The last time that Lucrezia had been alone with Cesare had been in her room in Naples, when he promised that he would keep them safe from harm. Now they are in Florence, tucked away in one of Signore Machiavelli's palaces, with plenty of room to spread out and breathe after days on the road from La Bella Farnese's estate.

Lucrezia finds Cesare in his room (a room of his own – not a room at an inn with a narrow bed shared with Jofré), leaning against the windowsill and peering out onto the streets of Florence. "Luciano," she sings out in greeting, rapping her knuckles on the casement of the door, and Cesare looks back to her after a beat.

"Filippa," he answers with a twist on his lips, and she joins him at the window. They had greeted Niccolo Machiavelli as the family Tondini; Cecilia, the matriarch, her three children, Luciano, Filippa, and Emanuele, and Filippa's baby, Giovanni. Machiavelli, to his unfailing credit, didn't bat an eyelash and ordered that the Tondinis be shown every courtesy by his staff.

"Do you miss him, sis?" Cesare asks, breaking their companionable silence. Lucrezia peers out over the roofs of the city and nods.

"Our father? In a way, yes," she replies. She worries the skin around a fingernail, where it's peeled back a bit. Cesare wraps his hand around hers to distract her, turns her palm upwards and traces the lines of it. "But I also am…relieved that he is dead. He would have let me rot away in Naples, and he thought nothing of keeping Giovanni away from me, as long as the family was served by me spreading my legs." Her voice is dark and bitter. Cesare kisses her palm. "You were the only one that fought for me and Giovanni, Cesare. You and Micheletto. You should have been his father," she finishes with a low voice and bright eyes.

Cesare feels a tug low in his gut and kisses her before he can think about it, catching her lower lip between his teeth. Her hands grab at his neck and chest and her breath stutters when his hand slides across the swell of her backside. She arches against him, pressing up against the powerful line of his body, and he slides his tongue into her mouth with a groan.

With a great amount of willpower and a thundering heart, she pushes away and touches her swollen lips. "The door, Cesare," she murmurs, and he looks over her shoulder to see that it's still open to the corridor beyond. He curses under his breath and turns to the window again, bracing his forearms on the sill. Her skirts whisper against the floor as she comes to stand next to him again and tucks her hand into the crook of his elbow in the image of sisterly affection. The insistent press of her fingers into the muscle is the only contraindication, and Cesare welcomes the weight of Lucrezia against him.

Vanozza's headache refuses to let her sleep, so she softly pads through Signore Machiavelli's palace to pass the night. She passes massive tapestries, shelf after shelf of hefty tomes, and she half-way wishes that she had brought a candle with her to better admire the furnishings of this luxurious Florentine manse. The light would have hurt her head, though, and she contents herself with running her fingers along the upholstered furniture, playing a game of guess the textile instead. Silk on a low bench, linen tablecloth in the dining room, wool for the curtains…

The respite in Florence was already doing wonders for her children. Jofré was not so used to such long hours in the saddle and was enjoying whiling away his time with Machiavelli's books in a window seat. Lucrezia and Cesare had spent the afternoon in the garden, lounging on the grass like commoners while Giovanni toddled between them. She remembers when each of them slipped from her body; to see them all grown up, Lucrezia with a child of her own, is bittersweet for Vanozza. Rodrigo should be here, Vanozza thinks, with us, his family. But Rodrigo had put forth every effort to scatter his children across the map of Europe, carving the family up like he would a roasted duck.

Ambition. That's what Lucrezia had said ran the House of Borgia. It had seen her married to two weak men and Jofré sent off to God-only-knows-exactly-where at such a young age. It had set Juan and Cesare against each other, sending both into their own kind of darkness, until only one was left standing. Yet for all of Rodrigo's ambition, Juan's pride, and Cesare's pragmatism, they had not been happy for a long time—not since the early days of Rodrigo's papacy and Lucrezia's first wedding, when she had looked so young and beautiful and resplendent and they had all thought that a marriage each would solve all their problems.

Cesare and Lucrezia today in the garden—that had been happiness, Vanozza thinks, letting the silk cord of a drape slip through her fingers. The two of them had always been extraordinarily close, and there had been a time where Vanozza had worried that had it not been for Lucrezia, Cesare would have allowed himself to go as far down into the blackness as Juan had before his death. And today, as the two joked with each other and doted on Giovanni, Vanozza had the first stirrings that perhaps her family could find happiness again at the end of this long and arduous journey.

She hears a door quietly open and shut from the balcony above, and, curious, Vanozza peers up to see Lucrezia padding along silently, the paleness of her hair and shift turning her into a waif in the darkness. Vanozza thinks for a moment that maybe Giovanni had been crying and, lost in her thoughts, she hadn't heard, but then Lucrezia stops in front of Cesare's door. She doesn't knock—just turns the knob and slips through the crack without hesitation.

Oh.

Oopsie daisy, Lucrezia.

We're starting to reach the end of what I already have written, but I would love to hear y'all's feedback! I basically am at a fork in the road of where I want to take this story (geographically as well as substantively) and I keep waffling between the two choices. :| Maybe I just need to merge them or think outside the box a bit...