Leonardo stares at the woman in the chair. She has sat for him a hundred times. The smile is almost right — almost. His patron is impatient; the commission is overdue. He has one more session to capture what he sees.

He picks up the brush. Before the first stroke, a messenger arrives with word from Florence — and the message changes everything he thought he knew about his subject.

The contraption in the barn has consumed years. Leonardo has drawn every part, calculated every weight. Tomorrow he will test it from the hill. His apprentices have sworn silence. The world is not ready — or so he tells himself.

At dawn he climbs into the harness. The wind is right. Then he sees a figure watching from the trees — someone who was supposed to be in Rome.

The body on the table is a gift from the hospital — a chance to see what no one has drawn so clearly. Leonardo works by candlelight, recording every muscle, every vein. What he finds in the chest cavity does not match what the ancients wrote.

He reaches for a fresh page. The door opens behind him. The voice that speaks is one he has been avoiding for months — and it carries a proposition he cannot refuse.

Michelangelo has left a challenge in the streets: a block of marble, and a dare. Leonardo could walk away. His medium is paint and pen, not stone. But the eyes of Florence are watching. He steps into the workshop.

What he discovers there is not a sculpture but a sketch — and the subject is someone Leonardo thought only he had ever drawn. The game has just begun.

The wall in the refectory is vast. Leonardo has mapped every figure, every gesture. The composition will tell a story in a single moment — the instant before the world changes. The prior wants it finished by the feast. Leonardo knows it will take years.

He stands on the scaffold, brush in hand. One of the monks below catches his eye — and the face he sees there will haunt the painting forever.