The Last Disciple Read Free

about Nero. During those years as a teenage emperor Nero had dressed himself as a slave and would roam the streets at night to loot shops and terrorize strangers. He and his friends, including Helius and Tigellinus, had attacked a rich senator and his wife. The senator was unaware that Nero was among the hoodlums and fought well, landing several punches directly in Nero’s face. Nero and his friends fled.
    While Nero had recognized the man as a senator, he made no plans to take action against him, realizing the senator had been perfectly justified in protecting himself from a mere slave. Unfortunately, when someone told the senator whose eyes he had blackened, he sent Nero a letter of abject apology. Because Nero could no longer pretend he’d been an anonymous slave and it was now publicly known that the senator had committed a treasonous act against the emperor, the senator was forced to open his veins in a suicide that prevented the trial and conviction that would have ruined the senator’s family.
    Yes. Nero was, first and foremost, an actor. Vitas counted on that.
    Without hesitation, Vitas marched forward and yanked the chain from Helius. “If the emperor knows you are involved in illegal torture, he will have you destroyed!”
    For Vitas, it was an all-or-nothing bluff, pretending he did not know Nero was inside the costume. Trusting that Nero would be too ashamed to admit it. Now. Or later.
    Vitas shoved Helius hard toward the doorway of the small hut. “Outside! Now!”
    Without hesitation, Vitas grabbed the chain and jerked it hard, treating the man in the beast costume as lower than a slave. “Don’t move. I’ll be back to deal with you.”
    Vitas forced himself to pretend outrage. But this was the moment. If Nero decided he would no longer play the role, Vitas was dead.
    The beast snarled at him, an echo from inside the lion’s skull. But the beast did nothing else.
    Vitas knew he was safe. Temporarily.
    Vitas spun on his heels and marched outside to Helius.

    “You feed his delusions,” Vitas said to Helius.
    The two of them stood outside the hut in the shadows of an olive tree.
    Helius shrugged, a smirk visible on his face in the moonlight.
    Vitas had learned in battle in Britannia how to detach himself from the emotions of the moment. Yet it took immense willpower to restrain himself from withdrawing his short sword from his toga and charging at Helius. But it would not serve the empire for Helius to die, for Nero clung to the man with a neediness that barely kept Nero stable.
    “Of course I feed his delusions.” Helius continued smirking, unaware of how closely the ghost of his own murder had passed by. “That is the whole point. His power. And how I survive.”
    “How does this serve Nero?” Vitas demanded, pointing at the hut behind them.
    Vitas was not particularly large, but he was tall and carried himself the way a man with solid compact muscles does. He was also cloaked in his family’s well-documented patrician background of generations of Roman purity, and by the stories, almost legendary, about his bravery in battles against the Iceni in Britannia. In daylight, his flat, almost black eyes made his thoughts unreadable to his opponents, and without a smile, his face was implacable, like unweathered stone. Here, his face hidden in the shadow cast by the moonlight, Vitas was that much more intimidating. Much as Nero needed Helius, Nero revered Vitas. Only Vitas could speak to Helius in this way and not fear later punishment in the stealthy form of poison or an assassin.
    “His nightmares,” Helius said, finally sensing the deadly anger simmering beneath the calm demeanor of Vitas. “Nero wants to be rid of them.”
    “By this travesty of justice?”
    Helius shrugged. “No worse than anything else Nero has desired in recent years.”
    Vitas could not argue with that. “He is Caesar, the representative of our great empire. To protect the empire, we must protect our emperor’s