“Dear Publius loves me anyway. I have made him Emperor of Rome.” Plotina’s voice oiled out, deep and unctuous and satisfied. “Perhaps we might strike a different bargain, Vibia Sabina. We may have had our differences in the past, but it doesn’t prevent us from striking a new alliance, does it? I will refrain from darkening your reputation any further, and you will greet your husband properly when he arrives, wearing something more dignified than that shift.”

“Die slowly, Plotina.” Sabina rose, speaking slowly and distinctly. “Dear gods, was there ever a woman better named than you? You sallow plotting scheming treacherous bitch.”

She turned for the door.

“You really will have to improve your language, Vibia Sabina,” Plotina called after her. Sabina could hear the smile. “There can be no swearing for the Empress of Rome.”

TITUS

The Norbanus house seemed strangely silent when Titus entered the atrium. The slave who ushered him inside was white-faced and distracted, vanishing without taking Titus’s cloak or asking whom he had come to see. When Titus had come to this atrium hand in hand with Faustina, soaking wet and asking her father’s permission for a betrothal, the house had rung top to bottom with congratulations: Calpurnia showering them both with kisses, Marcus beaming pleasure, Faustina’s brothers making sly jokes about why their big sister was drenched head to toe, the slaves trading smug whispers of “Told you so!” Now the house was silent as a crypt.

They already know, he thought. Good. It would make things easier.

“Faustina!” He found her sitting in the gardens, a splash of peach-colored linen and fair hair, staring at the splashing fountain. “You heard, I take it.” He kissed the top of his betrothed’s smooth blond head. Betrothed. Future wife. Wife-to-be. Words he’d reveled in these past weeks, because they were all just so many delicious synonyms for mine.

Faustina looked up at him, but he didn’t see the familiar leap of happiness in her face. Her dark eyes were larger than ever, and blank as stones. “He’s dead.”

Titus swallowed. “I know.”

He’d had the news from Ennia, of all people. A freedwoman housekeeper, better informed than one of the richest men in Rome… she had a brother who worked the Tiber docks, and she’d been visiting him when the black-sailed ship came gliding home. She’d come running direct into Titus’s chamber, where he sat ostensibly looking at alimenta reports and in reality making happy plans for his wedding. How many guests to invite to the banquet; whether Faustina would prefer an old-fashioned iron ring or the new kind with gold set in iron… he’d been doodling her profile in the margin of a wax tablet when Ennia came running in, sickly pale under her olive tan, to tell him the news that had just barely come to Rome.

Emperor Trajan was dead.