“And Michelotto. This is his sort of work, usually.” My first real errand, since donning Cesare Borgia’s livery. “Cardinal Borgia sent us to Pesaro, five nights ago. Very quietly. We had a letter in his hand for Lord Sforza, urging that the documents be signed, but the letter wasn’t the point.”

“What was?” Carmelina asked.

“We were to persuade him what would happen if he did not yield.”

“And?”

“And we did.”

It had been very quick work, really. All that riding, all the aches in my legs from the saddle, and the whole business itself done in a matter of heartbeats. We were on the way back to Rome almost before the sweat had time to cool on our horses.

“How did you persuade him?” Carmelina’s voice was quiet.

“Lord Sforza was in his sala—none of his captains there for once, just a page-boy with his wine and his letters. The page . . .” I shrugged. “It isn’t important.”

“It isn’t?”

Michelotto eviscerated him, I almost said. Dropped the boy’s guts onto his shoes in one stroke of the knife. Then broke his neck and slammed the letter on the table in one motion, all before either the page or Lord Sforza could scream. And then Michelotto had looked at me with his empty stone-colored eyes, and I’d known what he wanted. Known it the way a snake knows the moment to strike its prey; the moment when the eyes go wide and white the way Lord Sforza’s eyes looked. And I’d taken the dagger out of my belt and slammed it through Sforza’s hand, through the letter and into the table.

Dio. I hadn’t even meant to do it.

I—

I suppose Juan Borgia thought that too, when he shoved a knife through Anna’s palm.

Carmelina pushed a stray curl back behind her ear with one hand. The scarred hand, which looked like it had healed, but had left a mark the color of a man’s liver. I’d seen the page’s liver, Lord Sforza’s page, when his guts spread themselves on the floor.

Michelotto had given me a nod as I yanked my knife back up. Approval, almost, though it was hard to tell from a man so blank and colorless.

I’d looked over my shoulder at Giovanni Sforza as we left the study. A man of thirty or so, handsome enough with his fashionable beard and less-fashionable doublet, wax-pale and staring at the letter under his spread hand, spotted with his own blood. I looked at him, and he met my eyes. “You don’t want her,” I said. “You don’t want any part of that family.”