Chapter Twenty-Three
After Easter, there’s a flood of commissions. All the wealthy families of Florence want to drape their halls with beauty, to welcome Lorenzo de’ Medici’s bride and earn the newly wedded couple’s favor.
And if an angel should choose to bless their home as well? All the better.
“ ‘Nubile Aphrodite’?” Giorgio reads the latest request, frowning. “What does ‘nubile’ mean?”
I snatch the paper from him. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
Leonardo’s mouth curves. Our eyes snag across the crowded workshop, an invisible rope pulling taut.
’Tis new, this sensation of being drawn to instead of away from him. As if I’ve stopped splashing upstream and finally allowed the current to take me where it will. I sincerely hope it’s not to a cave full of flesh-eating spiders.
He mouths, Tonight? and I nod. He winks back, and for some reason, it makes me blush and choke and want to hurl myself into the Arno simultaneously.
The feeling only gets worse later when I usher him inside the empty workshop and lock the door behind us.
Instead of sitting before the half-finished Medici wedding painting, he collapses on a stool by the workbench. He balances his elbows on the rainbow-stained table behind him, long legs crossed and stretched out to take up half the workshop.
“We’re going to try something new tonight.”
“We are?” Why has the air gone thin? Has he taken up half of that, too? I glance at Lupa’s corner to see if she’s noticed anything amiss, but she’s already sleeping.
“You’re going to paint.”
“I won’t! The whole point of working at night is to hide how I can’t do it.”
“I thought it was to discuss the very illegal murder and state secret we know about without anyone overhearing.”
“That too, but—”
“No, Virgil. I’m getting tired of doing all the work myself. I know you can do it.”
I shake my head. My morning exercises look like they were done by an untalented toddler. The paints run on my palette and smear into a color that could charitably be described as shit brown.
“It’s faster if you do it alone.”
“Just try.”
Heaving a sigh, I uncover the paints and add a darker shade of green to a fold in the bride’s skirt, only to realize too late that the existing color is purple and I’ve fucked it up again. I throw down my brush. “We don’t have time for this.”
His eyes snag on the part I’ve just ruined. “We do.” He stands and draws closer. Even though we’ve worked alone in the dark dozens of times before, a spark crackles along my ribs. “You know how to do art without magic. I remember your stuff when I first started here. It was good. Really good.”
“Great to hear I reached my creative zenith at fifteen.”
His laugh is closer to a sigh. “You are incorrigible.”
“I thought you liked this about me?”
“I said I liked your prickly personality. Not your aversion to anyone being nice to you.” His voice grows softer. “That gets old.”
I press my lips together and look away. The half-finished portraits and statues all seem to lean closer, listening.
The magicked paintings actually are, nubile Aphrodite nearest, with her face in her hands and her ankles crossed behind her.
She gives me a tiny glare when our eyes meet. Be nice to him.
All right, fine. I’m certainly in the wrong if even the paintings have noticed.
I gesture to the canvas. “Tell me how you paint without magic. Unless…?” My gaze drops to the lone bargain mark on his wrist.
He smiles, the expression a slow, spreading slick. He swipes his fingertip through yellow paint and covers over the mark. “If someone had told me last year that Virgil Pitti would be so curious about me, I would’ve asked if they’d hit their head.”
The slide of paint across his jumping pulse makes me swallow. I wish I could come up with a witty retort—he certainly would—but my tongue feels thick and clumsy.
He presses his yellow-coated fingers to Lorenzo’s cheekbone. A smoky hollow takes shape, making his face feel alive in a way it wasn’t before. “I like using my hands to paint. Ditching the brush makes me more aware of what I’m doing.”
Without asking, he takes my hand and hovers it over the paints. “Which color calls to you?”
I fist my hand before he can tell how sweaty it is. “No. I’ll make it worse.”
“And if you do, I’ll fix it. So I’ll ask again: Which color?”
Cristo santo, he won’t let me weasel out of this, will he? I don’t know why he cares so much but… part of me also doesn’t want him to give up on me. My eyes keep going to a purple so dark, it verges on black. “That one.”
