“Or, perhaps I should dress as an urchin instead,” he says, voice lilting, as Micheletto cleans some of the dirt from his face. When Micheletto looks up, Cesare is grinning. It’s a joke.

“Perhaps,” Micheletto says. He steps back to examine his work. “There. Although a beard would be better.”

Cesare claps a hand over Micheletto’s shoulder. “It will have to do. We need to move quickly.”

In these days following Alexander’s death, nothing is less certain than survival. From the papal throne, Della Rovere hunts them down with a bloodhound’s single-minded determination; Micheletto still hears stories from the maids and the servant boys about the new pope’s rages. Cesare cannot be caught.

But they are being followed. It is not for certain, but Micheletto can take no chances. It would be so easy to make a mistake, now, both of them haggard with exhaustion and long nights of riding. Micheletto thought they might be safe in Milan, but these days they are not truly safe anywhere.

“My lord,” he says to Cesare, and tilts his head very lightly behind them.

When Cesare sees the man, he swears, whirling around again so suddenly he is sure to attract his attention. Which is perhaps why Cesare’s next move is to seize Micheletto’s face in his hands and kiss him.

Cesare’s mouth is soft and dry, his breath hot. It’s a hard kiss, meant to distract, not arouse, but as with all things Cesare throws himself into it wholeheartedly. Micheletto feels Cesare’s palms against his neck, the blunt scratch of his nails; he feels the heat of Cesare’s body pressed against his own. Over Cesare’s shoulder he sees the man’s gaze turn from them, and then the man’s body as he disappears into the crowd.

“Is he still watching?” Cesare asks, the question a hot gust of breath against Micheletto’s face.

They could be dead tomorrow. 

I snorted. “I’m sure.”

“I’m serious.” She put away her mascara and brought out a tube of lip gloss. Her face was, in fact, deadly serious, and in spite of myself, in spite of knowing better—she was only trying to freak me out; it was hazing; it happened all the time, I told myself—all the hair on the back of my neck went up. “I mean, I know you’re a transfer but come on.”

“Wait, you mean—“

“Totally. Like, three guys got killed last year. No one’s bit it this semester yet, but,” she shrugged, and the implication was clear: it was only a matter of time.

“Why aren’t the cops doing anything about it?” I asked, dumbfounded. “Three people’s a lot.”

“You’re telling me. The last guy—“ she glanced around the empty bathroom, then leaned forward to whisper—“was cut to fucking shreds, okay? Like, for real serial-killer sort of shit.”

“Fuck.”

But what was I supposed to do with this information? I closed my windows at night. I locked them too for about four days, and then, with no news of any awful deaths on campus, started leaving them open again. This was a dorm, after all; I was one of ten different rooms in this wing alone. Why would anyone go after me, if they were going after anyone? Whoever was killing people—because there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the killer was a student—had likely graduated.

And besides, I was more interested in the Greek students.

A murderer was strange and unknowable, but if I was at the right place at the right time, I could see the Greek students, and hear them talking; once, coming out of the registrar’s office, I nearly ran head-on into the redhead. Francis, was it?

“Sorry, sorry,” I said.

He was wearing his greatcoat, black and stark against his bright hair, his spooky redhead pallor, and when he stepped out of my way it was much more graceful a movement than my own awkward stumble. He had a cigarette in one hand but it was unlit.

“Excuse me,” he said politely, but his gaze on me was fleeting and distracted, and after a frozen moment I realized he was only waiting for me to get out of his way.

Once I’d gone past him, and the doorway was clear, I realized I’d been holding my breath. Like a wish, or a magic charm: if I don’t breathe, I won’t let it in. Whatever ‘it’ was.

I was still standing there when he came out again a minute or two later, and I felt him stop, surprised, in the doorway.

“Did you forget something?” he asked. His voice was light and friendly enough, and I could hear Boston in the way he pronounced his words.

“I—no. Sorry, I just wanted to appreciate the scenery a little.” I made a weak gesture toward the lawn—which, though impressive enough, was only grass and a cluster of oaks to the west edge. Francis looked out over it, then toward me. For a moment it seemed he was going to laugh, or at least smile, but I only caught the edge of it as he turned away, with an amused little huff.

.

A local man was murdered maybe a month later, a farmer. And I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, since we didn’t have much contact with the surrounding town, but they found him hacked to pieces, and something of it recalled that conversation I’d had with Judy when I first came to Hampton. Three students murdered. Some real serial-killer type shit, she had said.

The police were out in the countryside for days, but nothing ever came of that investigation, either.

.

I saw Francis watching me, sometimes, smoking in the windows of the Lyceum, and once or twice I ran into him in town on the sidewalks, going from a cafe I liked there to the thrift store, which was where I did most of my shopping. Sometimes he nodded to me; sometimes he didn’t seem to see me at all.

It was almost a month after that, though, that I really spoke to him again. It was late, and I heard footsteps crunching by outside my window (we had had several inches of snow the night before, and I had seen Bunny throwing snowballs at some of the freshmen on the quad that afternoon). A dedicated insomniac, I was still awake—so of course I looked. And it was him. Him in his long coat, which billowed out behind him as he walked. He looked like he was in a hurry.

So of course I followed him.

Through the darkened rows of the dorms, across the shadowed quad. I was afraid he was heading toward the parking lot, and that I would lose him, but he turned at the last second into one of the buildings near the tennis courts. It was no building I was familiar with; I thought it might be one of the hard sciences buildings, biology and chemistry and the like, though Francis had about as much business going in there as I did.

The inside of the building was even darker than the outside, of course. Long black hallways, relieved only by long white rectangles of moonlight thrown across the floor.

I found him sitting, quite casually, in a chair at the end of one of the first-floor hallways. It had been a minute or so since I had lost him, and the sight of him there made me stop dead. He was sitting squarely in one of the patches of moonlight, his back to the last room in the corridor.  

He looked up, and saw me. “Come for the show, have you?” he asked drily. He was smoking, with long, deep breaths, with obvious contentment.

I blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

He made a sharp gesture toward the room behind him, and I noticed, with an icy shock of trepidation, that the door was open. Just a crack; I couldn’t see anything through it, but for some reason that made it all the more terrible. Francis’s eyes on me were calm and steady and very, very blue. He had always struck me as a particularly animated person, with nervous hands and a tendency to ramble, but this was not the person I had spoken with several times in the hall; this was not the person I had seen debating, with great spirit, with Charles in the stairwell of the Lyceum. Here, in the moonlight and the shadows, he looked quite strange.

I swallowed. Audibly. “Um.”

Francis raised an eyebrow. “N’aie pas peur, mon petit chou.”

“Sorry?”

He sighed, heavily, and gestured again. “Go in, then, if you’re going to.”

Carefully: “Where’s Henry?” He had always seemed to me the most level-headed of the bunch, if the least approachable, and it would have been reassuring to know he was waiting just inside the door, or around the corner.

But Francis only shrugged, and said, “How should I know?”

“Are you sure you want me to—I mean—“

I knew. I knew what was behind that door. It was so clear, suddenly, that I had to wonder how I hadn’t seen it before, that no one had seen it before. Perhaps it was only that Francis didn’t look capable of such things, that he came from a family with money, that he was educated, and polite, and had a fondness for cats. Perhaps that was what had duped me—that and his air of mystery, which was, even now, terribly exciting.

“Oh, do go in,” Francis said finally, sounding almost exasperated.

I looked at him, and then at the door.