Hearing my proper title in that smug voice made my teeth hurt. I thumped the cup down beside his books, so hard it splashed. “Mulled wine. Madonna Giulia’s orders.”

He reached for it. “Our lord Jesus Christ is the only man to be served by nuns. Maybe I’ve died and been resurrected, to earn such a privilege?”

I glowered. “Drink.”

“Something I’ve been wondering.” He swirled the wine, ruminating. “I know you cut your hair and traveled as a man, when you escaped your convent and made the journey to Rome. You’re tall enough, and flat as a marble slab in the bargain—you’d pass. But I’ve always wondered how you got over the convent wall in the first place. Bribery? Ladder? Grappling hook?”

I hesitated, but I wanted him complacent, and feeding his curiosity seemed the best way to accomplish that. “Bribery,” I said shortly. “I paid a fisherman to pick me up in the night with his boat. Now drink.”

Leonello chuckled, taking a long sniff of his mulled wine. “Smells cloying. Are you trying to sweeten me up?”

“I assure you, it’s delicious. Wine, honey, cloves, a pinch of pepper—” I watched him take a sip. “And a dash of hemlock.”

He froze, and I lunged. He was strong for a dwarf but the French had left him weak and blood-spent, and I slammed him flat to the pillows with my hand across his mouth. “Don’t swallow,” I said. “Just hold that wine in your mouth and listen.”

His hazel eyes regarded me calmly over my hand.

“You know what I am,” I said. “Mostly, anyway. I took the name Suora Serafina when I took my vows at the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice. Serafina,” I couldn’t help saying with a certain exasperation, “so you can stop all this Suora Carmelina business!” And I still couldn’t understand how he’d found out in the first place. Only my cousin Marco Santini knew where I’d fled from, and he was sworn to secrecy. To the rest of the household, I was just Marco’s orphaned cousin from Venice come to help in his kitchens now that she had no other place in the world. But somehow Leonello had put one fact with another, and then another—my hair, which had been chopped short when I first came to the household; my avoidance of churches and my knowledge of Latin prayers—who knows how many details he’d managed to sniff out? He was far too clever for his own good, or mine.

“You think you can ruin me, by telling the world who I am?” I went on. “Well, you can. Even worse, because I won’t just be hauled back to my convent if I’m found. I’ll have my hands and my tongue chopped off for desecration, because I stole a reliquary from my convent to get money to travel south.”