The Borgia Betrayal: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

smile. I exhaled in relief as around me, I heard the others do the same. Guillaume eased the grille open and stepped aside. “Go swiftly and with God.”
    We went in pairs, Sofia and I together, parting from the others with quick words of reassurance and hasty embraces. As the attackers were likely to have come by the river, we avoided that and struck out across the fields ripe with summer wheat. The setting sun gave us our direction but we went quickly all the same, mindful that it would soon be night.
    We had gone some little distance when Sofia glanced over her shoulder. She stopped and touched my arm.
    “Look,” she said.
    I turned and saw black smoke rising against the darkening sky. Having failed to find us, the attackers had fired the villa. By morning, it would be nothing more than a charred ruin. But our bones would not lie within it, like the poor cracked remains I had seen on the funeral pyres of the condemned. For that, I struggled to be grateful.
    We could not afford to tarry. By then, the concealed door in the hall surely would have been discovered, along with the passage behind it. That would lead our pursuers to the basement, where they would have greater difficulty finding the tunnel but would conclude that we were at large. We could expect them to launch a search of the surrounding area without delay.
    With that uppermost in mind, Sofia and I stumbled onward. She fell once, tripping over an exposed root, but quickly regained her feet with my help.
    “I am fine,” she insisted when I expressed concern. “It takes more than a little tumble to rattle these bones.”
    In the face of her courage, I could offer no less. We hurried on, helped by the light of the quartered moon, and came finally to a stream where, out of breath and exhausted, we knelt to drink. The villa was miles behind us and we heard no sound of pursuit. For the moment at least, we seemed to be safe.
    With that realization, the shock of what had happened crashed down on me, worsened by the implications that lay behind it. I sagged to the ground. Beside me, Sofia did the same but she, at least, still had the strength to put an arm around me.
    Softly, she said, “We are alive, Francesca. Later, we will deal with what has happened, but for this moment, let us give thanks that we have survived.”
    She was right, of course, and I knew it, but dread weighed me down. Against her shoulder, I said, “Guillaume and the others…”
    She patted my back gently, like a mother soothing a fretful child. I had never known my own mother’s touch, for she died giving me life. Yet there were times when I imagined that I heard her voice singing to me softly, and glimpsed a face lost to me forever.
    How foolish the fanciful longings of our hearts.
    “They have gotten away safely, I am sure,” Sofia said, “and Luigi is far too clever to let the villa be traced to him. Lux will endure, have no doubt of that.”
    I prayed that she was right but I also understood, as I lay there in the gathering night, that we had been betrayed. Someone who knew Lux well enough to be aware of the carefully hidden time and place of our meeting had acted to destroy us.
    Someone who would act again unless I, Francesca Giordano, the Pope’s poisoner, stopped him.

3
    Sofia and I remained in hiding outside the city until just after dawn. A light rain was falling as we joined the stream of merchants, travelers, traders, and gawkers flowing along the Via Flaminia toward the city gate. The rain did not keep down the dust churned up by the passing of so many horses, carts, and boots. It lingered as a reddish mist several feet above the ground, thickening as we drew nearer to the city.
    The road ran straight and true, as the old Roman roads do, between slender poplars and tangled hedgerows giving way to fields of ripening grain and vines laden with grapes that would be ready for pressing in a few weeks. Crows cawed over the creak of wagon wheels, the jangle of harnesses, and—rising