It is 1495 and in a small Italian city-state, politics, faith and fear play themselves out to a bloody end. In a damp cell beneath the bones of a restless saint, a brother-monk waits for his wicked Borgia cousin to save him from the butcher's knife. And in the same town, a homeless woman accused of poison faces death by hanging until a stranger born of heretic fire arrives to fight her case. Why would he bother to defend a nobody like her? And if she is innocent, can the monk then be guilty? Seven days of lies, seven days of truth, seven days of digging down into the very dirt of human love, faith and cruelty.