I hadn’t thought of my nun’s name in a long time. It whispered over my skin like a dead breeze.

But this time it won’t be forever. I repeated that like the beads of a rosary. This sojourn behind convent walls would be strictly temporary. Lucrezia Borgia wouldn’t stay in the convent more than a few weeks, a few months—when she left, I could leave too, and by then I’d have found something else. Something far away from Rome, where Juan would never think to look for me. But until then, at least the convent walls would be safe.

“Perhaps you can come back, after . . .” But even Madonna Giulia’s smile faded. After what? After Juan forgot me? The Duke of Gandia never forgot a slight. If he’d hanged a lordling at a party for daring to call him illegitimate, I didn’t want to think what he’d do to me for scratching him across the face, or watching him be so thoroughly humiliated by a dwarf.

Somehow I didn’t think a knife through the hand would be the end of it. Or even the beginning.

I shivered, touching the bandage on my hand, and of course Madonna Giulia saw. “I’m getting you a salve for that wound,” she said, and rummaged in her store of vials and potions. “Juan’s a ravening beast; I’d stick him with that dagger myself if I could see him now—”

My face flamed. As much as I needed her help, I hated seeing the sympathy in her big dark eyes as she looked at my bandaged hand. It was what everyone looked at—the only visible sign of what Juan had tried to do, and everyone stared at it when they thought I wasn’t looking. The only one who didn’t look on me pityingly was Leonello. His eyes had been somber when he saw me that night, but they lacked pity. Leonello might have seen me shaking, crying, and bloody, but he did not seem to find me pathetic, and for that I was grateful.

Madonna Giulia finally let me go—“I’m keeping you from your packing, I know you’ve got to be traveling by dawn”—and I left her chamber with a purse full of ducats and a vial of salve and another vial of that herbal rinse she concocted that miraculously took the frizziness out of my curly hair. “Just because you’re in hiding doesn’t mean you can’t keep tending your looks. Frizzy hair depresses me terribly even when there’s nobody but me to see it. And then I just end up eating more than I should and getting plump, because I always eat when I have frizzy hair.”