He disentangled himself, and for a moment Lollia thought he’d just throw her across one shoulder and carry her out of Rome kicking and screaming rather than abandon her here. But his habit of obedience was still strong, and so instead he just helped her move a gold-inlaid wine service into another of her grandfather’s hidden cubbyholes. She brushed a cobweb out of Thrax’s fair hair, and he took the little wooden cross from his neck and slipped it over her head. “For God to protect you.” He reached for her hand, gripping it for a long desperate moment, and then he went back up the stairs.

Lollia watched her grandfather leave for Ostia the following morning, taking with him Thrax and Flavia and his cash box and most of his slaves. Flavia had a tantrum at the last moment, wanting her mother to come along, but Thrax fixed her with a stern look and she subsided, waving over his shoulder as he carried her into the wagon. Lollia waved back with a happy smile, waved until they were just specks in the road. Afterward she went back inside and sat in the deserted atrium and had a good cry, clutching Thrax’s little wooden cross and surrounded by ivory-eyed ebony statues. Me crying, she thought. Lollia the scandalous. This time, scandalwise, she’d really surpassed herself. What would the other Cornelias say if they knew she’d done the worst—worse than taking lovers, worse than marrying five times by the age of twenty, and three of those marriages in one year?

She’d gone and fallen in love with a slave.

I think I’ve seen enough,” said Diana.

“Enough?” Marcella’s heart was pounding. He’s finished; Vitellius is done. There would be no escape now, no mercy—and she’d seen it all. “You want to leave already?”

“Don’t you?” Diana looked down the long hall of the Domus Aurea, curiously empty though the streets outside resounded with uproar.

“I thought you’d be glad to see it,” Marcella said. “You’ve been furious at Vitellius since your race, after all.”

“I don’t like seeing a horse stagger along with a broken leg,” Diana said tightly. “Still alive, but not knowing it’s dead.”

“Oh, I think Vitellius knows. And it won’t be long before someone comes to knock him on the head and put him out of his misery.”

“I hope I don’t have to see it, that’s all.” Diana looked as lovely as ever in a blue cloak pinned at the shoulder with a round silver brooch from Britannia, but there were shadows under her eyes. “Let’s go before the streets get worse.”

Reluctantly, Marcella let herself be tugged along. Seeing history being made close at hand might be exciting, but she had no desire to get killed in a mob. That was a little too close at hand.