Chapter Sixteen
You didn’t come home last night.”
Leonardo pauses on his way out the door with our sketching supplies. He turns slowly, a smirk unfurling. “Did you miss me?”
Even though there’s no reason to be embarrassed—even though it’s completely normal to notice whether or not someone is around!—heat fills my cheeks. I play it off with a shrug.
“You didn’t prep the panel for the painting like you said you would.” I finished up his abandoned chore myself after everyone else went to bed, sullenly slopping the glue on the wood and then pressing the linen into the stickiness.
Leonardo sucks in his cheeks, not quite remorseful enough to appease me.
“I’ll add the gesso tonight, then.” Gesso is the last layer we need on the panel before we can start transferring our sketches to it.
I should be happy we’re about to move on to this stage of work—it means I’m closer to getting my hands on the Medici’s golden florins—but my exasperation with Leonardo remains, a hissing cat that won’t leave my lap.
“You also missed my birthday party.”
His eyebrows shoot skyward. “Did you want me there?”
I sputter, thrown by the question. I looked for him last night, even saved a bit of cake for him, because I’d hear about it for days if I hadn’t, but looking isn’t the same as wanting. Suddenly self-conscious, I swallow and address the spot six inches to the left of his face.
“I needed to talk to you, was all. Don’t go to the palazzo today. Let me buy you breakfast instead.”
His eyebrows rise even higher. “You? Buying me breakfast?” He puts his hand against my brow.
I hiss and swat him away. “What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for fever. Something must be wrong if you’re trying to do me a favor.”
“That’s not fair! There was the time you went off with the handsome blacksmith for three days, and I told Verrocchio you were caring for an ill relative.”
He thumbs his chin pensively. “Oh yes. I forgot about that.”
“You forget every time I’m nice to you,” I grumble.
He glances at me, a sideways look through his eyelashes. “I don’t forget. You’re just so rarely pleasant, it’s hard to remember.”
I give up my fight with a frown. I can still feel the outline of each one of his cold fingers across my forehead. “This is important.”
“More important than painting Lorenzo de’ Medici’s grumpy toad face for the opportunity to paint his toad-faced children? More important than precious work?”
I groan and look at the ceiling. “Please let me be nice to you.”
He shrugs and tosses the art supplies back into the workshop. “All right, fine. I’m not the one who cares about winning.”
I wince at the crash but don’t tell him he doesn’t have to throw things.
The city is painted ocher and bronze in the morning light, the stone thawing in what promises to be one of the first warm days of the year.
Leonardo takes me to a crumbling window that faces the Arno.
An old woman with nut-brown skin hands slices of focaccia to a queue of workers.
The entire time we wait in line, Leonardo twirls that lock of hair around his fingers, over and over again.
Who does that? Isn’t he worried about losing it or getting it all greasy?
Did he pay a strega to put a curse on someone he hates?
The hair color is close enough to mine that I pat my head to make sure I don’t have a shorn spot.
The old woman has to yell at me twice before I realize it’s my turn to order.
Blushing for no reason, I order two slices topped with stracciatella cheese and roasted onions.
Then, to really sweeten the deal, I buy a flagon of watered wine from the vintner just a few doors down.
By the time we settle on the steps of Ponte Santa Trinita, Leonardo’s skepticism is drawing the interest from the female Primavera statue guarding the bridge’s northeast corner.
She bends closer with a stony creak, eager to eavesdrop.
“Out with it,” he demands. “You’re obviously buttering me up for a reason. Breakfast and wine? I doubt you even do this for your lovers.”
He’s twirling the curl again. “Do you have a ragazzo?” I ask suddenly.
Cristo santo, that’s not what I wanted to ask him!
His fingers freeze. “Are you asking me if I have a lover?”
My face is as hot as a kitchen fire, but it’s too late to take the question back. We’ve never talked about both of us liking boys before.
Of course, everyone knows it about him—Leonardo maintains all the mystery of an unshuttered window that always has a candle burning in it so everyone can see inside—but I’ve only ever brought a boy home once.
He followed me up the stairs to my attic, shy and eager, but all I could think of when we tangled across my bed was whether or not Leonardo had noticed when we tiptoed past his open door.
