“It’s going to be him or me.” I felt that quite strongly. This morning when I’d marched into the city, I’d had a lover. I’d lost her. But I’d found something else.

An enemy.

A week later, calling myself all sorts of fool, I went back to the squalid tenement across from the rooms that had been Demetra’s.

“You’re here again, are you?” the tired-looking woman greeted me shortly. “Aren’t you grand.”

I’d worn my lion skin and breastplate, hoping to impress her if I needed to. “I’ve come about the boy. Demetra’s son.”

“What about him?”

“Let me see him.”

She vanished into the second room. The one I stood in smelled of grease and stale food. Two children playing in the corner with a pile of sticks looked up at me, and I saw watery eyes, dingy hair, tunics spotted with food. Not much like Demetra’s little oasis of scrubbed cheer.

The woman reappeared, with the boy in her arms. “Here he is.”

I looked at him. He was bigger, nearly three years old now, wearing a dirty shapeless smock. He had his mother’s dark-honey hair in curls all over his little head, and I thought I could see the start of her beautiful bones under his round cheeks. He gazed at me silently.

“He’s a looker, isn’t he?” the woman said. “He’ll be a beauty when he grows up.”

She’d said that before, last week, and somehow it had preyed on me. Bothered me. “You’ll raise him?” I said.

“Like my own.”

Titus would have believed her. I’d finally told him of Demetra’s death, and my child’s, and his sympathy had been as warm as I feared. “Gods, Vix, I’m sorry. No wonder you’ve been in such a foul mood. What about her son, the little boy?”

“A neighboring woman took him,” I’d grunted. “Got five children of her own already.”

“That’s good,” Titus had relaxed. “A new family for the poor little sprat, if he has to lose his mother. Gods keep her soul, she was a good woman. She’ll be glad to know her son is well looked after.”

Would he be well looked after? I gave the woman a hard stare and saw the way her eyes shifted sideways. I wasn’t Titus, believing the good in everyone. I’d been raised a slave—and I knew what could happen to pretty little boys in the wrong hands. It might have happened to me, if I hadn’t had kind masters. If I hadn’t had a mother to shield me.