“Everybody had high hopes of Titus.” Lollia shifted her baby to her other hip and craned for a better view. Little Flavia stood at her side—fifteen years old! Where did the time go? She was betrothed to the new Emperor’s cousin now, and a person of much importance, but she wasn’t too grand to carry the first of her golden-haired little half-brothers on her shoulders. Thrax stood behind, as always. Lollia’s husbands still tended to come and go—she’d racked up seven by the time her grandfather died, and after that declared she was on hiatus—but Thrax was as permanent as the weather. Roman society had long since stopped being shocked. “And now,” Lollia concluded gloomily, “we’ve got Domitian.”

Cheering through the crowds mounted like a wave. Domitian himself was approaching on a gray horse, armored like a general, a wreath tipped back over his head. Burlier now than the boy of nineteen who had carried off Marcella, but the deep-set black gaze was as inscrutable as ever as he smiled and waved to his new subjects. Every year that passed, people whispered more and more of his depravities.

“Isn’t anyone going to say it?” Diana looked back and forth between her cousins. She looked more exotic than ever now, face tanned dark gold against her pale hair after so many hours training her young colts under the midday sun. Distinguished men still turned up at her door, hoping that she’d marry one of them, but Cornelia had long since given up trying to push suitors at her. “We’re all thinking it, aren’t we? Marcella finally did it. She’s an empress.”

“God help us all.” Lollia touched the little gold cross hanging from her neck, a twin to the wooden one at Thrax’s throat. “There she is.”

Cornelia felt her throat tighten as she looked past Emperor Domitian to the woman in the gold litter. Marcella waved to the crowd with a cool hand, her smile empty and unchanging. My little sister. Though there was nothing of her little sister in that perfect marble-carved effigy. In twelve years, Cornelia hadn’t traded one word with Marcella beyond the required empty courtesies.

Cornelia reached for Drusus’s hand, and he gave it a comforting squeeze. Domitian passed out of sight with his Empress behind him, cheers following like a rumble of thunder. Eleventh Emperor of Rome.

His massive entourage followed. Cornelia’s eyes picked out the Imperial astrologer in his star-embroidered robes—his horoscope had predicted three girls and two boys for her and Drusus, which meant she had one daughter still to come. Well, if you believed in horoscopes . . . Diana waved irrepressibly at Marcus Norbanus, consul again this year. No one else could make a limp so distinguished.