He’d still been staring as we shut the door. I don’t know how he covered the scene, after. Perhaps he claimed he caught the page thieving; no one would bat an eye if a lord killed a servant caught dipping in the gold. It was the sort of decisive gesture men-at-arms appreciated. Everyone liked a ferocious lord.

But Lord Sforza was not ferocious at all. Just a man from the country, a man who liked soldiers and horses and simple things, a man who must have had some sincere affection for his little Borgia wife if he had fought so stubbornly to keep her. Not a ferocious man, not like Michelotto, not like Cesare Borgia. Not like me.

“Good,” Michelotto said to me on the way back to Rome. He had a voice with no rise and fall whatsoever, a voice like a sheet of metal. “You did well, little man.”

“Will he sign?”

Michelotto did not dignify that with a response. But we heard the next day that witnesses were gathered in Pesaro to watch as Giovanni Sforza, Count of Pesaro, signed the documents stating that he had never laid a finger on Lucrezia Borgia due to his own overpowering impotence.

“Good,” Cesare said, brisk as Michelotto, and asked no more.

“Don’t you wish to know how we did it?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“Why?” The young Cardinal looked surprised. “If one leaves a task to subordinates, one trusts they are capable of handling it. I don’t employ anyone unless they are capable. You did your task, the documents were signed, and there’s an end to it.” He tossed a purse each to Michelotto and me. “Good work.”

It was good work. He had been right about me. This was the work I was made for.

If only my head didn’t ache.

I wished Carmelina would not look at me like that, with her suspicious black eyes and the accusing red eye of the scar on the back of her hand staring at me, too. I might have been tempted to put my head on her shoulder and ask her to rub my throbbing temples. But she looked at me that way because she knew what kind of work I could do, the things I was so good at. Unlike Giulia, who had looked so happy to see me when we saw each other in the Sala del Pappagallo. I lied when I said I’d retreated too quickly to read her face. I could read her face in a glance. She’d been glad to see me, lips trembling to speak, and I had no desire to hear anything she had to say.

Oh, but my head ached.