What you're about to hear is based on actual events.

List their discretion is advised.

It takes until the next morning for the blood of the soap makers' victim to coagulate.

Leonardo doesn't sleep long, but she does sleep and well.

She is nearly giddy with excitement after all.

What she has done can never be forgiven, sure, but she will never ask for forgiveness.

What she has done is not for her, but for her son, Giuseppe.

The house is spotless when she wakes, stinking like an infirmary from the bleach.

Still, the smells of caustic soda of the body rendering down to mush, lingering beneath

the cleaner sense like the soft beat of a tell-tale heart.

But it is no matter tillianarda.

She is not doing this for herself.

She flips through the pages of the red book, passing several other recipes she may have

tried, recipes for roasts, recipes for soups and stews, recipes even for soap.

But there is only one she needs.

She follows it to the letter, baking the blood in the oven, and then milling it into flour.

The resultant material is a coarse, slightly gritty meal of a rust-brown sort of color,

with a not unpleasant aroma.

In fact, it makes the anarda salivate in an unfamiliar way when she lets her nose linger

over it.

She mixes this flour with sugar, chocolate, wheat flour, milk, and eggs, then cooks the

resultant mix into tea cakes.

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