Cesare Borgia cupped the smooth skin at the point of my bare shoulder where my sleeve had already slid down, and my blood bubbled through my veins like hot wine. I closed my eyes, burying my nose in the dent at his collarbone, tangling my hands through his hair. His mouth trailed down to my breast and lingered there, teeth grazing my skin as his hand found my bare knee under my hem. He skimmed along the naked length of my thigh as he tossed my skirts out of the way; I pushed the doublet off his lean shoulders, and he seized my wrists, laying me back on the table. He spread my arms out straight, nailing them to the table with his full weight as he loomed over me. “Look at me,” he ordered, but I was already looking at him. Why wouldn’t I? The Pope’s son was a thing of beauty, amber-skinned in the light of the taper, his eyes like pitch.

“Odd,” he said. “Mostly they won’t look at me. I frighten them.”

I curled my legs up around his waist, locking him against me. “Because you’re the Devil, Your Eminence?”

“Yes.” He still leaned his weight on my wrists, hurting them. “I should frighten you.”

“You don’t.” Lie, lie, lie—I was remembering the dagger with the sapphire in its hilt, the dagger and where it had been found and all the whispers through Rome about who might have used it. A week or a day or an hour ago I’d found the thought utterly ridiculous, those whispers about a Pope’s son murdering a tavern girl in his idle hours. Now his eyes were burning into me, and maybe I did find them frightening—but I still wanted to look at him.

He gazed back, quite expressionless. His fingers tightened in an abrupt, violent squeeze, steel bands cutting my hands off, and I cried out in sudden pain.

Then he began.

Leonello