He was screaming at the end, bleeding from four more wounds I’d dealt out in shallow and controlled fashion over his arms and legs and hands whenever the answers slowed. But for the most part, the answers came quickly. Yes, he liked killing girls. He killed the first because she fought too hard, because he was too drunk to finish the job between her legs and too humiliated to let her walk away knowing she’d unmanned him. He killed the others because—well, that part was less clear. He began to sob then, and his words came more and more indistinctly. He killed girls when drink made him incapable, when he was angry over some insult or failure, if the girl was ugly, or if he knew no one would miss her. One girl he had killed with his brother’s dagger, simply to spread ugly rumors about Cesare—a going-away present to his older brother, right before leaving for Spain. He thought he had killed three or four in Spain; he couldn’t remember. And no, he had no idea who had killed the girl who died when La Bella and I had been in the hands of the French, and Juan himself had been in Spain.

“Pity,” I said, and filed that mystery away for another day.

Bartolomeo stared at the Duke of Gandia in utter revulsion. Juan Borgia was still weeping, tears dripping down to mix with the blood on his face. He’d long since soiled himself; piss and shit mingled with blood on the floor. “Why?” Bartolomeo whispered, clutching at the crucifix about his neck as though fending off a devil. “Why?”

But I didn’t care much why. Never had. Even when I hadn’t known the man I was hunting was Juan Borgia, I knew Anna’s murderer had killed her and all the others because he wanted to.

Because he liked it.

“Please, little man, please, I won’t do it anymore, I won’t do it, I swear, and I swear I won’t say a word about you, if you’ll just let me go—”

“Do you remember the first girl’s name?”

His head drooped. “No,” he whispered, and I still felt not one drop of pity.

Bartolomeo was white as a bowl of milk, and I rose from my chair on legs that had gone stiff, and drew him to one corner. “Wait outside, boy,” I said quietly.

“No.” Bartolomeo’s voice was just a thread, but a steady thread. “He wouldn’t just have raped my Carmelina—he’d have killed her. Like the others. I owe him for more than I thought.” A flick of a glance at me. “And you.”