I expected Leonardo to bring it up—it’s the sort of thing he’d tease me mercilessly for—but strangely, he never did. “I’m only asking because what we’re doing is important. You shouldn’t let other people…” Kiss you. I bite the words back before I humiliate myself further.
His eyebrow lifts knowingly. “Distract me, as you’re fond of saying?”
I nod and shrug, the movement jerky, and try to focus on the Ponte Vecchio upriver. ’Tis early enough that the butcher shops crowded along it haven’t stained the water red yet. It doesn’t matter who he talks to. It certainly doesn’t sodding matter who he kisses. Why did I bring this up?
Leonardo slips the curl back into his pocket when he thinks I’m not looking. “No,” he says finally. “I don’t have anyone.”
It’s not the answer I expected, and he can tell. His long fingers flex, as if they can pluck the words he wants from the air. “Sometimes it’s easier to let someone take what they want from you than to want something for yourself. Do you understand?”
I don’t, but I’d rather die than admit it. “Sure.” I shoo away the hungry pigeons already gathering around us and wait until it feels like I can ask the question I really wanted to ask him.
“Did you know Lupa has magic of her own?”
Leonardo takes an enormous bite of his focaccia. Steam wreathes his face from the warm bread, the sweet tangy scent of yeast enveloping both of us. He thumbs away grease from the corner of his mouth and leaves a smudge of charcoal there instead. “No.”
“And you know how I’ve been struggling to get inside the palazzo?”
Leonardo’s snort scatters the pigeons lusting after our food. “Struggling? You’ve barely tried! Every time you look at the guards, your face turns the color of spoilt milk.”
He’d feel sick too if he remembered the casual menace of their grip. “Lupa offered to use her magic to get me inside. What do you think?”
I want to ask him to come in with me, but I can’t quite bring myself to say it yet. I need to warm up to the question, like trying to pet a nervous dog.
Leonardo takes another bite and chews slowly. He still hasn’t wiped off the charcoal near his mouth, and the smudge bothers me more than it should. After a century, he swallows and says, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
My stomach swoops at his stern tone. “If you’re worried about Verrocchio noticing Lupa’s gone—”
His eyes snap to mine. “I’m not worried about Verrocchio. I’m worried about you. I don’t trust Lupa.”
I suck in a breath. “Are you jesting?”
He shakes his head, dark eyes never leaving mine for an instant. There’s a ring of amber at the edges I never noticed before. ’Tis strange how you can see someone every single day for your entire life and still discover new things about them.
For example, the fact that Leonardo likes everyone, but not Lupa.
“She’d never hurt us!”
He runs a hand over a white scar on his arm. The wound he gave himself to save Gorgio from the ravenous, old angel. “You’re the one who named her she-wolf. Does a wolf mean to kill, or does she kill because she’s hungry? She’ll hurt us if she has to.”
I square my jaw and take a too-big bite of food and wash it down with a too-big wine gulp. He’s wrong! How could he not see that Lupa is nothing like the old angel? She would never attack an apprentice. She’s too strangely human. She cares about me.
“She uses her teeth, Virgil,” Leonardo says. “If you watched her, you’d see.”
I look away when Lupa makes bargains with the other artists, but it’s only to give them privacy.
Still, it’s impossible to ignore how when people approach her with their knives, she shakes her head and leads them into the corner where the light doesn’t quite reach.
Cloaked in shadows, she splits their skin with her mouth instead, drinking tenderly.
Sometimes a trickle of dark burgundy dries on her chin.
Once, I reached across the table to wipe it away with my thumb before I remembered what the stain was.
“She won’t hurt us,” I insist, more quietly this time. “Not unless you strike a bargain with her.”
The noise of the city settles between us. The rush of the river, the bustling bridge. Leonardo takes another thoughtful bite and wipes his mouth again, somehow still managing to miss the charcoal smudge. “You’re not afraid of angels.”
“No.” I bite the inside of my cheek as I say it, because that’s not the whole truth. Lupa doesn’t drink my blood because she won’t bargain with me. She can’t hurt me because I’m going to die. There’s nothing left of me for her to take.
Leonardo leans closer. “Most people are.”
Our faces are close—too close for me to ignore it anymore. I wipe the charcoal smudge from his mouth. He flinches and I freeze, thumb lingering at the corner of his lips. Sudden understanding rushes through me. “The angels frighten you.”
