She smiled, deftly adjusting the cushions under my bandaged side. “I won’t forget it, Leonello,” she said. “That you defended me, and Laura. I’m so sorry you were hurt—”

“I’d take another broken rib right now if you’d just cease thanking me,” I complained. I’d only done what I was paid for, after all, so I didn’t see the need for all this fussing and fawning and gratitude. I’d done my job, and there was an end to it. “I want more wine, dammit.”

“Done.” She leaned forward with the flask. “And I’ll stop thanking you. But I won’t forget.”

We passed the rest of the journey in companionable silence.

* * *

Night had fallen by the time we reached the gates of Rome. Torches waited, papal guards in impassive ranks mixed with Borgia guards in their colors of mulberry and yellow; churchmen on horseback in a throng behind. The procession halted, and I saw a cloaked horseman ride toward the French captain with one hand raised.

“Cesare.” Giulia peered out the carriage window, making a face at the sight of Cardinal Borgia, her Pope’s saturnine eldest son. “No doubt he’ll hold me in utter contempt for getting myself captured.”

“I’ve rather missed him,” I said. “He makes life interesting. I wonder if he’s killed anyone lately.”

“I can never tell if you’re joking or not, Leonello.”

“It’s generally a safe assumption.” I had my suspicions about Cesare Borgia and the things he did for his dark amusement—but such things were not even to be whispered of.

Torchlight flickered over the lean planes of the young Cardinal’s face as he and the French captain traded a series of flowery courtesies. Bows were exchanged, compliments, protestations of gratitude, and then a bull-like figure shoved through the lines of papal guards toward the French. “Out of my way, you whoresons,” snarled His Holiness Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia of Spain. He raised a fist in warning to a French sergeant who did not move fast enough, and my mistress barely had the chance to ease little Laura off her lap and rise from her seat before her papal lover wrenched the carriage door open.

“Giulia,” he said thickly, and swung her down before her feet could even touch the steps. His broad arms wrapped her tight, and I saw his lips move in what might be a genuine prayer of thanks, this most wordly of pontiffs. The French looked amused and the papal guards were grinning by the time the Pope finally set his mistress of the past two years on her feet. He was tall, swarthy, heavy-shouldered; still a bull of a man at sixty-three. A fitting match for his family emblem of the Borgia bull. “You’re unharmed?” he demanded, cupping her face in his big hands.