Drusus. In the slums, he’d be safe enough—fighting would surely be concentrated around the Forum, the half-burned Capitol, the Campus Martius, and the city gates. Cornelia had sent him a note the day Gaius and Tullia left Rome. They found out, she wrote, and then added a disjointed Be safe—please be safe. Don’t reply, and don’t come for me.

“Where is Zoe?” Cornelia asked, looking around for her maid.

The steward’s eyes shifted sideways. “I don’t know, Domina.”

“Find someone else to dust those cobwebs, then.”

By midmorning Cornelia started to hear distant crashes, muffled shouting. She summoned the litter-bearers to carry a note to Lollia—surely she would rather wait it all out here than alone in her grandfather’s massive cave of a house—but the litter-bearers had all gone missing, and no note could be sent. By midday all the male slaves were gone. By midafternoon, Cornelia didn’t have enough maids left to lift a massive feather bolster for its yearly turn.

“Well.” She sat down rather suddenly on the feather bed. “That’s it, I suppose.”

“Domina,” one of the slave girls whispered. “There is fighting in Forum Julium—by the Circus Maximus—by the Temple of Minerva—”

“Is there?” Cornelia pushed back the surge of nausea again. “Then you may as well flee if you want to.”

They scattered without another word. Cornelia lay back on the bolster, curling into a ball. Perhaps Lollia would come, even without a note, and bring Diana with her. They had to be frightened, alone in Lollia’s great cave of a house. Or Marcella would come back . . . oh, why had she gone out? Why? Cornelia wanted her sister’s hand over her own, her sister’s cool voice explaining all the logical reasons why the world would come right again.

Maybe the world wasn’t going to come right again.

The sound of a banging door downstairs sent Cornelia bolt upright. Heavy footsteps up the stairs—surely the fighting hadn’t spread as far as the Palatine Hill, surely—she looked around her for a weapon, frantic, but then a familiar voice shouted “Cornelia!” She flew across the room and fell into Drusus’s arms almost before he burst through the door.

“Gods—” He gripped her with violent relief, his voice thick against her hair. “I thought you’d have left the city by now—why didn’t you leave?”

“Why didn’t you?” Cornelia said against the rough wool of his tunic. “I told you not to come—”

“You thought I’d listen?”

“But if someone here recognized you, the treason warrant—”

“Everyone’s got more important things to worry about today than minor traitors.” Drusus pulled back, eyes sweeping her anxiously. “Don’t you have any guards? Slaves with cudgels, even—”

“All fled.”