“I can’t.” He massaged the stub of his missing finger, the finger that had had to be amputated after those same French pike-men stamped it into a broken mass of blood and bone shards. “Madonna Giulia . . . please?”

I’d never heard him say please before in my life.

He looked square into my eyes. “Do you trust me?”

The words came unthinking. “With my life.”

“I assure you that if you put your honor in my hands, it will be equally safe.”

I held his gaze a moment longer, and then I fetched my scented paper and sharpened a pen. I wrote the few brief sentences for him in my looping sprawl that had never managed to conform itself to the elegant formal hand that girls of rank were supposed to master, no matter how much I practiced. I folded the note and sealed it with the fragrant wax and personal seal that anyone close would know for mine.

“I do trust you, Leonello.” I passed my bodyguard the note. “With my life and my honor. So I hope you know what you are doing.”

He was utterly silent as he took the note from my hand.

Leonello

Night came swiftly over me in the Piazza degli Ebrei. A night darker than murder, and murder was common here where the streets sloped sharply away from the decent houses toward the foul, narrow quarters that were grudgingly given over to house the Jews. Ill deeds happened every night here, because the darkness pressed the eyes like black velvet and once dawn swept it away and revealed the bodies left behind, well, they could always be blamed on the Jews.

I stood in an inky pool of shadows, looking out over the piazza with a knife in each hand already drawn, to ward away any drunks or footpads who might decide I looked like an easy mark. But the drunks and footpads passed me by, staggering or slinking to their next drink or victim. It would be hours yet before I needed to draw blood. The trap had been laid and baited, and tonight the strings would begin to tug.

Pay attention, now.