“Bitch drew blood,” I heard the Duke of Gandia mutter, pettishly. “Hold her hand out. The one she scratched me with.”

The guard locked my body down this time, forcing out my left arm. I had a sudden flash of Cesare locking my body down on a table, spreading my arms just like this, but he had held me down to keep me from moving as he tasted my skin an inch at a time—

The vision disappeared in a flash of agony as Juan took the dagger from his belt and slammed it in one casual motion through my hand and into the wood below.

It hurt—sweet Santa Marta, but it hurt! Had Leonello hurt so badly when he lost his little finger to the French? If it had pained him half as much as this, he should have trumpeted my secrets all over Rome in revenge. My bloody lips parted, but I couldn’t make a sound. The quivering blade neatly bisected my palm, now slowly filling with blood.

“Good,” Juan panted. He cuffed blood off his cheek from where I’d scratched him, and I could see a bulge in his codpiece that wasn’t just fashionable padding. He was reeling drunk, but dear God, he was hard as a kitchen spit. God help me, I thought, God help me, God help me—but why would He bother? I’d been wedded to His Son, and I’d fled them both.

“Hold down her other hand,” Juan Borgia ordered. “Hold it down, and give me your knife.” The guard had no resistance from me this time as he spread my limp arm across the trestle table. But he hesitated as he took the knife from his belt and began to give it to his master, hesitated with a strange little grunt, and I opened my swimming eyes to see the puzzlement in his gaze as he looked down at the blade suddenly growing from his shoulder.

“Stop this at once,” said a cold voice from the cellar doors.

Bartolomeo, I thought idiotically. But the figure in the doorway was far smaller, a dwarf with a knife in each hand who fixed the Duke of Gandia and his guardsman with an implacable gaze and said, “Let her go.”

Leonello

A spill of yellow candlelight making jagged shadows over the stacks of wine casks. A girl’s long body arched and writhing across a table like an agonized female Christ. The knife through her hand, its hilt throwing a cruciform shadow in stark relief across the flagstones. The blood pooling in her palm, dripping slowly through her fingers to the floor as Juan Borgia bent over her other hand.

I saw it all in one horror-filled instant. What a thing to see, when all I wanted was a cup of wine and a little sleep.