She flung herself down beside me with a great lack of grace, sighing. I would have wondered why a princess would talk to a dwarf, but bastard-born Sancha of Aragon was not much of a princess. I’d never spoken a word to her before, but I’d observed her the past few months after she and her sulky little husband Joffre had come from Naples. It wasn’t for nothing that my mistress referred to her as the Tart of Aragon. “Spread her knees for the nearest page boy, she will,” I’d heard one of her maids whispering to another. “Then tease her little husband about it, just to see his chin quiver!”

“An afternoon wasted,” Sancha complained, jamming a pearl pin further into her piled hair. “Cesare said we’d have the whole day after he was done visiting with Lucrezia!”

“How efficient of him,” I said. “Visit his sister, then pick up his sister-in-law on the way home for a good romp.”

Sancha cast her blue eyes at me. “Does that shock you?”

“Nothing shocks me,” I said, but thought of my friend Anna again. Her death had shocked me profoundly—staked out on a tavern table by a knife through each palm, and her throat cut afterward. She had a dimple in her cheek, her one claim to prettiness, and it had had a drop of dried blood in it by the time I found her dead on the table.

“Cesare might be able to shock you.” Sancha laughed. “He’ll do anything, you know. I had him take me once on the altar over there, in his cardinal’s robes.”

Time was, I’d thought him capable of sins a good deal more sinister than fornicating in a church. Three men had killed Anna: a guardsman and a steward from the Borgia household escorting a young masked man hunting through the slums of Rome for a whore. The steward and the guardsman I’d hunted down myself, but I’d never found the man in the mask. Time was I thought it might be Cesare, or maybe his vicious brother, Juan. And there had been other girls after Anna, found table-staked and throat-slit and raped. Five in all . . .

But the last had been a year and a half ago, the night after La Bella and I had been captured by the French, according to the gossip I’d gleaned on my return. Juan Borgia had been off in Spain then, and Cesare Borgia had been pacing the floor in the Vatican, witnessed by a hundred eyes as he tried to reassure the frantic Pope that his mistress would not be murdered by the French King. La Bella and I had not died that night; another girl had—but since then? Nothing.