let the fire rain down (watch it flare up inside his heart)
by Sandrine Shaw
When Lucrezia returns to Rome, she brings home a king and his army, and the curve of her stomach conceals a growing new life. Her laughter is less carefree and her eyes are often shadowed, but there's something about the way she holds herself, a new kind of confidence.
Cesare looks at her and feels sadness and pride at the same time: he mourns her sweetness, her innocence, but while he wishes that he could have shielded her and protected her from the world for all eternity, he can't help appreciating the woman she's grown into.
He watches King Charles bid goodbye to Lucrezia before he leaves for Naples, watches her smile as the king takes her hand and presses a soft kiss to it, and Cesare feels the same dark jealousy consume him that he felt when he married his sister to Sforza, the same possessiveness he felt when she danced with Djem, or when she confessed to him that she carried the child of a man whose name she would not disclose.
"I shall never love a husband as I love you," Lucrezia had once promised him, a long time ago, before she understood that marriage and love had as little in common as the sun and the moon.
It's not a promise he should expect her to keep - he knows that, knows that he shouldn't begrudge her any happiness she may find, but the mere thought that someone else could make her face light up in the same way he does clouds his mind with blood-red anger and makes his hand twitch towards his dagger.
Lucrezia laughs at something Charles says.
Cesare turns and walks away, his robes swirling behind him.
Later that night, she finds him bent over a book, trying to calm his thoughts by focusing on the words on paper, even when they blur in front of his eyes.
"The king has taken his leave, then?" he asks without looking up at her.
"He has. And Father is safe on his papal throne again." Lucrezia reaches out and brushes her fingertips over his forehead. "Why are you frowning, brother? I thought you would be pleased."
Another man, a less selfish man, would keep his thoughts to himself and tell her his worries were unrelated. He's not that man, though, and the admission falls from his lips before he can stop it. "I didn't like seeing you with Charles. He seemed far too familiar with you."
He thinks he has revealed too much already, but Lucrezia misunderstands. Smiling, she tells him, "Don't worry about me, Cesare. Despite his less than favorable intentions for our father, Charles has shown nothing but kindness to me. He's a good man."
Cesare catches hold of Lucrezia's wrist, his grip more forceful than he intends.
"It makes no difference to me what kind of man he is," he says, the words rasping against clenched teeth. "I want to take a knife and stick it into the chest of any man who looks at you the way he looked at you."
Wide blue eyes lock with his, and he can tell the exact moment when comprehension settles in, when she understands just how much he hates being forced to share her. He suddenly feels foolish, burdening her with this knowledge. He lets go of her arm and turns away, but her hand on his cheek stops him, the touch soft but insistent.
"I cannot control how those men look at me, Cesare," she says, "but I promise you this: I will never look at anyone the way I look at you."
The solemnity of the vow takes his breath away, and right in this moment he wants nothing more than to kiss her, to claim her lips (claim her), not with the chasteness of a sibling, but the possessiveness of a lover.
He doesn't. He takes her hands in his, his thumb softly caressing the blooming bruises on her wrist, angry red already, where he held her too firmly a moment ago. When he leans forward, it's her forehead his lips meet, not her mouth.
Cesare comes to see her at the convent as often as his duties allow, sometimes daily.
He pretends he's coming for Ursula, and the bittersweet irony is that Ursula believes that he's pretending to come see Lucrezia for her sake. The truth is, her rejection still stings, because what else did he ever do than what she asked of him, and his heart continues to ache when he remembers those brief weeks of happiness at her side.
But when he looks at Lucrezia, radiant and full of youthful beauty even as her body is swelling as the time of birth grows closer, he forgets entirely about Ursula, and she might as well be halfway across Italy rather than only a corridor away from him.
Here, within the walls of the convent, finally free of her detested husband, Lucrezia flourishes like a bloom in spring after a long, cold winter.
One night, her eyes follow Ursula out of the room after she came and brought fresh bed linens.
