And what a dent that would put in her tidy palace arrangements. Really, it had all been so convenient with Trajan gone in the east. Her palace floors unmarred by muddy boots, her quiet halls unbroken by loud male laughter, her parties hushed and tidy affairs without crude military jokes or goose bones being made into fort diagrams. No one to mess up her tables with discarded quills and slates and scabbards. No one to interfere with her management of Imperial funds, her oversight of Imperial projects. No one to interfere with anything, really.

“Why now?” Trajan echoed her. “One or two things have come to my attention. Seems it’s time to come home and put my house in order.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Plotina sank down on a chair beside him, waving the secretaries and freedmen back out of earshot with a flick of her fingers. “There was a matter I wished to bring up, in fact. That young Titus Aurelius everyone seems to be making so much of these days.” She lowered her voice to a cozy regret. “I know you’ve thought highly of him, but I believe you’ve been mistaken.”

“Have I?”

“Yes. I found out—”

“I think you mean, you were found out.” And Trajan tossed a creased, much-folded, much-read letter into Plotina’s lap.

A long letter. There were pages of figures, calculations, receipts, and account book entries, all meticulously noted. But Plotina only had to read the first paragraph, and a blue wave of bile swamped her throat. He said he wouldn’t tell, she thought disjointedly. He said he wouldn’t tell the Emperor—Juno, you heard him say it!

That sly treacherous poisonous little weasel.

“Goodness, what an impressive packet of lies.” Plotina looked up from the letter with careless contempt. “Surely you can’t believe that ambitious toad. He’d say anything, he—”

“No, Plotina.”

“But I—”

“No.”

The harsh bark of his battlefield voice cut her voice off in her throat like a sword.

“I return to Rome,” Trajan continued crisply, as if briefing an aide. “You will return with me, but not your Publius. He can stay here, as governor of Syria—he’ll make a good job of it, I’ll say that much for him. What he does afterward is none of my business, since he’ll no longer be a member of the Imperial family. I’ve a mind to grant little Sabina that divorce she’s been wanting.”

Plotina felt the words scrape out of her throat like stones. “You can’t.”