“Now, Gonfalonier,” I said, rising from my chair. “No screaming, please. Few people bother answering screams in this quarter of the city, but I’m not taking any chances. We’re going to have a long and uninterrupted chat, you and I. It’s not how you anticipated spending the evening, I know.” I shook my head at the stained walls, the warped boards of the floor, the sounds of barking dogs and muttering drunks coming through the bolted shutters. “And you thought Giulia la Bella would meet you in a place like this,” I couldn’t help saying. “Because you think she is just a whore, I suppose, and all whores of course like it dirty? Dio, it’s a good thing the killer I was hunting turned out to be you instead of your brother. Cesare would never have been stupid enough to fall into such a trap.”

“My brother—wait, what killer?” The young Duke’s eyes narrowed at me after Bartolomeo took the rag away on my nod. “If you release me now—”

“Seven.” I folded my arms again. Roped into his chair, Juan was shorter than I, and I took a perverse pleasure in the advantage of height.

“What?” He felt Bartolomeo pace behind his chair and twisted his head in a futile effort to see. “Seven what?”

“Seven girls, Juan Borgia. Seven at least here in Rome, and God only knows how many in Spain when you went to claim your bride. Seven girls staked to tables by knives through their palms. Raped. Their throats cut.”

I saw the flare in his dark Borgia eyes. A flare of fright, but behind it something else. A furtive kind of greed, and I felt the familiar savage thrill bloom in my chest. Yes, I thought, yes, oh yes. I had not thought Juan Borgia had wits enough to get away with so many killings, or tastes twisted enough to move from simple rape to this kind of dark and compulsive murder—but I had been wrong. That furtive gleam in his eye had the base cunning of a rat, and a lust black enough to see a thousand girls staked and screaming on their backs beneath him.

So many wrong turns, but not now. Not now.

“Leonello?” Bartolomeo whispered. “What is this? There were more of them? More girls besides Carmelina who he—” But I paid no attention.