The festivities moved out to the Sala Reale after that, a high-arched hall that had already been prepared with stools, padded benches, and liveried pages with trays of sweetmeats. The guests chattered and circulated, freed from the stifling confines of Burchard’s propriety and the small sala. I obeyed my orders and drifted, keeping my charges in my sight. Lucrezia, stiff with the importance of the moment, sitting between her papal father and her new husband as the first dishes were presented . . . Giulia moving effortlessly through the crowd, laughing and easy, drawing every eye . . . little Joffre in a slashed-velvet doublet, pop-eyed with the effort to behave like a prince . . . Cesare, dark and lounging, lifting his cup across the room to his sister and winning from her the first effortless smile of the evening . . . Still no assassins, and a troupe of players came out, painted and masked, to launch into one of those mindless comedies that seem inevitable at all weddings, and I thought, How Anna would have loved this.

Had my friend been alive, I would have smuggled her in to watch this gathering of the greats. Gotten her a temporary job as serving maid, perhaps. But of course, Anna could not ever have been here to gape at the young bride’s jeweled gown, or marvel as the Pope settled himself in his throne with all his Spanish arrogance. If Anna had not died, I would never have swum into the Borgia orbit at all.

The comedy was succeeded by a more classical offering; a Latin play by Plautus that the Pope silenced halfway through, bored and frowning. Giulia Farnese slid from her chair to curl on the step below his throne, her fingers stealing upward to twine with his inside his sleeve, and he smiled down at her as a poet hastened forward with a pastoral eclogue. Papal thunder, abated by a woman’s slow-burning smile.

I could hear Anna’s voice, but not remember her face. It had been a long time since I’d thought about the man who had escaped me: the one in the mask who had helped kill her. I’d done for the other two, after all. No need to look for the third. Especially not with Cesare Borgia warning me just what would happen if my knives stirred up any trouble, for any reason other than protecting his family. I was certainly no hero—bringing a murderer in a mask to justice wasn’t worth having my own murder charges resurrected.