“Cesare will always take Lucrezia’s side over Ours,” Rodrigo snapped. “We thought We could at least count on you to follow Our wishes!”

He went ranting at me again, and I cast my lashes down. A touch of the penitent wouldn’t hurt: a repentant Magdalene ready to kneel at his feet and press her lips to the papal shoes.

“Lucrezia is happy, Your Holiness,” I ventured as soon as he stopped for a wrathful breath. “So happy. Lord Sforza pleases her, and she pleases him.”

“It is not her business to be happy! She is Our daughter; she will do as she is told!”

“Always.” I cast a glance up through my lashes. “But surely His Holiness is pleased to see her so content in the marriage you made for her?”

Not just content, but glowing. Lucrezia had flung ecstatic arms about me the moment the Sforza entourage left the courtyard in its important clatter of hooves. “Thank you,” she had whispered. “I can bear it now, if he has to be gone for a time. I’m not useless anymore!” She had spent the past weeks humming all over the palazzo, stitching with great wifely industry on an embroidered shirt that she meant to give her husband on his next visit. “Husbands like presents from their wife’s own hands,” she told me with a sage nod, and I’d been careful not to smile.

Lucrezia’s father was not smiling either. His dusky face darkened even further, and his eyes narrowed to folds at the corners in a way that prickled me.

“You are Our concubine, Giulia Farnese.” His voice dropped from its bull roar to a cold levy of sentence. “Not Our councilor, not Our ambassador, not Our adviser. And certainly not the mother of Our daughter Lucrezia. Or of any other child of Ours.”

That stabbed me. Tears pricked my eyes, but I bit fiercely on the inside of my cheek. I would not cry before him; I would not.

“I am none of those things, Your Holiness,” I managed to say, looking up at him with a steady gaze. “Unlike your ambassadors and your councilors and your advisers, I care only for your happiness. Your happiness, and that of your family.”

“That is precious little consolation.” He clipped off the words. “You disappoint me, Giulia.”

At least I disappointed him, not Us. “It pains me to think so.” I stretched out a hand, touching the back of his knuckles, but he brushed me aside.

“I have a great deal of business to attend to.” Turning away. “Do not look for me tonight.”

I was not going to stand by for a fortnight this time, waiting and hoping for him to get over his temper as I had when we quarreled over Laura and Orsino. I caught hold of his embroidered sleeve, halting him. “Surely it is part of the Holy Father’s duties to punish transgressors?”

“Yes.” Impatiently, he shook at my grip.