Page 106 of A Dangerous Bargain

“Leonardo!” His name bursts from my chest, from my very soul. I pull him onto my lap, smooth the rust-gold tangle from his face. He’s my last second of sunlight, the person I’d give anything to see again. He’s finally here in my arms.

His eyes open a sliver, bloodshot and swollen. There’s a cut on one cheek, like he was nicked by someone’s ring. The thought of anyone hitting him fills me with a feral, vibrating rage.

He blinks, focusing. “Virgil?” His fingers hover just over my cheek, like I’m a painting too fresh to touch without ruining. “I didn’t think it’d take so long.”

I comb through his hair, searching for injuries. “What are you talking about, caro?” This confusion isn’t him. He’s the smartest, quickest person I know. My anger coalesces into a fiery throb in my center. If they hurt him—if anyone touched a single goddamn freckle—

His mouth tugs sideways, like I ought to be smarter than this. “Dying and coming back to life. I’ve been terribly bored without you.”

I laugh, the sound echoing all around us until it ends in a sob. “I missed you too.”

His fingertips trail over my face, down my neck, softer and colder than snowflakes. They push at the flutter in my neck, counting my heartbeats. “You’re alive.” He clutches my wrist with sudden violence, eyes filling with relieved tears. “It worked.”

I kiss them away, savoring every taste of him I can get. A shadow creeps over my heart, eclipsing my happiness. I want to clean his bloodied face and feed him castagnaccio and tell him I saw his stepmother, and his baby sibling had his red-gold hair. I don’t want to put him in danger again. “Lupa sent me back. We’ve got to destroy the portrait that sealed the devil’s bargain with the Medici.”

Something slams into the window.

A forked tongue laves the glass between three sets of gnashing teeth. Cracks spiderweb through the windowpane, spreading with each thrust of the demon’s tongue. I cower, but Leonardo sits up and makes the sign of the cross. The demon snarls. With a baleful look, it bludgeons the window with a thick, scaly tail and disappears.

“It doesn’t hold them off for long,” Leonardo says. “Will destroying the portrait stop them?”

“Them, and the rain.” My mouth twitches, almost smiling. “If we don’t finish this soon, the city will flood.”

Leonardo scrambles upright, one hand offered to me. “And I thought it was only raining because you had died.”

I pull myself up, not letting go of him. “The rain reminds you of me?”

“It always has.” He kisses me so softly, I could float away. “Everything a little sad reminds me of you.”

My answering smile is its own sun. My thumb runs along the ridges at the base of his fingers, just above his palm. We have calluses in all the same places, and I still want to learn every single one of his.

Another slam.

The demon is back, a claw tip worrying into one of the window cracks. When we look, it goes stone-still. A cat stalking a mouse.

I swallow and stumble backward.

Leonardo’s arm catches my back, stopping me from hitting the capsized worktable.

“Careful now. You don’t want to jostle it.”

“Jostle what?”

The room is a disaster, but on closer inspection, the disorder seems almost deliberate. The worktable isn’t smashed, but broken and rearranged, its wooden pieces fastened together with hand-carved mortise-and-tenon joints. A familiar panic skitters down my spine—like Leonardo’s ditched Verrocchio’s morning exercises again, and I’ll have to be the one to tell our master.

“You know that I’m not great at doing what I’m told.” Leonardo moves a bundle of ripped bedclothes onto what’s left of the table and starts tying the shreds to wooden pegs. “When the Medici told me to paint, I decided to make something else.”

“Make what?”

Leonardo smiles up from his tangled hair. The expression is sly, flirting with a smirk. The infuriating one that’s always gotten under my skin like a fever. He nods toward the inside of whatever the worktable has become. “Can you give me that jar near your feet?”

I step closer, seeing something that can be described as wagon benches, one behind the other.

And on the floor beneath it is the vial of Lupa’s blood.

I draw in a soft breath. His cut-up hands, his bloodshot eyes. Leonardo hasn’t been slapped around by the Medici or mourning my demise.

He’s been working on a secret project.