Chapter Forty-Four
I pace across the painting studio, a staticky, crackling restlessness racing through me. “We’ll find a way out of this.”
I won’t let anyone hurt you.
The unspoken promise fills my veins with iron. It’s not one I can keep.
Leonardo doesn’t act like he’s heard me. He sits on the edge of the pallet, his head in his hands, hair cascading to his knees. His back is to the canvas and paints on the worktable. Someone must’ve stocked it when we were out.
Leonardo’s things are here as well. His extra clothes.
A patched winter cloak. Most chilling is the stack of leather folders rising from the floor to the table.
Leonardo opened the first one and then recoiled as if it were a striking serpent.
They’re all the sketches and machine blueprints from his bedchamber, organized and catalogued in a way he would never have done himself.
A violence and violation of his very being. He hasn’t looked at them since.
Nothing of mine was moved here. I might as well already be gone.
“How?” His question is a tiny, broken thing. It cracks something in me. He’s all sunshine, my light. I don’t know how to be the person who fixes things for him, even though I want to be.
“We can make a bargain.” I settle on the bed beside him.
The mattress dimples under our weight, pulling us together thigh to thigh.
I pull out Lupa’s vial and uncork it so he can see the gold blood for himself.
“Lupa gave this to me before she left. She’s not sure how it’ll work, but it’s worth a try. ”
Leonardo’s eyes widen.
Then he pushes it away gently. “No.”
“No?” I repeat, certain I’ve misheard. “It could be a way out. We might as well try it.”
Niccolo’s soul has been stolen. We’ll be dead in three days. What else do we have left to lose?
He sighs at my furrowed brow. “Let’s think through this. If we escape, what happens next?”
It feels like Verrocchio is peering over my shoulder, evaluating my work and finding it wanting. “We’d get far away from Florence. I’d tell my family to follow. We could open up your workshop.”
Leonardo’s mouth pulls ruefully, as if I’ve answered wrong. “What about your brother? Would he come with us too?”
I pull in a sharp breath, as if I’ve stepped on broken glass.
I don’t know what to do about Niccolo. He’s gone, but he’s here. He’s soulless, but alive. I found him, but he’s never felt further away. I can’t leave him here, but I don’t know how to save him.
I don’t know if it’s possible.
Leonardo’s fingers lace through mine. His pulse gallops in the hollow of his throat.
“You know what would happen next. The Medici would find another unsuspecting painter to lock up. They’d find more desperate, innocent people to agree to end their lives and be possessed by demons.
More people would make bargains. More people would die.
I can’t let that happen. My mother, your brother, Bartolomeo.
How many more people will suffer? I can’t run away from this now that I know the truth. ”
Panic lunges in me, a frightened, snapping dog. He can’t ask me to leave him here. I won’t. “If we escaped, we could get help. Tell people what’s going on—”
“You said it yourself. Who would believe us over the Medici?”
Rage seethes through me, a bruising, wild river of it. I shouldn’t be angry at him—none of this is his fault—but I’ve been so angry for so long, I don’t know how to feel anything else.
“So that’s it? You’re just going to give up?”
His warm lips brush across my frigid knuckles. “It’s not giving up.”
I rip away from him, even though it feels like sinking a knife into my own skin. “You should do it, then.”
“Do what?”
“Paint me.”
His umber eyes pierce me, drawing the air from the room. “No.”
“Yes. I was never going to survive this year anyway.”
If Leonardo does what they demand—if he paints this one portrait—it might buy him the time he needs to come up with a way to tear it all down forever. The Medici only have need of one artist, and it’s not me. I’m a spare, a body good for filling up with something more useful.
But not to Leonardo. Never to him.
A spasm shakes his body. “I won’t end your life.”
Why can’t he see the obvious? I’ve been waiting for this moment the entire year. “Then someone else will soon!”
He makes a soft, furious noise and shoves me.
I fall back on the pallet, gaping at his blazing face. The dying sunlight has caught in his hair, spinning it all to glorious fire.
“You can’t ask me to take a life. Especially not yours.”
“It’s the only way to save yourself and end this—”
“Then after, I’ll do what? Live a life without you?” His breath is ragged, stirring up flurries of golden dust motes. The hand pinning me down is a brand, a stone, a cathedral over my heart.
“I thought you wanted to end the age of angels and magic?” Can he feel how I’m shaking? “I’m giving you the chance to do it.”
As abruptly as it swept over him, the anger clears. Disappears into some distant part of him I’ve never seen before. He yanks me up roughly. “I need to show you something.” He drags me to the worktable, flipping open one of the leather folders and gesturing for me to look.
I make eye contact with a sketch of my own face.
It’s not the sort of image anyone would want in their house, certainly not one they’d commission. My brow is furrowed, expression angry, a paintbrush clamped betwixt my teeth.
“That’s from when you were doing the Strozzi commission,” he says. “You were fighting with the canvas the entire time.”
I trail my fingers over the feverish lines of my face. Each one is rendered in exquisite, loving detail. It’s like someone saw past my skin to the soul beneath.
His hand is a torch against my back. “Keep looking.”
The folder is filled with drawings of me. At work, at the dining table, alone in my window overlooking the garden. There’s even one of me holding up Giorgio’s phallic apples.
