Normally, I could. But when my husband’s pride was hurt . . . and even if he enjoyed these intimate little gatherings of the powerful, he surely still heard the snickers that followed him. Orsino Orsini, the eternal cuckold with his soiled wife trailing her bastard Borgia daughter.

Give him a son, I thought. Give him a son of his own, and he’ll deny you nothing.

But I didn’t want to give him a son. I didn’t want to, no matter how willingly I made myself lie under him whenever he wanted me. I kissed him and caressed him because it made him happy, because it was my duty, because I felt sorry for him—but that didn’t stop my private little prayer every time he spilled inside me: Please don’t let him get me with child. Every time I prayed it, and every time I stowed the sin away for my confessor because it was a wife’s duty to want sons. When I was a virgin bride reciting my vows to Orsino, I’d assumed I’d bear him whole batches of sons, and I’d even looked forward to it because I was supposed to. But things had not turned out that way, and I had only the one golden daughter, and I had no intention of shipping her off to France so she wouldn’t get in the way of some chinless little half brother who didn’t even exist yet.

“Giulia?” At my other elbow, Orsino sounded anxious and showed me his cards. “Which should I play, my little rose? The deuce? Or—”

“The deuce,” I whispered back, and tried not to sound irritated. Living in the Borgia household beside all those decisive men really had ruined me, hadn’t it? Rodrigo, Cesare, Leonello—even Juan Borgia may have been an illiterate cat-killing despoiler of virgins, but at least he could decide what card he wanted to play. I ask you!

Orsino laid down the deuce with a flourish, looking about him with a pleased air, and my irritation changed to the more familiar pinch of guilt. “I’m a bad wife, Sandro,” I whispered to my brother on my other side as the turn passed to him.

“Not anymore.” Sandro tossed his own card out carelessly. “You’re very well-behaved and boring these days, I assure you.”

“But it doesn’t come naturally to me anymore. All these wifely things our mother taught me, the things I used to take for granted—”

“Oh, sorellina.” My brother looked a little sad. “None of our lives have turned out quite as we planned, have they?”

“No whispering!” Rodrigo called out. “I get enough of that in my formal audiences. Caterina mia, your draw—”

But a man’s shriek broke through the companionable chatter of card-play.