I could hear Michelangelo clomping around his studio, so I moved through the darkness quickly. If I could hear him, then he could hear me. I slid each foot forward along the slick stone floor, hoping to feel a ledge before I walked off it. Uno, due, tre, quattro . . . The corridor smelled of grassy mold and—what was that? Blood? Maybe Michelangelo had caught me after all and beaten my head in with his hammer; maybe this was what it felt like to be dead. I walked faster. The corridor echoed with plunks and squeaks—what were those? Rats? I started to run. Was that someone breathing? Was there someone in there with me? My foot hit a wall, and my hands came up without thinking; I’d smacked into . . . what? Was that a handle? And were those hinges? Yes, yes. A door! I pulled on the handle again and again, but it was locked. Why did those squeaking rats sound so loud? I knocked on the door. “Help!” I kicked and cried, “Please open up!” and—

The door swung open. I stumbled forward, desperate to be out of the darkness, but a man blocked my exit. “Who are you?” He raised a torch to my face.

I held up my hand, a shield from the sudden blaze of light. “Per favore, signore . . .”

“Where did you come from?”

“A friend’s workshop.”

He pulled the torch away. My vision adjusted. He was a cardinal, dressed in official reds. Short with humped shoulders, he had one of those stereotypical friar’s heads: a semicircle of gray hair curling his bald skull. He said, “Michelangelo does not have friends.”

My breath caught. The cardinal knew this passageway connected to Michelangelo’s studio? I leaned in the doorway like any good courtier, as if I didn’t have a care in the castle, and said, “As much as one can be friends with any sculptor, Your Eminence.”

The cardinal peered back down the corridor behind me. “Is he following or . . . ?”

“He has something to finish in the studio before . . .” I’d exited onto a landing of a nondescript spiral stone staircase; there were no clues on which to fabricate a fiction. “He sent me on ahead.”

“Without a key?” The cardinal took in my rough appearance but also seemed to register the quality of my leather boots, fine velvet vest (despite the rips), and papal summons conveniently poking out of my pocket.

I smiled easy and said, “Knowing him, he probably thought it was funny.”

The cardinal chuckled. “And you are?”

“Pardon my impertinence.” I swept into a low bow. “Raphael Santi of Urbino.”

When I stood, his eyes were dancing. “Ah! Bramante’s protégé! I’ve heard of you. You’re subject to my cousin, Francesco Maria.” Urbino’s duke was cousin to the pope and this cardinal? How many of his family were there in power? “I’m Cardinal Raffaello Riario,” he said. “Cousin to His Holiness. Call me Fafel.”