The silence that followed the explosion at Sant'Alessio was not an absence of sound, but a physical presence—a pneumatic void that seemed to suck the very oxygen from the lungs of the survivors. Nonna Anna ran across the sand, her bare feet sinking into the slimy, lukewarm mud, indifferent to the shards of concrete still raining down like black hail. Her scream had died in her throat, transforming into a hoarse hiss, an ancestral summons seeking to catch Elia's soul before the Strait reclaimed it.
When she reached his body, the acrid smoke of the plastic explosives stung her nostrils. Elia lay supine, just a few meters from where the pier abruptly ended in a stump of twisted iron rebars. He appeared intact, but it was an illusion of the twilight: his chest moved with an irregular jolt, and his glassy eyes stared at an invisible point in the dark sky, far beyond the clouds of ash.
"Elia… my son, stay here. Do not look at the light; look at me," Anna whispered, cradling his head in her soot-stained hands.
At that same moment, thousands of miles away in the pitch-black darkness of the Richmond Theatre, Azzurra felt that same sensation of suffocation. Oliver's warmth was the only point of reference in a world that had just collapsed. Her legs felt dead, heavy as the concrete blocks that had just been pulverized in Sicily. The bond was not merely spiritual; it was physical, visceral—an umbilical cord made of mud and intent that had been severed by dynamite.
"Azzurra, you have to get up! We have to get out; the ceiling might collapse!" Oliver shouted. His back burned with a bluish light, a reverberation of the Sicilian destruction that he, like a human lightning rod, had absorbed to protect her.
But Azzurra did not hear Oliver. She heard Elia's slowing heartbeat. She smelled the sea of Sant'Alessio invading the wings of the London theatre. In the stalls, Belinda had become a pillar of salt. Her phone had slipped from her hand, her connection to Sicily severed by a roar that would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.
It was Erica who broke the spell of terror. The aunt, with a coldness bordering on sociopathy, pushed through the panicked crowd, followed by two private security men from the school. Despite the darkness, her stride was sure.
"Take her away," Erica ordered, pointing to Azzurra on the stage. "Immediately. Out through the rear emergency exits. I don't want journalists seeing the niece of a patron in this state. She is unstable; she needs care."
Belinda jolted back to reality, rushing toward the stage. "Don't touch her! Erica, do you know what happened? Elia… the construction site… it's over, they've destroyed everything!"
"It is your charade that is over, Belinda," Erica replied, turning to her sister-in-law with a smile that did not reach her eyes. "You played with fire, and now the theatre is burning. Azzurra is coming with me. You are out of control, and this incident proves it. I will file for immediate guardianship. What happened tonight is proof that your delusions are a danger to her mental health."
As Erica's men hoisted Azzurra up—who offered no resistance, lost as she was in Elia's dying pulse—Belinda realized the war had shifted. It was no longer a matter of piers and lighthouses, but a battle for her daughter's soul. The "silk" was attempting to stifle the "mud," seizing upon the moment of maximum weakness.
Azzurra was dragged away, her feet dragging across the stage floorboards she had consecrated with her dance only minutes before. Oliver tried to intervene, but his wounds—the marks of the Draunara etched into his skin—sent him collapsing to the floor in a fit of violet fever.
"Oliver!" Azzurra cried out, waking for an instant from her stupor. "Don't leave me! The sea… the sea is retreating!"
And it was true. In Messina, the water of the Strait was performing an unnatural movement. After the explosion, instead of crashing against the shore, the sea had begun to pull back with a deep hiss, exposing rocks that had not been seen for centuries, wrecks encrusted with shells, and the white bones of ancient shipwrecks. It was the prelude to something terrible, or perhaps the final breath of a land refusing the violence inflicted upon it.
Nonna Anna, still clutching Elia, looked toward the horizon. She knew what that retreat meant. The sea was gathering momentum. The Draunara had not been driven away by the explosion; it had been offended.
Belinda, left alone in the emptied theatre, gathered up her black shawl. She felt a sudden cold in her chest, right where Samuele's medallion once rested. She looked at her hands: they were soiled with a mud that should not have been there, in Richmond. It was the mud of Sant'Alessio, transported across the bond.
"Erica thinks she has won because she has the walls, the doctors, and the legal stamps," Belinda whispered into the darkness. "But she doesn't know that Azzurra is no longer just a girl. She is the Lighthouse. And a Lighthouse is not extinguished by a court order."
As Erica's private ambulance sped away with sirens wailing toward a psychiatric clinic in Surrey, and as Elia exhaled a breath on the Sicilian beach that seemed to be his last, the sea of the Strait began to return. It was not a wave; it was a wall of dark water, heavy with debris and memory, surging straight toward the ruins of the pier.
The novel, much like the sea, was entering its most destructive phase. The destruction of the physical pier was merely the prelude to the destruction of the psychological barriers that had kept Azzurra divided between two worlds. If Elia's body was failing, his will was transmigrating into someone else.
Belinda stepped out of the theatre into the London rain, which now fell mixed with a gray dust, like the ash of an olive tree. She took out her phone and dialed a number she hadn't called in years. One of those numbers you use only when the laws of men no longer have answers.
"Anna…" she said when her mother-in-law answered amidst sobs and the sound of the returning, furious surf. "Anna, do not let him go. Azzurra is coming. I don't know how, I don't know when, but she will return to finish the work. Prepare the Lighthouse. The real one. The one made of bone and of will."
The night had only just begun. And the mud, now more than ever, reclaimed its place upon the throne of silk.