“No one will ever know.” I strode across the chamber to my bed and began stripping the linens. I would at least leave my room tidied when the servants came to clean it out. “I burned the note once it served its purpose. I gave you my word on that.”

“That isn’t what worries me! You always keep your word—you think I don’t know that?” She stared at me a moment longer, but I refused to look at her, just kept stripping the bed. “Why? Why would you risk yourself, risk me, to kill him?”

I shrugged. “It isn’t important. Suffice to say the bastard deserved it, a thousand times over.”

I watched her sidelong as she lowered her eyes to the floor, crossing herself. “I believe you,” she whispered, and pressed at her temples with her fingertips as though her head hurt. “And I give you my word, too,” she said even more guietly. “No one will ever know who truly killed Juan. Not from me.”

“I’m touched. I didn’t think you kept anything from His Holiness. Not when he’s grunting inside you, anyway.”

That brutal tone usually worked well for me, when it came to keeping Giulia Farnese at bay. Say something cutting and she retreated with quiet hurt like a swan folding her wings. This time she merely smoothed my discarded sleeves and added them to the neat pile of black clothing. “Do you really feel you must go?”

“Oh, I think it’s time.” I finished stripping the bed, heaping the linens together. “Better if I’m out of the Borgia orbit, or I might be tempted to kill off a few more of them.” I’d nearly planted a blade in Lucrezia Borgia’s long white throat today for her careless offhand spite.

But it wasn’t really the little Countess’s fault. If I’d just kept better control over my face, shrugged, laughed it off . . .

My mistress’s voice again. “Why are you really leaving?”

Don’t, I begged La Bella silently. Oh, don’t! “Perhaps I’m bored with bodyguarding,” I said lightly. “It’s a dull business, after all, sitting about while you go to confession or get measured for dresses. Besides, I must have read every book in the Borgia collection by now. Time for new pastures.”

“Leonello—what Lucrezia said—”

“Leave it, Madonna Giulia.” I strode to my small shelf of books, the last things to be packed. The old books I had brought with me: the tattered Cicero, the well-thumbed Ovid and Boccaccio, the ill-printed copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. And the new books: the Chanson de Roland I had bought from the printer with my first payment as bodyguard, the marvelously translated and illustrated Iliad my mistress had given me at Christmastide last year . . . I left the Iliad and began sweeping the rest into my pack atop the clothes.

“But Leonello—”