Leonardo nods to the bride’s unfinished sleeve. “See how it feels.”
I hesitate, the paint beading on my fingertip. “Maybe I should try on a different painting.” I couldn’t bear messing this one up any more. It needs to be perfect. Our plan hinges on getting close to the Medici.
Leonardo shakes his head, catching my wrist. “Try. It’s just us.”
He guides my hand closer, and I let him. When my finger is a hairbreadth from the canvas, I uncurl it with a held breath. I pull away and leave a tiny dot on the canvas where there was nothing before.
But Leonardo gasps like I’ve put the finishing touch on a masterpiece. “You did it!”
A baby could do what I did. On accident.
I open my mouth to say so, but I can’t bring myself to transform Leonardo’s breathless smile into a frown.
I don’t want to be the person who dampens his fire tonight.
He’s helped me for weeks. I’d say it makes me want to be a better version of myself for him, but that’s not quite right.
Being exposed to his relentless warmth has thawed a part of me I forgot was there.
“I did.” I smile shyly, but the grin he beams back magnifies mine tenfold.
“Keep going.”
I dip into the paint again. This time I drag my fingers along the lines of sketch just visible beneath the yellow-gray base layer.
The texture snags on my finger pads. The bride’s dress slowly fills with a rich plum color.
It feels good, right. After a few minutes, Leonardo lifts his brush and fills in a more detailed section.
Sitting side by side with him feels right too. His breathing follows the ebb and flow of my pulse. The sky goes darker as the scent of the night-blooming flowers tumbles through the open windows lining the workshop’s second-floor gallery.
The dark makes me feel brave enough to tell him something I should’ve said a long time ago. “I’ve always admired the way you paint faces.” Their expressions are alive in a way mine never are. “How do you do it?”
He blinks, as if my question is reaching him from the end of a long tunnel.
“I always start with a real person. Not how they look, but how they make me feel.” He drags his brush through ocher and adds it to the panel.
“I’ll sketch them over and over again until they possess me, the smallest details taking up my entire mind.
Lines in a brow, the curve of eyelashes. ”
The word slips out unbidden. “Freckles.”
His cheeks go pink, highlighting his damn freckles even more starkly. I drag my tongue along my teeth, embarrassed, but not enough to take it back.
“Freckles,” he agrees quietly.
There’s a squeal as his stool scrapes closer. I’m facing him now, our knees touching. Heat roars off him like a furnace.
“If I were drawing you, I would do the cheekbones first.” His fingertips slowly drag along the ridges under my eyes.
I shiver at the whisper of coolness where the paint sticks.
“Then the eyes.” He traces my brow bone tenderly, his finger lingering at the corner of my eye.
“They’re the most interesting color, did you know? A burst of copper ringed in green.”
My heart is a storm raging beneath my ribs. After several ragged breaths, I cup his jaw in a trembling hand. “It’s the freckles for me.” My smallest finger presses against each one I can reach, gentle as a snowflake. “How many do you even have?”
A laugh rumbles deep in his chest. “Would you like to count them all?”
“I’ve tried.” I press into the one at the edge of his mouth. It might be my favorite. “But you’re so distracting, I always lose count.”
“I distract you?” He tilts his head, lips against my thumb, eyes heavy-lidded and low.
It’s not a kiss, but it could be.
My thumb drags downward, tugging on his bottom lip. “Always.”
I feel his sharp inhale, the hitch in his breath, a jerk in my lower belly.
“Virgil,” he whispers, barely loud enough for me to hear over my rioting pulse. “What are we doing?”
Dear sweet Cristo, what are we doing?
I lean backward slowly, wanting to put distance between us without hurting his feelings.
A tumult of emotions charges through me—but none of them are shame or regret or anything that would douse the hunger in my soul and remind my traitorous, grabby hands that kissing your colleague and co-conspirator is a very, very bad idea!
I’m not allowed to have this. We need to go back to where we were before.
I wipe my shaking, stained hand on my trousers. “You do this a lot, then? Make up stories about strangers?”
His mouth presses together, the movement almost imperceptible. “Perhaps. Why do you ask?”