He laughs softly, but I can see the gooseflesh rising beneath his freckles. “Is it that obvious?”
“No.” But it makes sense. He’s refused to make a bargain with one; he never lets himself be alone with Lupa. Come to think of it, he tries to keep me from being alone with her too. How many bargains of mine did he watch me make with his heart in his throat, wanting to save me from myself?
My hand falls from his face. I should’ve noticed he was afraid sooner, but I couldn’t imagine him afraid of anything.
“Verrocchio’s old angel… he wasn’t the first angel I knew.
” Leonardo braces his elbows on the step behind us and leans back.
His long body fully takes up a third of the staircase now.
People step over and around us, and we should probably move, but I don’t say a thing. I’m drinking in his every word.
“I’m a bastard, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.
” His words are teasing, self-deprecating, but his smile doesn’t touch his eyes.
“When my father finally married, I loved my stepmother like she was my own mother. She was the one who taught me to draw, and then paint. She was the daughter of a painter, and she wasn’t afraid to make bargains with the workshop’s angel.
I used to draw marks on myself with charcoal to look more like her.
When she told me she was pregnant and I’d have a little sibling with red-gold hair like mine, I wept with excitement. ”
My lungs clench. His use of the past tense isn’t lost on me. “What happened?”
His eyes flutter shut. His face lifts toward the sun, his freckles like flecks of cinnabar. If I painted them, it’s the color I’d use, along with a hint of sienna earth. “There were complications. When they tried to stop the bleeding, they couldn’t. She died, and my sibling died with her.”
He’s got that curl out again, twisting it tenderly between his thumb and index finger.
In the light, it’s shot through with chestnut.
I picture him tucking it into his pocket each morning before he sits across from me at breakfast. Imagining him reaching for it and not finding it makes me tense.
It’s too easy to lose. He needs to be more careful with it.
“She should’ve lived, but she gave way too much of her life to the angel,” I guess.
He shrugs, not saying anything.
I suck in a rattling breath, knowing I’m right.
And I’ve done the same thing to myself.
He can’t find out what you’ve done.
I promised I wouldn’t lie to him anymore, but if I had known his past, I never would’ve asked him to help me.
Losing a beloved parent is awful—but losing his only sibling as well?
Niccolo’s disappearance was soul-rending.
Trying to imagine life without Giovannia and Elisabetta makes my eyes burn.
My siblings shaped the best parts of me.
Without them, I’d be a lifeless lump of clay.
I never suspected Leonardo and I were both broken in the same places.
“I’m so sorry that happened.” My voice catches. “And I’m sorry I kept telling you to make bargains.”
He shrugs again. “You didn’t know. I never trusted the angels enough to make a bargain, so at least some good came from it.”
“You don’t have to find the silver lining in something so terrible!”
At my sharp tone, his eyes fly open. “Virgil. Looking for the silver lining is what I do best. Life is too unbearable if we linger on the sorrow of it.” He tips his head and smirks just a little, as if to suggest I could learn from him.
Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Brooding is the respectable, honorable birthright of every artist. I scoff, but there’s nothing behind the sound. We’re Virgil-and-Leonardo, and this is how I’m supposed to react. If sadness is a place he doesn’t want to visit, I won’t make him sit there with me.
There’s a sudden, dazzling burst of light. My arm flies up over my face, but the burning glare vanishes as quickly as it arrived.
“Lupa!” For fuck’s sake, how long has she been there eavesdropping? “You’re not supposed—”
The angel cuts me off. She doesn’t even look at me. All her words are for Leonardo. “If I convince you I won’t hurt people, will you help Virgil?”
Leonardo gapes. He startled so hard, his half-eaten focaccia went flying. Pigeons swarm on it—the cyclone of noise and feathers enough to drive everyone else away.
“I—yes?” His eyes slide toward mine helplessly. “Is that why you dragged me out here? You didn’t want to search the palazzo alone?”
A blush bolts across my cheeks. Why is it so hard for me to say what I want? “If—if you want to help, then sure—”
“Great.” Lupa snaps her fingers. An invisible hand pushes me upright, so strong, I nearly topple forward. “Come with me, then.”