She tried to speak, but his hand was an anvil across her throat. Black spots danced across her vision as he began to move inside her, his eyes two brilliant points of light spearing her down, and not until he finished in utter silence did his hand shift from her throat.

“Excellent,” he said cheerfully, getting up. Marcella heaved herself upright, gasping for air. “I’ll send one of my stewards to inform your family and collect your things. We’ll have this whole wing of the Domus Aurea to ourselves. I’ll introduce you to my brother tonight at dinner.” Domitian regarded Marcella in faint surprise as she coughed painfully. “Titus won’t oppose the marriage, if that worries you. He’s got no wish to remarry himself and neither does our father, so it will suit them if I have a wife to take on the tiresome social duties. And as daughter of General Gnaeus Corbulo, you’re a fit wife for a prince. Even an emperor.”

Marcella wheezed, still dragging in breath after painful breath. Her hands were shaking, and she felt a freezing hollow in her stomach. She could still feel Domitian’s hand on her throat, see his strangely blank eyes—the eyes of a far different creature than the cheerful ruddy-faced boy who now stood tidying himself and chattering.

“I will be Emperor someday, you know. Nessus has seen it. He says I’ll be Lord and God of Rome, and you’ll be Lady and Goddess. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He brushed a lock of hair off Marcella’s forehead and she flinched, but he didn’t notice. “Of course, even the Lady and Goddess of Rome is a wife first. You will concern yourself with maintaining my family and household, not with matters of state. I never take a woman’s advice.”

He clapped his hands, and a cluster of slave girls entered. They bowed very low to Marcella. Dear Fortuna, did they know before I did that Domitian meant to make me his wife?

“Your new maids,” Domitian was saying. “Dress for dinner, but don’t wear green. I dislike green. Oh,” he added as an afterthought, “and no more of your scribbling. You won’t have time for that now, and it isn’t seemly in a prince’s wife. Your desk is for writing letters only. Naturally I’ll read them before they’re delivered.”

Marcella’s breath came in little pants. No, no, no—the word pounded through her head in mindless repetition, but when she parted her lips to speak, her breath froze behind her teeth.

Another slave woman entered, holding a little girl by the hand. A year or two younger than little Flavia, but much more solemn, regarding Marcella somberly through a curtain of straight blond hair.