“Thank you,” I said, and not for the vial of hair rinse. It was a beautiful summer morning, blue and gold and cloudless overhead, and the dusty outlying villages around Rome were beginning to give way to dry yellow plains dotted with grazing sheep. There was color and warmth and noise in the world again, not bells and grilles and cold. I wanted to stretch, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, and I wanted to cry.

Suora Serafina was dead and buried. Most officially.

“It was all Leonello’s plan.” Giulia dropped a kiss on her bodyguard’s brow, looking so very wifely that I had to wonder one or two things. “But thank me if you like, Carmelina. I hope you feel grateful enough to come be my cook in Carbognano forever?”

Bartolomeo and I looked at each other. He’d been buttering bread and laying out little slices of marbled prosciutto and whisking napkins into impromptu baskets for the grapes; he had a smear of butter in his hair already and he had been muttering under his breath about the lack of a proper credenza. We grinned at each other, and looked back to our former mistress.

“We’ll stay in Carbognano for a little while, Madonna Giulia,” I agreed. “But we want to move on soon to Milan.”

“The court of Il Moro,” Bartolomeo said, nudging the cat’s curious nose away from the prosciutto. “What do those Milanese know about proper food? We’ll take it by storm.”

“We?” Leonello looked between us, and sharp-eyed Giulia clapped her hands and squealed.

“A ring!” Seizing my left hand to look at the band of delicate filigreed gold. “Let me see—”

“Dio,” Leonello said. “Women!”

It wasn’t a true ring, not the kind passed between husbands and wives when they recited their vows. “I still can’t marry you,” I’d said to Bartolomeo last night in the convent storeroom, pressed so tight between barrels of bad flour that my only option was to lie along the hard freckled length of him with my nose up against his. It was exquisitely uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t have moved for the world. “Even if we manage to get me pronounced dead, I’ve still given vows. Any vows we said afterward would be invalid.”

“In a new city where no one knows you, who’s to know about the vows?” Bartolomeo pointed out. “Either the ones you took to God, or the ones we didn’t say to each other?”

“God will know.” I couldn’t help crossing myself. “Don’t pretend that doesn’t trouble you.”