by Kate Quinn
I heard Bartolomeo gasping at my side, and not because he was winded. “Santa Marta save me,” he said in an unsteady voice. “I’ve never stabbed anyone before. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“That usually happens, the first time.” At least the boy was still here. He could have panicked at the unplanned bloodshed, stumbled off and left me to deal with the Duke of Gandia on my own, but he did not. I was beginning to have a certain regard for Carmelina’s apprentice, who I suppose was now my apprentice, albeit in a darker trade than the whipping of egg whites and the kneading of bread dough. “Clamp your teeth down on the nausea, and let’s close the gap on that horse,” I whispered in brisk tones, and he obeyed me numbly. The numbness was common too, that first time one drew blood.
I hoped he would not have a second time. Far better this apprentice stuck with Carmelina’s trade than mine.
Juan was fast approaching the place I wanted, the place where he thought he would get what he wanted. He was singing now under his breath, riding along on his pale horse as happy as a bridegroom to a much-desired bride, and in a way I suppose that was what he was. He had wanted her so long, after all. I’d seen the lust in his eyes as he took her in his arms in the courtyard and plastered his leech of a mouth over hers. She was the woman he couldn’t have, and that made her even more irresistible than she already was. And of course, any man as vain as Juan Borgia assumes all women want him too, even if they protest the opposite. I know what you want, I’d heard him breathe in her ear even as she struggled. You’re too much for an old man, you’re wet for something younger.
When Juan Borgia broke the seal of the letter Bartolomeo passed to him in Vannozza dei Cattanei’s vineyard, he’d have felt nothing but a thrill of triumph.
My love, I cannot resist you any longer—you have finally made me realize that. If you follow the man who gives you this letter, he will bring you to me tonight. We must be very cautious—but I must have you.
Unsigned, but surely Juan would know Giulia Farnese’s easy looping writing by now, her rose-imprinted seal, the familiar honeysuckle and gillyflower scent that breathed even from the writing paper she used. Even if those details escaped him, I’d added one final touch: one of Giulia’s doeskin gloves, soft and perfumed and embroidered with her family crest, which I’d slipped into my sleeve when her back was turned and then added to the folded note.
Juan Borgia had recognized the glove the moment he saw it—Bartolomeo said the Duke had held it to his nose when he opened the letter at Vannozza’s cena, held it and inhaled Giulia’s scent. Not just the smell of honeysuckle and gillyflowers, but passion; the passion she brought to everything she did. It wafted from the glove, from the note she’d written; a passion to make the blood boil in any man’s veins if he read the words on that scented page and thought they were meant for him. Never mind that she’d written those words under my direction with nothing but disquiet; the passion was still there. No wonder Juan Borgia sang under his breath as he went to cuckold his father.
He halted his horse, eyes searching through the dark for the door that Bartolomeo had described from behind his mask. A door with faded green paint, marking the entrance to a tall building with a sagging roof. Perhaps once a merchant’s dwelling with a shop below and a place for wife and children and a servant or two above, but this quarter of the city had deteriorated, and now the house was divided into small apartments rented by the week, by the day, by the hour to whoever wished to flop there among the fleas. If Juan had a brain in his head, he’d wonder why Giulia Farnese had arranged an assignation in such a sinkhole, but fortunately for me, Juan Borgia did not have a brain in his head. And even if he did, I doubted his head was his primary working organ at the moment.
I saw a beggar limp past on a crutch, half visible in the light of the torch over the door. I’d put that torch there myself when I rented the room—or rather, when I paid a half-drunk fellow at a wine shop a few coins to rent it for me, as I had no intention of being remembered by the man who rented out the rooms.
“Giulia?” Juan called hopefully toward the door, halting his horse. “Are you already wet and waiting for me in there, my girl? You like it dirty, flopping down in a slum like this? If you want it filthy, wait till you see the things I can do to you—”
I hissed to Bartolomeo through the darkness. “Now.”
