Page 18 of A Dangerous Bargain

I grimace and drag a hand through my dark curls. I don’t like her tone—as if I’m someone who steals food from hungry children or kicks puppies. “They were trying to hurt you. Protecting the workshop’s angel is a vital duty.”

She pushes up on her toes and kisses my cheek. “Thank you.”

My hand flies over the spot. There’s a curious, helpless pull in my chest. “You’re welcome?”

She nods like she’s the one who saved me. “Stop this moping and choose to live. I like you, Virgil Pitti. You’re my friend.”

And even though her words are trite, even though I worry that the workshop’s only nonhuman starting to feel like a friend isn’t a good thing, there’s a little burst of warmth in my chest anyway.

I offer her my arm to take her home. “I’ll try.”

CHAPTER TEN

After the plates and food are cleared from dinner, I go to Leonardo’s room, but he’s not there.

Although he could be. There is enough mess to hide at least three Leonardos. The desk is an unspeakable wreck of papers, charcoal, and old paintbrushes, some of them snapped, some of them ruined with dried-on paint. The bed is a snarl of blankets, pillows, and clothes, the linens stretching halfway up the wall. The floor is littered with torn bits of paper, crumbs. I even spot a spider weaving a web that rivals the grandness of the duomo itself. When I step inside, one of Verrocchio’s garden cats leaps from its hiding place through the open window. Madonna santa, he lets them sleep here? I grimace and try not to sneeze.

It seemed better to talk to Leonardo here, where no one could see me or hear me, but being in his room feels too intimate, and waiting outside the door feels desperate.

I don’t know why Lupa is so convinced he’ll help me. Leonardo is many things, but I wouldn’t say helpful is among them. Sure, yes, he helped me once, but only once. When it’s time to rinse off the brushes, he’s mysteriously ill. When someone must sweep the workshop floors, it’s his day off. He does exactly what he wants to do, and nothing more. Begging him to make helping me one of the things he wants to do causes my palms to sweat, my heart to crawl along the bottom of my stomach.

What if he says no?

Then I’ll have groveled for nothing, and he’ll lord it over me forever. It would crush me.

I move to wait outside the door and knock into a bookcase I didn’t see behind me. An avalanche of paper flutters to the floor, all of them sketches in various stages of doneness.

I kneel to pick them up.

And freeze when I see what they are.

Figure drawings, dozens and dozens of them. People in piazzas, people in cafés.

People in bed.

Those make my cheeks hot. There is nothing obscene about them, but the attention of each careful line, the delicacy of the details, feels astonishingly intimate, too private for my pillaging eyes.

So he does practice, even though he pretends not to. Is this what he does when he ditches our morning lessons? Why not just tell Master Verrocchio, so he’d stop punishing his lateness with chores? Each sketch is arresting, alive, even the half-finished ones. Sadness in the slant of the light, a declaration of love in heavy-lidded eyes. It’s as if he captured part of his subjects’ souls with charcoal and paper.

My insides lurch at the thought of what he would see if he ever turned his artist’s eye on me.

I gather the sketches and return them to the shelf. But there are piles more, and my brain must be broken, because I can’t stop from rifling through the others. One shelf is all insects. Another is different fish. One entire stack is different parts of a rose, rendered so clearly, I could be holding the flower in my hand. I sift through them all, brow furrowing. There are enough sketches here to paper the workshop’s walls twice over. This must be a passion project of Leonardo’s, one done at the expense of his actual, paying job.

Promising myself I’ll be done after this, I lift one stack halfway, just barely glimpsing a familiar-looking face—

“Virgil!”

Leonardo explodes through the open doorway, his face wild.

I leap back from the bookcase like it’s on fire. Madonna santa, there is no good reason for me to be in his room. Mortifyingly, it was I who created the rule about not trespassing in other apprentices’ spaces without their consent. Leonardo thought it was ridiculous when it happened (What if someone’s hoarding all the best brushes, and I want to paint, Virgil? What then?), so to mark the occasion he scrawled ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE above the door leading to my attic, which was undeniably rude of him, but at the same time, almost thoughtful, given how I felt about having my privacy.

Except now he’s caught me snooping through sketches he doesn’t want anyone else to see, or he would’ve shown them to us forever ago. If he did the same to me, I’d never let him live it down, and we both know it.

My nails dig painfully into my palms.

I’ve found my cause of death. Not a horrible accident or a wasting illness, but the humiliation of Leonardo rightly roasting me every day until I finally walk into the Arno River.

I lick my chapped lips and force my eyes to meet his. “Look. I’m sorry, I can explain—”