I’m thinking your brother Juan might have murdered that girl in the Borgo, I almost said. And before her a fruit-seller named Eleonora, and a girl named Anna. Juan Borgia’s name had come easily to mind once I began contemplating my masked murderer again, after Carmelina told me of her fruit-seller friend’s death. After all, what did I know about the man I sought? I knew he was a young man from within the Borgia household, gone slumming in the common quarters and splashing money about, trailing a guardsman and a steward appointed to keep him out of trouble. That certainly fit the arrogant young Duke of Gandia. But as neatly as it fit, I had my doubts. Whoever had staked those girls down was exercising a lust far darker and stranger than mere commonplace rape, and Juan Borgia’s lusts were of the extremely ordinary variety. I didn’t think he had the imagination for dark ritual murder. Or the patience, or the brains . . .

“You’ve gone a long way away, little lion man,” Cesare Borgia observed.

If not Juan, who? One of his swaggering, violent young friends, perhaps—

A yell from the door interrupted my thoughts. “Leonello!” A furious female voice shattered the heat. “What in the name of Santa Marta are you doing to my side of beef!”

“Signorina Cuoca,” I greeted the tall figure with the wrathful black-browed face. “How untimely.”

“That was for tonight’s cena!” Carmelina shouted, pointing at my large and fly-specked target. “It’s supposed to be going on a spit!”

“Think of it as pre-spitted, for your convenience.” I held up my hands, modest. “No need to thank me.”

She muttered some Venetian curse and began to storm past, then noticed the lounging figure of Cesare Borgia and his guardsman. “Your Excellency,” she muttered, and dropped a belated curtsy.

“Not at all.” He waved her up with a rare grin. “Better than a play. Do you require rescuing, Messer Leonello?”

“I do apologize,” she began, eyes lowered, but Cesare shrugged her apologies aside as well. One last lazy salute to me, and he was gone as though whisked from a stage by pulleys, Michelotto ghosting behind him.

Carmelina had already hastened to look at my makeshift target. “Mucked and torn to pieces, look at that hide! Pierced through a hundred times at least, it will never hold its juices now—” But I stood quite still now that Cesare was gone, tapping the toe of my boot against a crack in the tile. Tap tap tap.

Another woman found staked to a table, with two knives through her palms. Anna first. Then the fruit seller in the market, though I had been able to discover very little about her. And now this one.

One, I remembered thinking before, might be an accident. Two was a coincidence. But three?

Anna’s masked killer flickered again before my eyes. Whoever he was.