“I’m not hungry.” Cornelia huddled deeper into her shawls.

“But Lollia and her husband are coming to visit—”

“I will not speak to that man. And I will never speak to Lollia.”

“Salvius Titianus is the Emperor’s brother! It would be very unwise to keep shunning him now that he’s family—”

Cornelia erupted out of her nest of shawls and cushions, seized a little copper bowl from the dressing table, and flung it across the room at the door. From the other side of the door she heard Tullia’s huff of indignation.

“How is she?” Marcella’s low voice, almost inaudible.

“Impossible, that’s how she is!” Tullia shrilled. “Utterly impossible. She’d do better to let Emperor Otho give her another husband, one of his own supporters, for the family’s sake—”

“I wouldn’t tell her that if I were you.”

“I have only our own best interests at heart.”

“Since when are you one of us, Tullia? You might have run down my fool of a brother in one of his many weak moments, but that does not make you one of the Cornelii. Our family outlasted Nero, and we’ll outlast you too. And given a choice between you and that despotic lunatic, I’m not sure we wouldn’t choose—”

“Gaius!” Offended sandals clicked away.

Cornelia turned over, pulling her shawl close as the voices faded down the hall. She hadn’t left her bed in days. Her own lilac-draped bed in the room she’d had when she was sixteen, before she married. Far too young for her now, with its little silver ornaments and white-on-mauve embroideries. But Tullia still sent me back to it like a little girl, now that I no longer have a husband.

Cornelia stretched out a hand, not opening her eyes, and trailed her fingers over the marble bust beside the bed. The bust of Piso that Uncle Paris had carved for her wedding; the one thing she’d been able to bring from home. Even without looking, her fingers knew the arch of his nose, the curve of his ear, his smiling lips.

She couldn’t imagine her husband smiling now. All she could see was his dull glazed eyes above the hacked stump of his neck, the mouth distorted into a snarl where the Praetorian had hooked a thumb for easy carrying.

It wasn’t him. Surely it wasn’t him. That mouth had never laughed, had never kissed her, had never smiled at a crowd while his name was acclaimed as future Emperor. Impossible.

“I wish I could join you,” she whispered to her husband. But he was cold marble now; he was white ash—and either way, he couldn’t hear.