“This morning I was vomiting from the effects of too much wine.” He removed his cap with care, stubby fingers gingerly massaging through his dark hair. “Mere suffering seems a great improvement.”

“Chilled lemon water,” I said briskly. “Nothing like it for a sore head. Not that they have lemons here, or even water that I’d care to serve my guests. So—” I uncorked a jar with a cross carved into it. “Communion wine.”

“Stealing from this convent too, now?” Leonello winced at the thump of the jar on the table as I put it before him.

“I robbed a reliquary from my last convent,” I said after making absolutely certain the two lay sisters weren’t eavesdropping outside in the courtyard. “You think I would balk at communion wine?”

Leonello managed a grin. “Can you possibly be bantering with me, Suora Carmelina? You haven’t spoken a word to me in years except to scratch and spit.”

“Any man who comes to my rescue with knives drawn must be viewed in a better light,” I informed him. “Even if he does know every secret I have.”

He studied me. “I would not have told, you know. I did like to torture you with it now and then, but as for truly giving you away?” A shrug. “Even I am not so cruel as that.”

I looked at him, my little adversary sitting with elbows propped on the trestle table and his chair tilted back on two legs, hazel eyes serious under cocked black brows. He looked small and wry and unexpectedly kind, not at all as sinister as I’d first found him. And though he was far beneath my eye level as usual, his broad-chested, big-headed little figure in its plain black had more quiet authority than Juan Borgia ever had in his most swaggering finery.

“I am sorry, you know,” I told him, and didn’t mind the apology. “That I was so prickly with you, and for so long. I misjudged you.”

“Most people do. You at least did not misjudge me as a drooling idiot or some fool in motley. For that”—raising his cup—“I thank you.”

I gave him an answering grin, wondering if we might have cleared the distrust away for good, and retrieved my ladle and bowl. “So?” I asked as he drank an abstemious mouthful from his jug. “What brings Madonna Giulia here? And why aren’t you with her instead of putting your feet up in my kitchen?”

“She has gone to see the Countess of Pesaro in private.” Leonello tilted the jug, looking down into it. “To tell her, in fact, that her brother is dead.”

I stopped stirring, feeling my mouth grow dry all at once. “Which brother?”

Leonello looked at me straight. “Juan.”

I dropped my ladle for the second time as I made a grab for the edge of the table to steady myself.