So I threw my head back and gave the Holy Father the most vicious smile I could muster. “You think I was ever faithful to you?” I spat. “From the beginning, it was Orsino. We were together every chance I could find. My true husband, my young husband, whom I love more than life. Far more than I ever loved you, you foolish old man.”

Something in Rodrigo’s eyes died at that, but now that I’d started this flood of words they wouldn’t stop coming. I hardened my heart.

“Laura. Is. Not. Yours.” I enunciated each word and aimed it at him like a stone. “She is an Orsini. There is nothing Borgia about her. She’s not a vicious brute like your precious Juan, or a coldhearted murderer like Cesare, or a vapid little twit like Joffre. And she’s nothing like your darling Lucrezia, who is shallow as a cup and filled with nothing but fashion and spite.”

I turned in a flare of skirts and stalked for the doors. The Holy Father did not stop me. “No French comte will want Laura for an alliance, Rodrigo Borgia,” I called over my shoulder. “Because she is not your daughter. And I am not your pearl.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There is no redemption from Hell.

—POPE PAUL III, FORMERLY ALESSANDRO FARNESE

Carmelina

I was very fortunate. Very fortunate indeed. Everyone told me so—Leonello, the prioress—and I had to agree they were correct. Cesare Borgia did not bother addressing one word to me, but he would have told me I was fortunate, too.

My hair had never been beautiful. Too thick and prone to tangle; too curly and always escaping its pins in frizzy tendrils. Not beautiful hair; not golden and silky and down to my feet. Madonna Giulia would have cried if she’d been the one kneeling on a stone floor as a sour-faced lay sister with a face like a withered plum sheared her bald. But I had been fortunate enough to have ugly hair, so I knelt dry-eyed as the shears went snip snip snip and all my unruly curls piled up on the flagstones.

“Please understand.” Leonello’s voice had sounded so deathly flat when we spoke in the frosty courtyard. “This is the best I could do for you.”

I hadn’t managed more than a dumb nod. He still had his knife in his hand, blade gleaming in the rising moon, and Michelotto waited with the reins of his horse and Pantisilea’s stiffening body slumped before him in the saddle. He was playing idly with her limp fingers, twining them with his own as though they were fond lovers cuddling in the saddle, and it was not a sight that encouraged me to speak.