“I have six men!”

“No,” Leonello corrected gently. “Five. Because I’m going to kill the first one who lays a hand on me. Likely I’ll only get one, and then the other five can string me up as you please. But the first one dies, and that I promise. So—” he gave a benign smile, stropping one of his daggers along the top of one boot. “Who wants to be first?”

Juan’s guardsmen, who had started forward obediently with hands on dagger hilts, suddenly looked a trifle uncertain. One or two even looked shamefaced—after all, plenty of the Borgia guardsmen rather liked Leonello, who often joined the house guards at their card games when he wasn’t guarding me. Whether out of fright or out of consideration, they hesitated, and I took a step forward up to my bodyguard’s side, repressing the urge to put myself between him and the danger just for once rather than the other way around. His pride would never stand for that. “May I add, good sirs, that this man is under my protection?” I fingered my huge teardrop pearl, reminding them just who had given it to me. “Which is to say, the protection of the Holy Father Himself.”

“The Holy Father does what I say!” Juan snarled, but his men had fallen back a step, looking between my gleaming jewels and Leonello’s gleaming blades. Leonello’s mouth had tilted in a smile of faint contempt, gazing at Juan who stared back in flat loathing, and I laid a warning hand on my bodyguard’s shoulder. Juan was hard enough to handle without being further stoked by Leonello’s jibes.

“Go home, Juan,” I said, and wiped an ostentatious hand along my mouth as though to wipe the taste of his kiss away. “Get out now, and perhaps I won’t say anything to the Holy Father. How you threatened my bodyguard, or how you put your hands on me.”

“Tell him,” Juan shrugged, with a final narrow look for Leonello. “I’ll say you led me on. He always believes me, don’t you know that by now?” The Duke of Gandia lowered his voice. “And you do lead me on, Giulia Farnese. I know what you want. You’re too much for an old man, you’re wet for something younger—”

I whirled and stamped into the palazzo then, hearing Juan’s snigger behind me as the doors shut. “I’ll find you another day, dwarf,” he called in a parting shout. “When you’re not hiding behind a whore’s skirts!”

Leonello merely yawned. “You shouldn’t taunt him,” I scolded as the guards bolted the doors and I heard the retreat of bootsteps from the courtyard. “He never forgets an insult, you know that.”

Leonello fingered his damascened knife hilts. “Then I’ll give him some new insults to remember.”