Instead of speaking the words out loud, Sodoma mouthed them: Felice. Della. Rovere.

My stomach dropped like an anchor. Yes, that’s where I’d heard that name. People call her the pope’s “niece”—don’t they?—how-ever . . . When Felice was nineteen, she’d poisoned her husband because he was rumored to have heard about a potential plot to murder her “uncle.” What niece do you know who goes around murdering their own husbands to protect their uncle? And when Julius was elected pope, he brought Felice down to Rome by sea, escorted by a dozen papal galleons at full sail. A dozen papal galleons at full sail. That’s some welcome for a niece. I remembered the Orsini crest on that dagger she’d pulled on me. “The husband who she . . .” I made a slashing sign across my throat. “He’s an Orsini?”

“No. Her first husband, the one who . . .” He repeated my slashing sign across his own throat. “He was some no-name merchant from up in Savona. Her second husband is the Orsini. He’s very much alive. For now.”

“She’s remarried?”

“His Holiness spent a year finding a second husband for her. She kept chasing off any suitor who threatened to take her out of Rome. He settled on using her to make an alliance with the Orsini. The violence has quelled some since their marriage.”

“So, if she’s married again, why is she still wearing widow’s weeds?”

Sodoma shrugged. “To remind us all that she’s unafraid of death?”

As Sodoma shuffled back to work, I took out my father’s paintbrush and began twirling frantically. The woman I’d confronted in the Sistine wasn’t only an Orsini, but a della Rovere, too, and the child she was carrying was a descendant of both. I leaned against the scaffolding to steady myself because how could I ever hope to survive in Vatican court—much less succeed in it— when I’d made an enemy of the daughter of the pope?

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVII

People are starting to talk,” Bramante said one day, cornering me in the hall. “You’re a maestro in your own right, it’s time to get your own rooms.”

“Sì certo,” I replied, adjusting my collar, so he wouldn’t notice the stains. I’d been turning my shirts inside out so that no one would notice that I kept wearing the same ones. A trunk from Evangelista had arrived a week before, but it only contained one extra pair of shoes, one shirt, one jacket, two pairs of breeches, a small workbag, and a whole box of painting rags and brushes, so I still had to conserve my clothes. “I’ve been too engrossed in my work to look.”

He squinted at my neck. “And if you need a recommendation for a barber . . .”

My hand flew up to cover the cuts. “My boy’s still learning, but I like supporting youth.”