There’s no point lying. Not when I’ve nearly kissed him and the alternative might be having to talk about that instead. “I… might’ve seen your drawings.”
“Snooping in my room? I thought a rule book brought to life like you would be above such scandal.”
I let out a breathless laugh, relieved he’s letting me change the subject. Him teasing me is safe. It’s something I can handle. “It was an accident, I swear. I went in because I feared your giant mess had finally suffocated you.”
“As you’ve noticed many, many times, I find it hard to draw when I’m asked to.” He glances aside, turmoil in his eyes. For one heart-stopping second, I think he’s going to bring up the almost kiss. “I… don’t think my mind works like other people’s.”
What an odd thing to say. “What do you mean?”
“When I’m assigned a project, I can’t work on it, no matter how much I want to. There needs to be a pressure—a deadline or a person—to force me to do the work. Sometimes even that doesn’t help. I get sucked into a new idea, and I can’t climb out of it. Here, come look at this.”
He stands abruptly, paint-sticky fingers dragging me along to the worktable. He fans a series of strange blueprints across it, hidden beneath everything else. They’re… wagons? Wagons with wings?
“Flying machines,” he says. “Verrocchio told me to come up with ideas for a church fresco, and I spent the entire day doing this instead.”
The blueprints are incredibly detailed and involve an upsetting amount of math. I trace my fingers over the lines, feeling timid and tongue-tied. This glimpse into Leonardo’s rich, frenetic mind feels like a gift I don’t deserve. “They’re good. You should keep working on them.”
He laughs again, the sound bitter. “Sure. Until they put me behind on my next deadline and Verrocchio’s glaring at me again.
” He shoves the blueprints away roughly.
I want to say that I’d like to look at them for longer, but I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to. A cold feeling trickles down my back.
Leonardo says Verrocchio chides him for not doing what he’s supposed to be doing, but I’ve done the same.
“My stepmother told me the way my mind worked was a gift, and it would take me far in life. But after four years here… I’m not so sure it’s true.
” He tips his head toward the lofted ceiling.
“There’s so much I want to do and not even time to do it all.
Perhaps I should’ve just picked one thing and stuck to it. ”
I hate the uncertainty in his voice. I want to tear it out and stomp on it.
“I love how your mind works.” Oh no. Did I just say I loved him?
I keep talking before the embarrassment can catch up, before it leads me to make a joke or self-deprecating comment that undercuts what I want him to know.
“I’m sorry if I made you feel smaller.” I think of how long it takes words to make sense when I read.
How sometimes I can’t make them make sense at all.
Father screaming at me that no son of his would be illiterate, me crying back that I wasn’t, but I needed more time to do it.
“What makes you different is what makes your work so good. If other people can’t see that, to hell with them.” I make a rude gesture, and he laughs. “If you opened a flying-machine workshop, I’d be your first patron.”
I never will—I’d be gone by then—but he doesn’t need to know that.
“I know you will.” He smiles. The soft caress on the back of my hand could be an accident, but I know it’s not. “I can’t promise they’ll work, though. You might condemn yourself to a painful death.”
“Better death by flying machine than by Medici.”
A realization comes over me—not a new one, but one I’m immediately, excruciatingly aware of. The feeling of standing too close to the fire and not knowing until you’re already scorched.
I have a thing for Leonardo.
For his cunning, quick brain that moves so fast, I can barely keep up.
Sure, yes, the rest of him too—I have eyes, I was trained to appreciate a good aesthetic—but this: him stripped down and vulnerable, that shy smile lighting up those goddamn freckles like flecks of gold—it fills my chest with such a big bright feeling, I could burst.
God, no wonder I was ready to kiss him.
How did I ever think it was jealousy that made my heart riot when his dark gaze brushed mine? That I couldn’t stop thinking about him because he was my rival? He hasn’t been for ages. Perhaps he never was.
There’s a whole, secret world in him, and even though it’s a terrible idea, I want to explore every inch of it. I wet my lips and lean forward.
“Leo—”
“Yes?” He’s never said anything faster.
My hand travels the space I put between us, reaching for his. Our fingertips collide—
A scream shatters the silence.