* * *
Bartolomeo bounds forward with a great leap to Juan’s side, seizing the Duke’s booted leg in its stirrup. The knife he borrowed from me makes a slash in the dark and cuts the stirrup leather clear through, slashes the leg too from the surprised cry that rises from Juan. The stirrup falls, clanking on the slimy stones underfoot, and the Duke’s balance is gone with it. He falls heavily, almost at Bartolomeo’s feet, and Bartolomeo scrabbles to get a grip on his arms, but Juan is quick and lithe-muscled even if he is an idiot, and he is already rolling and reaching for the sword at his belt. Even Juan is not fool enough to go unarmed into these squalid streets; he sent Marco to bring his half armor before he even set out from his mother’s villa on this journey that he assumed would end between the thighs of his father’s mistress. He parries Bartolomeo away, staggering to his feet, and Bartolomeo’s answering slash of the knife clangs off the breastplate beneath Juan’s cloak. “Attack the Duke of Gandia, will you?” Juan hisses, and his sword whips toward Bartolomeo again.
Juan’s torso might be well protected, but half armor does not cover the legs, and I am already moving around the startled horse in the crablike scuttle that carries me with much speed if very little dignity. I hit Juan from behind with both blades drawn, slashing twice across the hamstrings and slashing deep.
Juan’s voice scales upward in a howl as he collapses, blood spurting down his boots on each side. He does not know it, this arrogant young killer, but he will never walk again.
“Take his arms,” I snap to Bartolomeo. “Drag him inside while I tether the horse and douse the torch. And Dio, will you stop his screaming?”
Darkness turns to light as we drag our victim inside the little rented room. Plans turn to action. And can we do it? turns to it is done.
* * *
Whenever I thought back to that little room afterward, I saw only the flare of light from the cheap tallow tapers I’d brought. Light flaring yellowly over an open hole of a mouth, and the bright spill of blood dripping steadily to the floor from the Duke of Gandia, who sat roped into the chair I’d brought at the same time as the tapers and the rope. Juan Borgia, terrified and furious and already in utter agony.
“You twisted little bastard, I’ll see you dead!” he howled when he saw me come around the chair from checking Bartolomeo’s knots and look him very deliberately in the eye. “How dare you lay a hand on the Pope’s son—”
“What are you doing?” Bartolomeo whispered fiercely at me from behind his mask. “Bad enough Marco saw me—you insisted we couldn’t show the Duke of Gandia who we were! You said we’d lure him here and blindfold him and give him a beating, but he couldn’t know who it was. He recognizes you now, are you mad? He’ll have you killed when we let him go—”
I spoke softly, under cover of Juan Borgia’s raving. “Here’s the part where I tell you I lied.”
Bartolomeo reared back. “About what?”
“About letting him go.”
Bartolomeo just stared at me through his mask, and I could see the white around his eyes through the eye holes. I looked at him a moment longer, waiting to see if he’d bolt and leave me now, but he continued to stand in horrified silence, and I shrugged and pulled up a chair before Juan Borgia. I listened to the Pope’s son rant for a while, idly flicking my little finger knife back and forth, and when he showed no signs of stopping I slapped him casually across the face like a lackey. That seemed to shock him more than the blood flowing from his legs. He stared at me, and then he began to froth and threaten again. This time I whipped the blade about in a slash that opened a shallow six-inch cut across his thigh; Juan gave a scream, and I motioned B
artolomeo.
“Shut him up, will you?”
Bartolomeo didn’t move. “What else did you lie about?”
“He’s getting more than a beating, I can tell you that. He’s going to answer some questions first.”
“Why?”
