I looked at her. Her face was hard, mocking, a gleam of anger turning her eyes to blue ice.

“Want to help me?” she asked. “Help me make a fool out of him?”

Have you slept with my wife? Hadrian whispered in my ear, and behind the whisper I heard the deadly hiss of steel. I gazed at the new Empress of Rome, and she gazed back.

I didn’t want her. God help me, I didn’t want her, I wanted my Mirah. But my hand was already stretching out, jerking Sabina up from the column, and my mouth was biting down on hers. She jumped up into my arms, her legs clinging about my waist, kissing me ferociously as I yanked the clasps out of her stiff formal dress and ran my fingers through her short hair.

“Promise me you won’t grow your hair,” I murmured as I pressed her down into the weeds. “He hates the hair.”

“I promise.” She laced her fingers behind my neck, pulling me down into her. “Now shut up and take me.” No finesse, no tenderness—just rage.

And maybe friendship. Maybe all the lust and the love and my occasional bouts of hatred over the years had given us that.

Afterward I gave her a hand up, and she straightened her dress and put the blond wig back into place, and we stood for a moment looking down the slope of the hill to the beach. The trireme waited there, and a hundred Imperial retainers laying wood for an emperor’s funeral pyre, but I don’t think either of us saw it. I think we saw Rome—but not the Rome we knew. The new and dangerous Rome that awaited us.

I put my hand on Sabina’s shoulder. She reached up, lacing her fingers briefly with mine, and her mouth flicked wryly. Then she pulled the gold veil up over her hair and descended the path alone, going down to stand like a polite statue as the new Emperor was hailed on his way back to Rome. I stood with the other soldiers, and I still had tears left to weep after all as Trajan’s funeral pyre was lit. My Emperor. The new Emperor presided, his head ostentatiously bowed.

Have you slept with my wife?

Yes, Caesar, I thought straight at him. The day after you took my legion away and put a kill list in its place, I slept with your wife. And someday, I will watch you die.

Maybe I should have gone into astrology instead of soldiering, because that was another prophecy that ended up coming true. I didn’t get all the details right—I didn’t know yet that I’d gotten Sabina pregnant up on that hilltop full of ruins. But I would someday watch Hadrian die.

Never mind how.

I’ll tell you later.

HISTORICAL NOTE