I didn’t even know I’d thrown the knife until the guard staggered back, clapping a hand to the blade in his shoulder. Carmelina contracted into a trembling ball about her staked hand. And Juan Borgia just straightened in slow arrogance, darkness writhing in his eyes.

“Get out of here, dwarf,” the Pope’s son rasped.

The Pope’s son. So I’d been half right all along. I’d just had my eye on the wrong son. No wonder Cesare Borgia had seemed so entertained.

“You will take your thug, Gonfalonier,” I said. “And you will remove yourself at once.”

Juan’s voice scaled up. “How dare you!”

I felt the same floating emptiness I’d felt when I swept Giulia behind me and faced the French army with nothing but the blades in my hands. I had a blade in each hand now, though I couldn’t remember drawing either, and I pointed one straight at the Duke of Gandia.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Juan snarled, and started for me. I flicked my wrist, and Juan stopped as the blade winged through his hair, carving a thread-fine furrow along one temple. A hair’s width of blood welled up. He’ll see you dead for that, I thought, but I didn’t even remotely care. I whipped another knife out of my boot top and held it between two fingers.

“There are only two of you,” I said, quite conversationally. “And if you think I cannot kill you both with ease, you are sadly mistaken. I believe you have no weapon, Gonfalonier, since you were careless enough to leave it stabbed through that girl’s hand, and your guard is on the other side of that table. By the time he rounds it, you will be dead and I will have seven more blades to spare for him.”

I heard Carmelina’s soft gasping from the table, and I saw Anna’s murderer hesitate. I could see a flush creep up from his collar. A red wave of it, like all the blood he’d spilled over the years. “When the Holy Father hears—”

“The Holy Father will hear a great deal,” I said, wondering in some quarter of my brain how my voice was coming out so calm when my insides were such a vicious coil of tension and rage. “Carmelina Mangano might be only the cook, but Giulia Farnese counts her a friend. You wish to upset La Bella, Gonfalonier? She is the only person in this world whose side the Holy Father will choose over yours. Cause any further damage to her friend, and I assure you she will bring your father’s wrath down around your ears.”

Another pause, one I counted not in heartbeats but in the slow drops of blood from Carmelina’s staked palm.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

“I won’t forget this,” Juan snarled.