His voice was curt. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” I said, bewildered. “I told you I bedded with my husband. I told you the day I came to you—I said I was no virgin anymore, and you said you didn’t care!”

Rodrigo sat up in bed, a bulky shape in the dark, and his voice was cold. “I’d have cared a great deal more if you’d bothered to mention you were bedding your husband and me the same damned week. I had to hear that from Adriana, once she got it out of that little coward she calls a son.”

Adriana. That rancid, tattling old trout. “I told you, it was only once with Orsino!” I said, and heard my voice scale up. How had this become a quarrel? My Pope and I had never fought before, not about anything. “Once!”

My Pope flung back the bedcovers in an angry motion and rose. “So you say.”

“It was.” I sat up, clutching the sheet to my breasts. “Adriana didn’t tell you that too, when she was busy telling tales?”

“Adriana always has my interests at heart.” Rodrigo reached for his robe in an angry swipe. “Clearly I can’t say the same for you.”

“You can’t possibly think— How dare you—” Angry words choked in my throat like hot sparks, but my Pope cut me off before I could string any of them together.

“Who put this foolish notion about Laura’s name into your head, anyway?”

“Vannozza,” I threw back. “She said you’d find a way around the law, if you really wanted to. And she’s right, you could!”

He let out a bark of laughter. “That wife of mine does like to meddle.”

I erupted out of bed, pulling my hair around me instead of a robe. “Wife?”

“She was at my side for more than ten years, Giulia. She was wife in everything but name.”

“And what does that make me?” I sputtered.

“Never mind.” Rodrigo raked a hand through his hair. “The law is the law, Giulia, and I will not go bending it just to put my name on the result of your foolishness.”

“She’s not a result!” I cried. “She’s a Borgia. One time with Orsino, just one time against all the times—”

“I don’t want to hear about him,” Rodrigo snarled, and I would have flinched at the rage in his voice except that suddenly I understood it.

“You think I would ever choose Orsino over you? Just because he’s young and—” I’d been about to say handsome, but that didn’t seem quite tactful. “Just because he’s young? Is that why you never said anything to me, when Adriana first told you?”

He made a furious little chuff of denial, but his eyes slid away from me.