But wasn’t it the arrogant of the world who crushed the beetles—simply because they could? “Killing is a skill like any other,” Cesare had told me over the chessboard, speaking of his first murder. “It should be practiced until it comes easily.” Could Anna and her successors have merely been practice? Cesare would have been very young at the time of her death, but he claimed he had killed his first foot-pad at sixteen—and been dissatisfied at how clumsily he had done it. And each kill after Anna had been progressively cleaner.

Maybe they weren’t such hot-blooded kills after all. There was a certain lust about them, a dark deliberation in making each kill exactly the same—but Cesare Borgia had dark lusts, that I knew. I had seen for myself the black flames in his eyes when he bid our party farewell, and spoke to me of leading the papal armies. Since he hadn’t been allowed to lead the papal armies, perhaps that black lust had found a different outlet . . .

“Roses springing in your lissome wake—”

But if Anna and the others had merely been a cold slaking of frustrated ambition, a cool self-education in the niceties of murder—if the victims had been chosen precisely because they would never be missed—then why leave the dagger with the last body to stir up so much speculation? I did not for one moment believe Cesare would have done such a thing out of mere carelessness.

Maybe he got bored, I thought. Hadn’t he said it himself, baiting me?

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

I suppose I should have wondered why he would ever say such a thing to me, but that was the one thing in all this murky mess that didn’t puzzle me in the slightest. Cesare Borgia liked games, games of every kind. Games played with chess pieces, games played with live pieces. Baiting me, whether with truth or with lies, was just one more game to amuse him. Perhaps the final game to finish off the string of murders, because it seemed possible to me that there would be no more murders. I had kept my ears open all this winter, dropping questions among the cards when I played primiera with Borgia guards, papal guards, municipal guards—I even tried prying my way into granite-eyed Michelotto’s confidence, though he just stared at me like a blind statue. And no more women had been found throat-slit and table-staked. Not since late last summer, when I had played chess with Cesare Borgia among the vaults of Viterbo and asked him if he was a murderer of women, watched by his discarded mask on the floor.

A question he had very carefully not answered.

“Soft your voice, as feathers from a dove—”