There are dozens and dozens of sketches, in all stages of completion. One for every day of the year, one for every time I scolded Leonardo for not getting his work done. One for every time I thought I’d never be happy again.
His voice is as soft and steady as a heartbeat.
“Every time I kissed someone, I wished they were you. When I couldn’t force myself to draw anything else, your face was the only thing I could finish.
” He laughs, the sound like the flash of gold leaf in the candlelight.
“I always wanted to draw you during our morning exercises, but I was afraid you’d notice. ”
The words shift and crackle through me like a fire. All the sketches of other people I found in his room. All these of me lying just underneath. I was so close, but I didn’t see them.
We’ve ended up back at the first sketch, the precise lines now blurred. “Why didn’t you ever ask? I would’ve sat for you.” Then maybe we would’ve realized sooner what we meant to each other. Then maybe we would’ve had more time together.
He brushes the dampness from my face. “I was terrified you’d say no.
I dreamed of you for too long to let you go, even if it was only in my head.
” He traces my cheekbones, like he’s putting the final touch on a masterpiece.
“That’s why I asked you to open a workshop with me.
It was never about the sodding work. I wanted a life with you.
” He draws in a long, shuddering breath that I feel everywhere.
“Whether we have months or years together doesn’t matter.
It won’t change how I feel. Any time I have with you is worth it.
” He brackets my face like it’s something holy, something cherished.
His dark eyes burn. “You’re wrong if you think you’re giving me what I want by sacrificing yourself.
I never wanted anything until I wanted you. I’m not letting you go now.”
It sinks into my soul: not the words, but their meaning. What he’s tried to tell me before and what I couldn’t understand.
“I love you too.” I press my face into the divot where his neck meets his shoulders. Melt against him so there’s no space left between us.
He shudders, like there’s a crack in the earth, a fissure in the sky. “Truly?”
He was too afraid to say it first. I’ll say it over and over again so he knows, so he believes that I finally figured out what I should’ve known for ages. “So much, I can barely stand it. I’ve loved you for years.”
And it’s too late.
I’ve found the love of my life when there’s no more life left to live.
For once, I don’t quail away from the pain. I let every bit of grief and regret hail against my heart. I grit my teeth at the ache, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt. He can’t just hear this: He needs to feel the truth in every part of his body. “I really wish we could’ve had that workshop together.”
The most agonizing thing is I can see it.
A room overflowing with paper and paintbrushes, wisteria climbing over the front windows to dye the light purple in the late spring.
There’d be two painters’ stations downstairs but only one bed upstairs.
Each day I’d be up before him, lay out the bread and jam for us both, my entire body waiting for the telltale creak above that means he’s finally up too.
I’d stop working, and we’d eat together.
Perhaps we’d even lock the door, return upstairs.
We’d get nothing done; we’d get everything done that mattered.
It could’ve been ours. A perfectly imperfect life.
He tilts my chin up, his mouth a whisper from mine. “You see it too, don’t you?”
Each heartbeat of mine feels like a too-big breath, so deep it hurts, but I like it. I want to remember everything about this for as long as I can. “It’s incredible.”
He smirks—that irresistible little smirk that’s gotten under my skin for ages. “Of course. Anything we create together would be, tesoro.”
He kisses me. Soft and sweet, but soon it turns hungry and hard.
I push him onto the pallet the way he pushed me, and from the way his pupils flare wide, he likes it even more.
Then we’re kissing columns down each other’s body, fumbling with laces with warm-honey smiles that melt away all the bad feelings.
We try to stay quiet in case anyone’s guarding the doors, but ’tis impossible to stop whispering, a stream of yes and all right?
and I love you, I love you so goddamn much.
His face lies against my chest when we’re done. I feel my heart pounding, and I know he can hear it too. I trace patterns on his skin, imagining a golden line linking all his freckles together. A map into his heart.
“It was nice to do this again without Lupa hovering over us,” he says. “She told me she wasn’t there, but unlike you, I do think she can lie.”
I poke him and groan. “I do not want to think about her now.”
“Too bad.”
“Always need the last word, do you?”
“I love having the last word. It’s my second favorite thing in the world.”
Because I’m his first. I have to bite my lip to keep from smiling too broadly.
The sky grows dark through the ceiling window. Soon Leonardo’s breath slows. His fingers go slack with sleep in mine. I hold him to me, wishing I could join him in slumber but watching the moonlight scythe across the floor instead.
My eyes flick over to the vial on the table.
I’ll see you on the other side. That’s what Lupa said right before she vanished.
What odd final words. And she was smiling as she said them.
Almost like she was happy about being torn from the body she possessed.
Almost as if she was trying to tell me something.
I press myself up on my elbows, suddenly wide awake.
Carefully I ease Leonardo’s warm weight from me. I slip my pillow where I was, drooping with relief when his arm tightens, bringing it closer to his chest.
He’s so beautiful like this, silvered in the shadows. He could be a statue in a royal garden. If he were, I’d go there every day and run my hands over the marble of him, even if stone would never do his freckles the justice they deserve.
I shrug on my crumpled doublet.
Then I move toward the waiting canvas, the palette knife already biting into my skin.
There’s one final bargain I have to make.