“Eat something,” my apprentice said helplessly. “You should eat, signorina.”

“That’s your solution? Food?” All the strength had left my legs; I melted down to sit beside him on the floor. “You really are a cook, Bartolomeo.”

His freckled face glowed. At least someone could find a ray of light in this black hell we were trapped in.

Because of me.

My hands doubled into fists, but they still shook. My head was one great mindless yammer of words; two words over and over. He knows. He knows, he knows, he knows. That malicious little man dying in the next room. Torn half to pieces, but still tearing me to pieces.

Suora Carmelina. Only half right, really. Suora Serafina was the name I’d been given, when I knelt on a stone floor in smoldering resentment and took my vows in the Convent of Santa Marta as a nun.

He knows, he knows, he knows. Though he didn’t know how truly he had the power to destroy me. He’d report me only as a runaway nun, and for the most part runaway nuns were simply handed back to their convents for whatever private punishment their superiors deemed fit. But if I was exposed as a nun run from her convent, it would soon be known what convent—because if inquiries were made around Venice, the story would surely surface of the lay sister who had robbed her order of a relic, not just any relic but their patron saint’s hand, and then fled. Desecrators faced a gruesome enough punishment: hanging upside-down on a public gallows as the crowds jeered and threw stones. But as a desecrator who was also a nun, I’d be returned to Venice to face a far worse fate.

“Signorina?” Bartolomeo ventured at my side.

I turned and buried my face in my apprentice’s shoulder, winding my cold hand into his sleeve. A maestro di cucina should never show weakness before underlings, but I wasn’t a maestro di cucina. I was a fraud. They called Giulia Farnese the Bride of Christ, but I was a true Bride of Christ, and there would be no forgiveness for any of my sins. Nuns were never forgiven; their misdeeds were counted twice as black because their souls belonged to God and must therefore be stainless. If a nun turned her back on her convent, she turned her back on God Himself. If a nun took a man to her bed, she committed adultery against God Himself. The punishment for a nun’s sins would always be crueler—and my spiteful prioress from the Convent of Santa Marta, with her velvety voice and her highborn connections into all the powerful families of Venice, would see to it I suffered the worst possible punishment offered for altar desecration.

She’d make sure I had my hands and my nose chopped off.