Chapter 14: The Crown of the Sacrifice

I slept for two days. I woke up in a room with sunlight in it, which was novel, and found Dario Moretti asleep in a chair with his hand around my ankle like a man who'd decided that was the most defensible position available. He hadn't shaved. His forearms were bandaged. There was a stack of papers on the floor beside him, and the top one was a property deed for the old Vance land in the north, already signed over, already filed. He'd been buying my house back while I was unconscious. I lay...