Page 9 of A Dangerous Bargain

I smile back and hope I’m not making a mistake.

CHAPTER FIVE

I hold up the length of emerald brocade again, hoping the fourth time will be the charm. My voice is cajoling, an inch shy of despairing. “This is a dress. You must wear it, please.”

The angel’s nose wrinkles. “Why?”

“Because you’ll get cold.”

“I do not get cold, see?” She grabs my hand and presses it to her bare shoulder. Her skin burns fever-hot. I jerk away, eyes sliding toward the kitchen door. There’s no doubt all the servants are gathered behind it, listening and waiting to gleefully share every embarrassing failure of mine with the entire workshop as soon as possible.

“Well, perhaps you won’t get cold, but it makes everyone feel better,” I say.

“Why is that?”

“Because… people don’t show their bodies to one another.”

Her eyebrows rise incredulously. “Ever?”

I grimace, the purple mark on Leonardo’s neck popping into my head. An image both unwelcome and unnecessary. “Only… only during very special circumstances.”

She drums jagged, dirty fingernails against her chair’s arm. “And what are these special circumstances?”

A blush finally overtakes my cheeks. “You’ll know when they happen.”

She lifts a finger and pokes my face, eyeing my blush with a frank, blunt curiosity that would be unspeakably rude coming from anyone else. “It seems inconvenient to have a body.”

Well, there’s no counterargument for that. I mash a hand against my brow. My sister Elisabetta refused to wear clothes for an entire summer, and I’ve drawn more nude women than I can count, but none of that prepared me for her.

“What about your name? Could you tell me that?” I ask, more than a bit desperately.

She sulks and hunches farther into her chair. “The man in the robes gave me a name. It is a bad name. I don’t like it.”

I smile coaxingly. “It can’t be all that bad.”

She plucks a loose thread on her chair and pulls. An embroidered rose slowly disappears from the fine upholstery. I watch it unravel with hopeless resignation, wanting to tell her to stop it, but afraid of what she’ll do if I say so. “He called me Maddalena, but it is not my name. It belongs to someone else.”

“Many people have the same name.” Surely she knows this already… right? There are four Giovannis in the workshop.

She hisses and rips out the entire rose with one savage yank. “It’s not mine!”

“All right, good God, I’m sorry! We’ll—we’ll call you whatever you want, then.”

The angel stops assailing the embroidery, anger replaced by suspicion in an instant. “How do you know God? You’re no angel.”

“You’re not the first person to say so.” I swallow a smile. She’s an angel, but there’s nothing saintly or holy about this half-feral creature. It’s… amusing, when it’s not terrifying, or teeth-squealingly frustrating.

I realize I don’t know what the old angel’s name was and feel a pinch of guilt that I never thought to ask. He was so different from her. It’s hard to believe they’re the same type of creature at all, were it not for the gold gleam that shines in her irises when the light strikes them the right way. I can’t stop thinking of the snarling wolf from my childhood. “Can I call you Lupa?”

“Lupa?”

“It means she-wolf. A wolf is an animal, a predator.” I pause, not sure how honest I should be. “You remind me of one.”

She unspools from the armchair, a muscle moving in her jaw. “Men fear this animal?”

My thumb runs along the tooth punctures on my palm. “If they know what’s good for them.”

The angel smiles delightedly, the expression baring each one of her pointed teeth. “I like Lupa. Choosing one’s own name is allowed?”