And all of this before I could even brandish a new weapon. But I wasn’t wholly useless. Once she slammed the door behind the last man, I grabbed her and rolled us both across the floor to smother the flames rising up her skirt, used my jacket to tamp out the last few burning sketches, and then dunked her torch into a bucket of water—or what I thought was water; the acrid smoke told me it was more excrement in nature. The point is, the flames were out, we were alone and safe, lying in a pile of charred wood and paper, breathing hard, when Felice turned to me and groaned, “We should’ve let the place burn.”

That was not the sentiment I was feeling in that moment, so I pushed my hair out of my eyes and said, “Cosa?”

She grabbed a stack of charred sketches off the floor and threw them at me.

I flipped through the drawings: a great architectural facade, three stories tall, with niches and an array of muscular figures. “I stand by my earlier assessment: Cosa?”

She crawled around the floor—still breathing hard—and pushed sketch after sketch at me like a wild dog kicking dirt over his . . . his . . . you know. “These are all drawings for my father’s . . .” She didn’t say the word “tomb,” but I heard it nonetheless. “This is why he’s so sick. That blessed sculptor is still tempting the reaper.”

I flipped through Michelangelo’s drawings of that tomb—one was more miraculous than the next. “You can’t honestly believe that.”

She glared at me with the same look that Michelangelo gives me every time we speak: You’re a fool, aren’t you? “Aren’t you the painter who believes that you can bend the world toward perfect with nothing but a bit of paint?”

I wiped ash off the end of my nose.

“So, why couldn’t Michelangelo also use a drawing or two to bend the world toward death?” She pulled the drenched torch out of the mucky bucket and tossed it at me. I spun away from the splatter. “Go outside and fetch a new flame. We’ll light the place on fire. No one will ever know it was us. They’ll think it went down in the riots.”

I didn’t want to waste more time, not when I needed to be rescuing Margherita, but also I wasn’t going to light any art on fire; not even Michelangelo’s. I shoved those drawings into my satchel. “No.”

“No?” She said that in the tone of a woman unaccustomed to being refused. She pushed aside a fold in her scorched skirt. The handle of her dagger gleamed.

I stood up. “I need these drawings.”

She marched on me.

I stumbled backward. “To save your father.”

She paused her advance. Her dagger disappeared back into the folds. “Go on.”