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to a window with the glass cut out, a grappling iron and a rope still hanging from the sill beyond. A single glance was all it took to know the world had changed. Tonight’s nurse had been ripped open and her guts bulged in coils through the edges of the cut. Leo’s cradle lay overturned on a carpet that was dark and sticky with blood. Not that. Anything but that.
    Tycho upturned the cradle to reveal the dead child beneath.
    Very small, very precious, and very broken. Sliced cloth and the pucker of a wound showed where Leo had been stabbed in the heart. Other wounds disfigured the tiny chest. His mouth was open in a silent cry. Tycho felt sick at the sight, raw with grief and riven with unfitting hunger.
    Hunger?
The thought brought him up short.
    The child at his feet was dead, and yet hunger tightened his throat so viciously his teeth threatened to descend. One of them was still alive. Swinging round, Tycho dropped to a crouch beside the nurse. She was young, dark-skinned and on the very edge of death. “Look at me,” he ordered.
    Dark eyes opened and struggled to focus.
    At the far end of the corridor halberds crashed as guards came to attention. The nurse tried to speak but her throat was ruined. A flat-handed strike had been used to silence her. He could read the mute desperation in the woman’s eyes. She was desperate to say something. He could feed, of course, take her memories and use what he learnt to hunt down whoever did this. Because he would hunt them down. The cold fury where his heart should be guaranteed it.
    Raising his head, Tycho let dog teeth descend, blood filling his throat from where they cut his gums, but he was too late. He felt rather than heard Alexa behind him. “Leo’s dead?” she demanded.
    Tycho knew he looked strange, crouched over the nurse, his hand over his mouth as if to stop himself vomiting. Alexa had come alone.
    “Tell me.”
    “Yes, my lady.”
    “I will crucify him between the pillars. I will cut down his bloody olives, destroy his precious villa and sew his land with salt. His name will be cut from public plaques and his portraits burnt.”
    “Who, my lady?”
    “Alonzo. Who else?” The duchess turned so swiftly Tycho had only just looked round when her dagger stabbed the original guard under his chin and pierced his brain. He tottered, dead without knowing it, staggered backwards as she withdrew her blade. Contemptuously, she tumbled his body into the room.
    “My lady,” Tycho protested.
    “You disagree with my actions?”
    The guard’s smile had been easy and his manner relaxed when Tycho first arrived. Too relaxed? Did Tycho now imagine an uncertainly around the eyes? A slight desperation? “We could have questioned him.”
    “And learnt what?” Alexa’s voice was brutal.
    “Whatever he knew, my lady . . .”
    “Others will give us that information. Where is my niece?”
    “Lighting candles for her mother.”
    Duchess Alexa froze, and Tycho wondered if even here, even now, so many years after Lady Zoë’s murder, the woman who brought up Lady Giulietta could be jealous of the mother who’d never age, never be cross, never be anything other than perfect in her daughter’s eyes. “I’ll have guards detain her,” Alexa said.
    “She’ll want to see Leo.”
    “You’d show her this?” Alexa gestured at the window, the nurse bled out on the carpet, the cradle Tycho had righted. Alexa saved Leo’s blood-soaked body until last.
    “She has a . . .”
    “. . . right to be driven mad with grief?”
    “My lady.”
    “I lost a child,” Alexa said. “My first son. He died in his cot and I was the one who found him.” It was obvious from the flatness of her voice she stood in that room, not here in the doorway of this. “That was hard enough . . .” Nodding at the bloody scene, “This is more than even I could have borne.”
    “I’ll go to her . . .”
    “No. You have other work to do.”
    Alexa will look after her.
Walking away from Giulietta’s