Lady of the Eternal City Read Free Page B

life in Dacia long ago, a brash young legionary rescuing a nervous young tribune, and ever since that day, Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus was my friend.
    Was. I already had a family hostage to my good behavior—I couldn’t afford friends, too. Not anymore.
    “Get up,” I said curtly. “He wants to see you.”
    “Your master?”
    “Ours.”
    “Yours, I think.” Titus unfolded himself, all long limbs and bony shins. “He made me his prisoner, but you’re his dog.”
    There was cool judgment in his tone, and I bristled. I’d rather have heard hatred. I didn’t mind being hated, but I was damned if I’d be judged.
    “I’m not his dog,” I bit out. “I’m his killer, the one he lets off the leash when he wants blood spilled. Keep it straight.”
    Titus’s words came quietly. “You were never a killer, Vix. A soldier, yes. But not a murderer of innocents.”
    “Well, that’s what I am now.” Putting my hand on the hilt of my
gladius
. “So move.”
    “‘A sword is never a killer,’” he quoted. “‘It’s a tool in the killer’s hands.’”
    “Juvenal?”
    He smiled. “Seneca.”
    Titus and his damned quotes; he had one for every occasion. “So according to Seneca, am I the killer or the sword?”
    My friend met my eyes. The night I’d come to arrest him, he’d been all fury at my betrayal, but now his gaze was sad. “Maybe you’re the tool.”
    That stung. Truth usually does. And it just made me angrier. Truth usually does that, too.
    Maybe Titus saw my jaw clench, because he put a hand to my shoulder. “I’ve been wanting to thank you for something, Slight.”
    “What?” I gestured. “Putting you in here? You didn’t thank me when I arrested you!”
    “You’ve done your best for me since then.” A shrug. “No, I meant to thank you for not letting my wife in to see me, after she told me she was expecting a child. I worried she’d miscarry, as much as it upset her to see me here.”
    “Don’t mention it,” I said, and gestured him out the door. “I didn’t do it for you.” I did it for
me
, because every time my friend’s wife looked at me, her eyes were stony with condemnation. I couldn’t blame her, but I hated facing her. I’d been the one to drag her husband away on what should have been their wedding night, her half-dressed and pleading as I dragged him from their wedding bed, him trying to reassure her even as I marched him across the flower-strewn mosaics. “Hope she doesn’t weep all over the atrium today,” I said brusquely. “The Emperor hates crying women.”
    “Faustina doesn’t weep.” There was pride in Titus’s voice. “Too brave! Far braver than me. I’m sure our daughter will take after her—”
    I put an arm out and checked him as he passed me. “Stop.”
    “Stop what?”
    “Stop being friendly,” I said brutally. “We’re not friends. Not now. I’ll get the order to kill you in a few moments—”
    “And will you carry it out?”
    “I’ll have to, won’t I?” I stepped closer until we stood chest to chest. “I’ve got a wife too, you know.”
    “Of course.”
    I stared into his eyes, seeing fear, but well-mastered fear. He was almost as tall as I was, something few men could say, but I could have snapped his aristocratic bones in half. He’d never been a fighter, Titus. He was a man of honor, with all it entailed. He wouldn’t kill me, if our positions were reversed.
    But I wasn’t a man of honor. I’d survive, and so would my family—even if I had to kill a friend to do it.
    “Come with me,” I said, and yanked him away from the cell toward the man who—whether we liked it or not—was master of us all.
    SABINA
    When Sabina’s mother-in-law had become Empress some twenty years ago, she had paused picturesquely in the massive doorway of the Domus Flavia upon entering for the first time and announced, “I hope to leave this palace the same woman as I enter it.” Plotina had made sure all Rome knew that