Belinda's departure for London was greeted by a livid dawn, with clouds racing swiftly over the waters of the Strait. No sooner had her plane taken off from Catania than another machine, far darker and more silent, set itself in motion through the alleyways of Messina.
The enemies of the "Samuele's Lighthouse" fund were not ghosts, but men of flesh and blood, driven by a greed as old as the world itself. They were the contractors who had lost the reconstruction bids, the politicians who could no longer speculate on the mud, and, in the shadows, the old families who saw the rebirth of the pier as an affront to their control over the territory.
"The lady is gone," a raspy voice murmured in a half-lit office. "It is time to strike down the symbol. Without the pier, the fund fails. And without the fund, the lighthouse builders' villa will return to being an empty shell to be sold to the highest bidder."
While Belinda was landing in London, a moonless night fell over Sant'Alessio. Elia had remained to stand guard at the site, sitting in a small wooden shack with a flashlight and a thermos of coffee. Nonna Anna was at the villa, intent on burning incense to protect the house.
Around midnight, three shadows slipped silently along the cliffside. They carried no documents or ordinances, but rather canisters of corrosive acid and low-intensity dynamite charges, designed to undermine the concrete joints without making too much noise. They knew that the pier had not just been built, but "sealed" by something they did not understand, and their goal was to desecrate that stability.
Elia heard a metallic sound, a creak that did not belong to the sea. He stood up, gripping his flashlight. "Who's there?" he shouted into the dark.
No answer. Only the sigh of the wind. But when he aimed the beam of light toward the base of the pier, he saw a hooded figure intent on placing a detonator near the plaque dedicated to Samuele.
"Hey! Stop!" Elia lunged forward, but he was struck from behind by a second man. He fell onto the damp sand, tasting blood in his mouth.
In that moment, as the assailants laughed, convinced they had an easy task, the air around the pier changed. Nonna Anna, from the villa window, felt an icy shiver. She grabbed her lemon-wood staff and began to strike it rhythmically against the floor. "The roots do not break! The sea does not forget!" she began to chant, her voice seeming to multiply in the silence of the night.
Something incredible happened. The sea, which until a moment before had been calm, rose in a series of anomalous, almost coordinated waves. The water did not hit Elia; instead, it crashed with surgical precision onto the detonators and the acid canisters, neutralizing them instantly. The attackers, terrified by a sea that seemed to possess a will of its own, tried to flee, but the mud beneath their feet suddenly became viscous, trapping them like quicksand.
"The Draunara..." one of them whispered, falling to his knees as the freezing water engulfed him. "The curse is real!"
Elia managed to pull himself up, watching the men flee in disorder toward the road, leaving their equipment behind. They had not been defeated by the physical strength of a man, but by the memory of the place itself.
However, the sabotage had left a wound. Even though the pier remained intact, Samuele's plaque had been chipped. A small piece of marble bearing his name had fallen into the waves.
That same night, in London, Azzurra woke up screaming. She clutched her throat, feeling a sharp pain as if someone had torn away a piece of her skin. When she turned on the light, she saw that on her neck—at the exact spot where Samuele's name rested in her mind—a deep, red scratch had appeared, bleeding slightly.
The sabotage in Sicily had failed materially, but the spiritual war had reached its climax. The enemy had realized that to destroy the Lighthouse, they had to strike the heart of the one who carried it within.