Page 73 of A Dangerous Bargain

“What’s he doing here? I was the winning painter! How could you fools get it wrong?”

In my lifetime of hating Bartolomeo Rucellai’s voice, I’ve never hated hearing it more. I shove the cracked door as hard as I can. Hear the outraged gasp as it slams closed. “This imposter is trying to take what’s mine!”

This time the guards must assist him, because even with my entire body weight against it, the door flies open. The force sends me stumbling into Niccolo. He grabs my shoulders, holding me up as much as he holds me away. He glances at his ring, then his eyes meet my own for one searing second. “Volpacchiotto?”

Bartolomeo freezes like he’s seen Medusa. “Niccolo Pitti?” His shocked stare bounces between us. “Both of them?”

My brother’s eyes roll up inside his head.

Then he falls to the floor screaming.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Niccolo clutches his head and screams, his eyes ringed with white and shot through with red.

I lurch closer, wanting to help but terrified to touch him. What if I make it worse?

Lorenzo de’ Medici and two more guards pour through the open door. Lorenzo balks at the sight of me. “You again!”

I sidestep them before I’m boxed in, racing through the door and back into the hall.

Leonardo and Clarice de’ Medici are gone.

I make a split-second decision to go right, the opposite way of the grand stairs leading to the garden and the glittering party.

At the end of the hallway, another door bursts open, and out pour five more guardsmen.

I skid to a stop, choking back panic. The guards from the painting studio pound down the hall behind me; these are racing toward me from the other side, and there’s no way to go. I have no weapon except the stupid skull-headed key, which will prove beyond a doubt that I’ve been sneaking into forbidden spaces. I should’ve slipped a knife in my boot; God, even a paintbrush would be more useful, but I didn’t think this through, and now they’re almost upon me. I can count the gray hairs in the first guard’s mustache—

“Virgil!”

A hidden door thuds open from the wall. Leonardo is frantic, his face ghost-pale.

I dive into the space right before the guards reach me. Leonardo slams the door shut and kicks a splintered board between the door and the wall. When the guards slam against it, the board only lets it open wide enough for a single, furious eye to glare at us. “Come out, ragazzi! We only want to talk.”

“The party is fabulous! What more is there to say?” Leonardo kicks the board again, and the eye vanishes.

We run down the pitch-dark servant passageway.

I hold my breath each time we pass one of the doors leading into the main house, but no one bursts through them. We stumble up a small staircase, then down another, and then the passage dead-ends at a door. It opens up to the hay-and-horse-smelling courtyard. Laughter and music reach us, the din of the wedding on the palazzo’s other side.

How long will it be before the guards figure out where we ended up?

“Should we steal horses?”

Leonardo snorts. “You think I can ride?’ ”

The door from the palazzo bursts open, guards rushing out.

We dash into the street.

Each turn leads us to some new obstacle—chickens, kissing couples, drying laundry—and loses us precious seconds. The heavy footsteps behind us crescendo, angry voices nipping at our heels. I taste blood in every breath.

Unless a miracle happens, we’re not going to outrun them.

We tear around another corner and stop short.

The city wall rises before us.