"I don't think Sister Martha likes you very much," she tells him, her lips quirked into a teasing smile. "Tell me, Cesare, what did you do to make her so angry?"
"She asked to be delivered from a husband who treated her badly, and so I did."
"It seems to me that would be a reason to be grateful rather than angry."
"I believe it's my methods of deliverance she disagreed with," Cesare says with a small, humorless smile. Almost without thinking, he takes his sister's hand in his and entwines their fingers.
"You killed him, didn't you?"
Lucrezia's face doesn't give away what she's thinking - if she's shocked or appalled or maybe intrigued, and at once Cesare worries that her reaction will be similar to Ursula's. He rushes to justify his actions. "We fought, her husband and me. He said horrible things about Mother, and he pulled his sword. I was only defending myself and our family's honor."
It's a lie, of course, and he immediately feels guilty for not telling Lucrezia the truth about how he'd planned Baron Bonadeo's death, and how much he had relished in delivering it.
Lucrezia smiles knowingly, as though she can see through his attempts at making himself seem more innocent than he is. "You did not goad him into attacking you, then?" she asks, and he doesn't answer.
It seems she's not done with her interrogation, however. "Was he the first man you killed?"
"By my own hands, yes," he says, more honest than he strictly needed to be. He thinks of all those who died by Michelleto's knife or his garrot, and of poor, unfortunate Djem, poisoned and suffocated by Juan.
"Did you enjoy it?" Lucrezia wants to know.
Cesare swallows the 'yesﾒ, settling on a half-truth. "I don't think taking someone's life is something a man should enjoy."
"There are a lot of things a man shouldn't enjoy but nevertheless does. Or a woman. Pleasure cannot always be controlled by propriety." Lucrezia's fingers tighten around his, as if she's trying to make a point.
"Yes, I did enjoy it," he finally answers truthfully.
The answer seems to satisfy Lucrezia, maybe even please her, for there is a small, fond smile stretching her lips. "Sister Martha should have rewarded you for what you did for her, not punished you for it. I know I would have."
Those five words mean more to him than all of Ursula's reproachful glances and enraged accusations, and he bends down to press his lips to their entwined fingers.
"Thank you," he whispers against her skin. Then he looks up and seeks her gaze with his. "I would have, you know. Killed Sforza, if it had meant that-"
He halts. If it had meant that I could have had you for myself, he was about to say.
"That you'd have been free," is what he tells Lucrezia, after a pause that's just a fraction too long.
When she tells him, "I know," he wonders if she heard the words he didn't dare to speak.
One evening, when he comes to visit her after being away on business out of Rome for an uncomfortably long week, Cesare finds Lucrezia unusually sombre and gloomy, and even his entrance doesn't make her face light up as it normally does.
"Cesare?" There's hesitance in her tone when she calls his name, and he instantly slides into place next to her, reaching out for her hand.
"What is it, sister?"
She seems troubled, restless. "Do you love me less now? Less than you used to before I was married?"
The idea alone, the fact that she would even consider it, is enough to shock him. "Why would you think that?"
"Because I'm different. I'm not your little girl anymore."
He takes her face in his hands, her cheeks cool and soft against his palms. "You will always be my little girl, sweet Lucrezia. I will love you until the day I die, and beyond."
She ducks her head and smiles, an innocent gesture, but there's something coy and calculating about it, as if it's what she knew he would say but wanted to hear it anyway. It should make him angry, perhaps, to be manipulated this way, but it doesn't. If anything, he finds it endearing, the way his sweet little sister has learned to wield her womanly charms like a weapon, even if it's him she's using them against.
Seeing her holding her newborn child in her arms makes his heart beat faster in his chest, as if it wanted to burst with love.
Cesare had thought that he would despise the child because it was physical proof of another man's possession of his sister's body. But there's an unexpected lack of jealousy - if anything, it makes him feel more possessive: he looks at Lucrezia holding the baby boy and he thinks mine, and he's startled that the notion extends to the child as well as the mother.
