Page 86 of A Dangerous Bargain

There must be a reason for it.

Piero throws down his napkin. “Come. We’ll show you how we do it.”

Neither Leonardo nor I move.

Piero smiles. Then he says the words I can’t resist. The ones that would get me to follow them anywhere.

“Don’t you want to know what happened to your brother’s soul?”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Lorenzo leads us through the palazzo, to a door hidden behind an especially gruesome hunting tapestry. My pulse stutters when he takes out a key hanging from a chain around his neck.

The skull-headed key’s little ruby eyes wink.

“It was so kind of you to bring this back.” Lorenzo unlocks the door. “It’s been hard to get in here and the painting studio without it.”

“Wouldn’t have been a problem at all if you weren’t so goddamn careless,” Piero hisses.

Lorenzo’s smirk falls, replaced with an icy calm that’s somehow worse.

The door opens silently into the dark room. Eerie green-gold light pulses to life inside at Piero’s first step. He glances over his shoulder with another impatient sigh when he sees us hesitating. “Do you want to know, or not?”

Leonardo’s hand lights on the small of my back. The single touch steels my courage.

It’s an art gallery, but I’ve seen all the paintings before.

I spin around the room, a waterfall roar in my ears. It’s all the portraits from the Palazzo della Signoria. There are even more of them here, so many, I can barely see the wall underneath.

They’re painted in the same style—a face-on portrait, from the shoulders up—but the expressions are a spectrum of emotions. Fear. Resolution. Joy. Most of the portraits are slashed, a single cut bisecting the frame.

“The portraits are essential.” Piero rights a crooked one with a single finger. “They serve as a tether that allows the demon to possess their human host by pushing out their soul. When it’s destroyed, the demon leaves the body.”

“Kills the host, you mean,” Leonardo corrects.

I grow still when one face leaps out from the sea.

Niccolo.

I brush my fingers along the canvas, the paint’s rough texture catching on my skin. The portrait on either side of it has been slashed, but his remains whole. It makes me want to tear it down from the wall. Hide it in an iron-banded strongbox so no one can hurt it, even though a stranger dwells inside my brother.

“Your brother begged to become a host. I’ve never met someone so desperate to escape their life.”

A feeling like lightning splinters through me—the hot strike of surprise chased with burning pain. “Escape?”

You already know, an awful voice whispers. You’ve always known.

“The pressure of your father’s terrible deals seemed to be crushing your brother, but of course, you’d understand that more than me.” Piero’s grin shows every single one of his teeth. Like he knows he’s drawn my blood and revels in the taste of it. “Forfeit your life to send your soul to heaven. A lie, of course, but a necessary one if Florence is to keep her magic.”

A disbelieving noise escapes me. I think of my brother’s red-rimmed eyes the day he trudged to me through the snow and told me he was leaving.

He thought he was leaving to die.

He chose to die rather than ask for help. To be honest with me.

And I wouldn’t hug him. Refused to say goodbye.

Now his soul is drifting in hell, lost for eternity.