“Ever original,” I murmured, but I felt a violent squeeze of relief in my chest. If he had rushed me—

He would never have rushed me. A man who had to nail a girl’s hands down before he killed her would never rush even a dwarf.

I stood well back from the cellar doors, not lowering my eyes or my knives until the Duke of Gandia snarled something at his guardsman, and the two of them stalked out of the wine cellar.

I heard one great gasp from the trestle table behind me as the footsteps receded. “Th-thank you,” Carmelina gasped. “Thank you—”

“You’re quite welcome.” I still stood in the doorway, watching the quivering shadow of my murderer disappear up the stairs. Once he turned to look back, and I saw a parallel rake of three lines across his cheek where Carmelina had scratched him. Blood on his face and murder in his gaze as he looked at me.

But not tonight. Tonight he would take his unspeakable urges to bed unslaked. My masked murderer.

Don’t be wrong, I thought coldly. Don’t be wrong this time, dwarf. After all, a girl had been killed while Juan Borgia was in Spain; that alone had made me scratch his name off my list when I was looking for my murderer.

But only one girl while he was gone in Spain, one girl in three years. Things had gotten so quiet during those three years, I’d convinced myself I must have constructed the whole thing from my imagination. But they hadn’t been so quiet after all. Juan Borgia had probably been killing girls in Spain instead, girls turning up staked to tables in Gandia and Barcelona instead of Rome.

He could not have killed the one girl in Rome during that time. I didn’t know who had killed her—but he had killed the others. He had killed Anna. I was sure of it.

Five years, Anna, I told my friend. It took me nearly five years, but I found him.

I heard Carmelina’s voice again behind me, a thin quiver. “Is—is he gone?”

“Quite gone.” I sheathed my Toledo blades, kicking the cellar doors shut.

“How did you—” I heard the rustle of her skirts, saw her try to sit up on the trestle table. “How did you come to be here?”