“A whore,” I lied, making up the details haltingly as though made uneasy by a bad memory. “She tried to rob me, afterward. Everyone tries to rob a dwarf. I fought her; she pulled a little knife out. I got it from her . . .” A shrug. “Women die differently than men.”

A black rook advanced, taking my knight. “Do they?”

I had no idea, and no intention of ever putting the theory to the test. “They do,” I lied, giving a bitter little laugh. “The bitch deserved it, but I still remember her face. Did you ever kill a woman, Your Eminence?”

The question fell into the vaulted room like a drop of water into a pool, spreading outward in silent ripples. There was a barely perceptible pause, and then—

“Careful,” said Cesare Borgia pleasantly, moving his knight. “Your king is in danger.”

I slid my king out of harm’s way. “I take it that is a no?”

“Take it however you wish, little lion man. I will tell you this—women aren’t worth the effort of killing.”

“Some might disagree. Did you ever find that man who staked those whores to the table?”

“As long as the crowds are quiet and do no more muttering about sacrifice to devils, who cares if we find him?”

“I thought you might be burning to find him, Eminence. If only to discover how he came to use your dagger on the last girl.” I had been turning that piece of information over in my mind since I’d first heard it, overheard from Giulia Farnese and her maids. Just a vicious bit of slander, I’d thought at first; no different from any other vicious slander that habitually circulated about the great. But then wildfire rumors overtook the city, and I found myself wondering.

“Ah.” Cesare looked amused, sliding a bishop one square. “You think I did it?”

“No.” I sacrificed a pawn. “You would never be so stupid as to leave your dagger behind to implicate you.”

“Perhaps I was arrogant rather than stupid,” he suggested. “Perhaps I wished to see how far I could go, and still get away with it.”

“An interesting notion.” My mouth was paper dry. “Did the first three girls not garner enough attention?”

“Three?” Bland. “I thought there were only two.”

“Three.” Anna, the first of them. She did appear to be the first, with her four-times-clumsily-slashed throat. No other girls had turned up on tables before her that I could find out. Another girl after that, one I had not even known about, killed a few months later. Then Carmelina’s fruit-seller friend, and finally the girl in the Borgo. And each woman, according to the answers I’d ferreted out from a few quiet chats with the Borgia guards, the idle city constables, the tavernkeepers where the bodies had been found—each woman had died more neatly than the last. Their throats gaping in progressively tidier slashes.