Page 115 of A Dangerous Bargain

“Do you really think so? My master says it’s a waste of time and—oh.”

He stops so suddenly, I nearly walk into him.

“Your family… keeps your art outside?” He stops at the first canvas. A night over the city’s skyline. The duomo is front and center, two faceless silhouettes before it. The artist has clearly used his fingers to paint, and he’s massacred the details of the piece with his clumsy prints. It’s unquestionably terrible—too personal, too strange.

It’s my very favorite of the new paintings I’ve created.

“Not always. But when the occasion calls for it, yes.” I gesture for him to follow me deeper into the roses. There’s another finger painting of two faceless boys at a river bridge, pigeons flying off with their food.

Then a red-roofed workshop with ivy crawling up its face.

He lifts a finger to that one, mouth going slack. “I think… I think I’ve been here.”

“You haven’t,” I say softly. “Not yet.”

Around the next corner, it’s just a sketch of me. His sketch. He makes a soft sound when he sees his name in the corner.

“You might be wondering why my brother and I chose you among every other artist in Florence. I’m not sure if you remember, but you’ve drawn me before.”

After Leonardo lost his memory, I bribed Giorgio to go through Leonardo’s room and bring me any sketches the Medici had missed.

He only found one, hidden under the mattress, just beneath the spot where Leonardo dreamed each night.

I framed it myself, like it was a holy masterpiece destined for the grandest church in all of Europe. Like each long-faded line was a tender fragment of my heart.

And now it’s hanging in the farthest corner of the garden.

Unlike all the other sketches he made of me, I’m smiling in this one.

He goes marble at the sight of it, cold and still. I know what he sees—how unsettling it must be. No one can look at these drawings and not see that the artist loved the subject. I can’t look at this and not realize he once loved me.

I dig my nails into my palms, willing my anxiety down into the smallest, darkest place in me. It’s going to be fine. Bargain or not, he still has an uncanny memory. He’s going to remember. He has to.

He touches his signature with a single finger. “I drew this.”

It’s not a question, but I answer anyway. “Yes.”

His eyes flicker to me. “Of you.”

Tears fill my eyes. “Yes.”

A minute passes, a century. My entire world narrows to that furrowed line on his brow. He’s looking less like someone on the verge of being assailed by a feral creature, and more like the scholar I know and love, the boy who once asked me in complete seriousness if centaurs and insects were the same.

Do you remember? Please remember…

My chest is airless, entirely made of hope. I draw up beside him and run my finger along the fading black mark on his wrist.

“You saved my life, but there was a cost.” Not only my life, but my very soul. Would I be here, putting my wild, beating heart in his hands if not for him? Would I have taken down the walls I built to keep everyone out even as they imprisoned me like a tomb? Lupa told me to stay alive, but I wasn’t living until I let him in.

Even if he never remembers me, I’ll never forget him.

“A cost.” His breath is steady and even, nothing like the riot in me. Does it quicken at my touch? Does his body know me even if his heart can’t? A flower doesn’t know why it unfurls for the sun. Something within it tells it to grow toward the light.

There’s still a seed inside him that calls us together, I’m certain of it.

He catches my wrist in his elegant hand. I shudder as the cuff of my sleeve rises, baring my skin and the first of the black marks marching up my arms. He makes a bitten-off sound at the sight of them.

“Virgil.” His voice is warm, breathless. It curls around my name like a quilt, like home. “Virgil.” He brushes back my overlong hair, traces his thumb under my jaw, where my pulse leaps.