“You’re about to find out. Sorry to deceive you, but you wouldn’t have helped me otherwise.” I’d said very little of why I wanted revenge against the Duke of Gandia, only that I had my reasons, and Carmelina’s would-be lover had been too focused on his own reasons for revenge to give a thought for mine. Nor had he questioned my glib assertions that all I intended for Juan Borgia was to drag him off his horse to a prearranged room where we could give him a swift and anonymous beating, and then let him go. “You’re a good boy, but you still have things to learn,” I told my apprentice kindly. “The next time someone talks you into violence, check all the details first. Now, kindly gag that monster in the chair and let me get to work.”
I didn’t know if Bartolomeo would do it—he looked ready to bolt, away from me and my dark lies and my even darker intentions. But I looked at my apprentice, and he looked at me through his mask, and then he came forward silently and stuffed a rag into Juan Borgia’s mouth.
“Now, Gonfalonier,” I said, rising from my chair. “No screaming, please. Few people bother answering screams in this quarter of the city, but I’m not taking any chances. We’re going to have a long and uninterrupted chat, you and I. It’s not how you anticipated spending the evening, I know.” I shook my head at the stained walls, the warped boards of the floor, the sounds of barking dogs and muttering drunks coming through the bolted shutters. “And you thought Giulia la Bella would meet you in a place like this,” I couldn’t help saying. “Because you think she is just a whore, I suppose, and all whores of course like it dirty? Dio, it’s a good thing the killer I was hunting turned out to be you instead of your brother. Cesare would never have been stupid enough to fall into such a trap.”
“My brother—wait, what killer?” The young Duke’s eyes narrowed at me after Bartolomeo took the rag away on my nod. “If you release me now—”
“Seven.” I folded my arms again. Roped into his chair, Juan was shorter than I, and I took a perverse pleasure in the advantage of height.
“What?” He felt Bartolomeo pace behind his chair and twisted his head in a futile effort to see. “Seven what?”
“Seven girls, Juan Borgia. Seven at least here in Rome, and God only knows how many in Spain when you went to claim your bride. Seven girls staked to tables by knives through their palms. Raped. Their throats cut.”
I saw the flare in his dark Borgia eyes. A flare of fright, but behind it something else. A furtive kind of greed, and I felt the familiar savage thrill bloom in my chest. Yes, I thought, yes, oh yes. I had not thought Juan Borgia had wits enough to get away with so many killings, or tastes twisted enough to move from simple rape to this kind of dark and compulsive murder—but I had been wrong. That furtive gleam in his eye had the base cunning of a rat, and a lust black enough to see a thousand girls staked and screaming on their backs beneath him.
So many wrong turns, but not now. Not now.
“Leonello?” Bartolomeo whispered. “What is this? There were more of them? More girls besides Carmelina who he—” But I paid no attention.
“I will make you a bargain, Juan Borgia.” I rocked back on my heels, looking almost fondly at my precious, long-sought murderer. “I’ve no interest in the later girls; I didn’t know a one of them. But the first was someone rather special to me, and I believe you will remember her too, because she was your first. No, don’t argue. Not the first girl you ever bedded, I’ll wager, but your first kill. That’s why you botched it when you slashed her throat. Do you still think of her? Because she did take your virginity in another way, didn’t she? She made you realize just how much you like the occasional spill of blood to go with that piss-poor stuff you spill between women’s legs.” I met his eyes. “Tell me her name, Juan Borgia. Tell me her name, and I’ll let you go.”
Juan licked his lips.
“Seven girls?” Bartolomeo whispered. “Seven?”
“Staked down,” I said without shifting my eyes from Juan. “When I walked in to see him putting a knife through Carmelina’s palm, I knew.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” But Juan Borgia’s eyes flicked, and then he screamed again because a knife flashed out and tore a great slash through his cheek. Not my knife—this one was clutched in Bartolomeo’s fist, and it mirrored the triple slash of faint scabbed lines still visible on Juan’s cheek where Carmelina had raked him a little over a week ago.
“Tell me!” Bartolomeo roared, and tore off his mask.
