Archive of Our Own

Cecelia was twenty and still unwed. Perhaps His Holiness was biding time before issuing a bull allowing women to be cardinals; it wouldn't be the first inappropriate advantage he offered his children.

"You are more use to us nearby," Rodrigo whispered in the confession booth, "watching and maneuvering in the shadows. You have a unique talent for politics, dear daughter. We would not lose you to a foreign prince's court just yet."

Political schemer was preferable to obedient, faraway princess, but not to gonfalonier. It chafed to possess more freedom than any other woman while being denied her heart's calling.

Juan taught Cecelia how to swordfight. They grew up close, barely a year apart and significantly older than their siblings. As adults, they were tender as brothers and sisters were, but something dark always simmered under the surface. Cecelia didn't think it possible to love and hate with such equal intensity.

The papal army was wretchedly, grossly misused by Juan. If Cecelia were gonfalonier, all of Italy would kneel at her feet. Jealousy burned hot through her veins, but when Cecelia shoved her brother's body into the Tiber, ice lodged in her heart that she didn't think would ever thaw.

There were no scandalous whispers about Cecelia and Lucrezia's relationship. Of course the pope's only daughters were close; no one else understood what it meant to be a Borgia woman. It was normal for sisters to touch, to share secrets, to protect each other from the treachery of men. Besides, they were Spanish.

Not even shameless gossips imagined Lucrezia begging Cecelia to be her husband, or moaning louder for Cecelia's fingers than for her husband's manhood, or Cecelia burying her face in the soft, wet place that felt more holy than any church.

At least Cecelia didn't believe in hell.

Everything Cecelia knew about poison, she learned from her sister. Cecelia preferred the quick, honest, brutal certainty of a blade. She disliked the delicacy of poison, the torturous watching and waiting, the long, messy, public death.

But poison was a woman's weapon, and Lucrezia's tonics afforded greater stealth than Cecelia's knives. In the bloody aftermath of Alfonso's death and the end of the Borgia papacy, they needed both: a beautiful lady of sweet smiles and deadly, untraceable herbs, and a ruthless warrior unafraid to shove a sword through her enemies.

Clean, bloodless, together, they'd take what the world owed them.