“I’m sure he does, too! What if he’s caught and hanged because of me?” Dread pooled sickly in my stomach, replacing all my stunned shock. I could not even imagine the vengeance the Pope would unleash on anyone with a hand in the death of his favorite son. “Bartolomeo should take himself away to Naples or Milan, and as soon as possible. He can just as easily build a career outside Rome.” Just as easily, and far more safely.

I looked up at Leonello and I couldn’t help a shiver, meeting his calm, unrepentant gaze. I didn’t see him fleeing to Naples or Milan—he’d see this terrible business out to the end, whatever the cost. “Thank you,” I said. “I am grateful, you know. Even if it had to come at such a price.”

“I hate gratitude,” Leonello said, and tilted his head upward as the bells began to ring overhead, calling the nuns to Terce. “Unless it’s the kind of gratitude that offers itself up naked across my bed, but you clearly like your bedmates quite a bit taller and younger than myself.”

I felt too worn even to muster a glare. Instead, I leaned across the trestle table, and I touched my lips to his broad forehead. Leonello grinned and rose, and I hoped he wouldn’t be damned to hellfire for this unholy business. He didn’t seem to care one way or another, but I found that I cared. I crossed myself, shivering again, and he made a dusting-off motion of his hands as if to push my prayers and my sympathies away.

“Now,” he said, clearly done discussing vengeance, guilt, and all the rest of it. “Shall we go to Madonna Giulia, then, and tell her you will be accompanying us back to the palazzo?”

Back to the Palazzo Santa Maria, back to my kitchens, back anywhere I wanted. Juan Borgia was no longer anywhere in this world to threaten me. “Home,” I said, and the first faint stirrings of hope rose in me. Home.

“Yes,” Leonello agreed. “I’m sure the Countess of Pesaro will be far too busy weeping for her brother to put up a fuss over your leaving.”

Madonna Lucrezia was not weeping, however. She was screaming.

* * *