Much as Cesare wishes that things could remain like this forever, this is not how life goes. Not for the son and the daughter of His Holiness Pope Alexander VI.
When the Pope says, "We will have to remarry Lucrezia," it's the first time that Cesare truly hates his father. Politically, it is a reasonable decision, imperative even, but all of Cesare's keen political knowledge can't make him approve what his heart firmly rejects.
"Have you told her yet?" Cesare demands. "What did she think about the fact that her own father is trading her happiness for profitable political alliance?"
His brazenness earns him a reproachful look that speaks of disappointment, but for once, pleasing his father is nothing Cesare is interested in. "She doesn't like it, of course, but she understands the necessity. As should you."
Cesare finds Lucrezia sitting with Giulia Farnese, who inclines her head in greeting and slips from the room quietly as he joins them. Lucrezia is calm and composed, but her red-rimmed, puffy eyes belie her demeanor.
"I know it is my duty, and I bow to Fatherﾒs will," she tells him. "But I wish with my whole heart that it didn't have to be this way."
He takes her into her arms and holds her tightly, her head resting on his chest and her tiny fingers clenched in the fabric of his hated scarlet robes.
He wishes he had any words of comfort for her, or for himself.
The night before her wedding, she comes to him. She's only wearing a heavy velvet robe thrown over her nightdress, and her feet are bare on the cold ground.
"The Lord Sforza... he told me that on our wedding night, you took me to bed after I had fallen asleep during the festivities."
Cesare feels a fond smile tuck at the edges of his mouth as he remembers that night, his sister's body heavy in his arms and curling towards him as he laid her down on her bed, and he feels a new wave of old anger as he remembers how Sforza treated her. He still doesn't know all the details because Lucrezia remains tight-lipped about her marriage, but he knows that if her second husband will treat her in a similar fashion, he will not live to see his marriage annulled.
Before he can let the dark thoughts take hold, Lucrezia continues, "My husband was angry. He said he should have had me that night, as it was his right."
A fresh wave of hatred towards Sforza makes Cesare clench his hands, but Lucrezia forestalls any disapproval he might have wanted to voice when she presses on, sounding at once unsure and paradoxically determined. "I think it's you who should have had me that night."
It's one thing to think about it, in the privacy of his own mind - a dark, forbidden fantasy he indulges in despite himself. It's another thing entirely to hear his sister speak it out so bluntly, her words loud and clear in the silence of his chambers.
"Sister, I-"
She doesn't let him finish his token protest.
"You will not-" she begins, and it sounds like she has to suppress a sob. "You will nottell me that we mustn't! I am going to marry another man tomorrow, and the only way I can go through with it is knowing that no matter how awful my marriage is, no matter how much I dislike him and how I cannot stand his hands on me, there is a part of me that he cannot touch because it's yours alone."
She lets the robe slide off her shoulders and begins to undo the straps of her nightdress with trembling fingers.
Cesare closes the distance between them and takes her hands in his, stilling them.
"Cesare-"
He silences her with a finger against her lips. "Shhhhh, it's all right."
Her hands stop in their restless task, and he replaces them with his own, deftly undoing the lacings. He can feel her breath against his face, and when she reaches up to undress him, her fingers are so much surer and more skilled than they were with her own clothes, as if all her uncertainties have vanished at once.
She rises to her tiptoes to kiss him, and he meets her halfway. Finally, at long last, he catches her lips with his own. Her mouth opens under his like a lock that was just waiting for the key to turn. She tastes sweet as honey and as intoxicating as wine, and he feels giddy with triumph that what he's been aching for for so long will finally be his.
The next day, he stands at the altar in front of everyone of distinction and nobility in Italy, and marries her to the Duke of Bisceglie. She looks like a queen in her golden robe, beautiful and achingly untouchable.
He wants nothing more than to take up a sword and cut the duke's heart out, but he clenches his hands and forces himself to read the sacred vows.
When it is her turn to promise to love and honour the man at her side, Lucrezia catches his eye.
She holds Cesare's gaze as she says, "I do."
End.