“They’ll try. I’ll fool them. I have spies.” Jerkily. “They’ll be sorry. I’ll make the Senate steps run with blood—”

He paced to the end of the couch and back again, running his fingers along the chased edge. His nails were varnished pink. “They think you can vote on an emperor,” he said to the tiles. “I am a god. You think I attained divinity by vote?”

“Of course not, Caesar,” she said cautiously.

“They’ll look to name some tight-fisted prune like Galba or Sabinus. Break my statues—I have so many statues—my mother always said I had the prettiest profile in marble . . .” He blinked. “I killed my mother. Did you know that? I don’t remember why.”

Sweet Fortuna, just get me out of here alive. Marcella stayed frozen on her couch, skin crawling. Nero drank another cup of wine, held the goblet out blindly, drank another.

“They’ll strip my pretty palace.” He looked around his beautiful, sumptuous triclinium. “My golden house. I never really lived until I built this palace. They’ll strip it bare, all those stingy old senators—sell off my pretty slaves, and my chorus boys, and the gold plate I ordered in Corinth . . . but I won’t live to see that. They’ll kill me first. Hack me to death with spears in my own bathhouse, or on the privy—it’s no way for a god to die—”

Marcella groped for words, any words. Her ready mental pen had fallen silent. “The world would lose a great artist in you, Caesar.”

His fever-bright eyes wandered back to her, surprised. Does he even remember why I’m here? Or had he even wanted her at all? Perhaps he’d just set her aside to show his cronies that the Senate’s grumbling hadn’t made him afraid. “Yes, a great artist.” He nodded vigorously. “I must remember that. There was never another artist like me, was there?”

“No,” Marcella agreed.

“No,” he echoed, and suddenly he stumbled across the room, crawling onto the dining couch and laying his head in her lap. “No,” he said again, shivering, and under the perfumes of amber and myrrh and lilies there was the sharp, malodorous stink of terror.

They said he’d laid his head in his mother’s lap and cried, after her murdered body was brought back for his inspection.

“No one will hack you to death with spears, Caesar. You’ll defeat them.” Marcella felt herself sweating. He could still have her strangled and thrown down the Gemonian Stairs if she displeased him—this was a man who had kicked his pregnant wife to death when he was in a bad mood. Marcella forced herself to stroke his hair, though her fingertips itched as if fire ants were devouring them. “You’ll defeat them.”