Everything in me lifted upward when she laughed, when her voice rippled on in its cheerful breathless chatter, when she dug into a plate of biscotti with unabashed zeal, when she shot me one of her teasing complicitous glances as a dull guest droned on at cena—and then the shaft of pleasure was always followed by a tang of bitterness, because what in this world can be more trite, more humiliating, more utterly laughable, than the sight of a stunted little man like me pining for a glorious golden beauty like her?

You are a joke. Don’t think I didn’t know it; don’t think I hadn’t told myself many times to leave this household, take myself back to the Borgo and my card games. Don’t think I didn’t rake myself, long and savagely, when I held Giulia’s note that had trapped Juan Borgia over the candle flame and found myself unable to burn it. Unable, that is, until I closed my eyes and put my head down on the page that still wafted her scent, and allowed myself to pretend—for ten precisely measured heartbeats—that those words were written for me.

The words that began with My love, I cannot resist you any longer.

Laugh at me if you wish. I won’t grudge you. I have laughed often enough, long and bitterly, at myself.

My eyes burned as I gathered my books up and stuffed them into the pack, but no tears fell and for that at least I was grateful. Giulia was silent, and for that I was more than grateful; for that I could have kissed her. As if I had not been kissing her a hundred times a day for years, in my imagination. The one kiss I had ever dared plant on her had been a poor excuse of a thing; a comic smack of my lips at the barest corner of her mouth that hadn’t in the end been quite comical enough to escape Lucrezia Borgia’s sharp eyes, God rot her.

One of my books had fallen face down, the pages crumpled, and she picked it up wordlessly. Too late I saw which book it was. “Don’t—!” I lunged, but the collected sermons of the world’s dullest Dominican friar had already disgorged their secrets, scattering a handful of loose papers. Giulia looked down at the pages covered in my writing—normally she would not have been able to read my hasty scribble so quickly, but these pages had been bound for the printer and so I had taken great care to write a clear hand. The signature of Avernus at the bottom was large and distinct.