannibal safe.