“Yes, do tell.” I pulled up my chair and sat down as Juan shrieked again, from the pain of his cheek and his thigh and the agony of his hamstrung legs, which had already bled a pool around his feet. “Tell me why you feel the need to stake women through the hands before you kill them. Tell me how many you killed in Spain. Or just tell me the first one’s name, and I’ll let you go.”
It was a messy, bloody business. I asked questions and Juan answered them, and whenever he balked I calmly opened a slash in his arm or put a blade through his hand in imitation of the stakings he’d dealt out so many times. Bartolomeo threw up twice in the corner, but he stayed, stayed with horror in his eyes. I could see an even greater horror growing in Juan Borgia’s gaze, every time I cut him. The horror of knowing that his father could not save him, his position and birth could not save him, his money could not save him. That nothing could save his brash and privileged life from the implacable vengeance that was me.
He was screaming at the end, bleeding from four more wounds I’d dealt out in shallow and controlled fashion over his arms and legs and hands whenever the answers slowed. But for the most part, the answers came quickly. Yes, he liked killing girls. He killed the first because she fought too hard, because he was too drunk to finish the job between her legs and too humiliated to let her walk away knowing she’d unmanned him. He killed the others because—well, that part was less clear. He began to sob then, and his words came more and more indistinctly. He killed girls when drink made him incapable, when he was angry over some insult or failure, if the girl was ugly, or if he knew no one would miss her. One girl he had killed with his brother’s dagger, simply to spread ugly rumors about Cesare—a going-away present to his older brother, right before leaving for Spain. He thought he had killed three or four in Spain; he couldn’t remember. And no, he had no idea who had killed the girl who died when La Bella and I had been in the hands of the French, and Juan himself had been in Spain.
“Pity,” I said, and filed that mystery away for another day.
Bartolomeo stared at the Duke of Gandia in utter revulsion. Juan Borgia was still weeping, tears dripping down to mix with the blood on his face. He’d long since soiled himself; piss and shit mingled with blood on the floor. “Why?” Bartolomeo whispered, clutching at the crucifix about his neck as though fending off a devil. “Why?”
But I didn’t care much why. Never had. Even when I hadn’t known the man I was hunting was Juan Borgia, I knew Anna’s murderer had killed her and all the others because he wanted to.
Because he liked it.
“Please, little man, please, I won’t do it anymore, I won’t do it, I swear, and I swear I won’t say a word about you, if you’ll just let me go—”
“Do you remember the first girl’s name?”
His head drooped. “No,” he whispered, and I still felt not one drop of pity.
Bartolomeo was white as a bowl of milk, and I rose from my chair on legs that had gone stiff, and drew him to one corner. “Wait outside, boy,” I said quietly.
“No.” Bartolomeo’s voice was just a thread, but a steady thread. “He wouldn’t just have raped my Carmelina—he’d have killed her. Like the others. I owe him for more than I thought.” A flick of a glance at me. “And you.”
I liked
him for it, and I felt sorry because I could see the revulsion in his eyes when he looked at me, me and my bloody hands, and I could tell he wouldn’t forgive me at the end of this night’s grisly work. He might well hate me.
“So be it.”
I turned back to the sobbing, bleeding wreck that was the Duke of Gandia, the Gonfalonier of the papal forces, Pope Alexander VI’s most beloved son. “Juan Borgia,” I said quietly, “look at me.”
He lifted his head, sobbing. He had been handsome, but he was not handsome now, blood on his cheek mingling with sweat and tears, his auburn hair hanging in limp strings over his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he choked. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry you were caught,” I said. “And her name was Anna.”
With that, I cut his throat.
CHAPTER TEN
The Pope is a carnal man
and very loving of his flesh and blood.
—CARDINAL ASCANIO SFORZA
Giulia
I had never seen my Pope more frightened. In fact, I had never seen him frightened at all. I had seen him raging, passionate, frustrated, amused—but never one whit terrified by anything that God or Fortune had ever thrown into his path.
