“Are you mad?” Vix hissed as the litter retreated down the street. “We’ll never get away with this, not now that they’re back from Baiae!”

“Yes, we will.” She gave a blink of her lashes instead of a kiss. “I’ll be down tonight.”

“A houseful of slaves, that suspicious old bag of a nurse who chaperones you—your stepmother sees everything—the senator, he knows everything!” Vix raked a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “Someone’ll see, and then all hell will break loose.”

“I don’t think so,” Sabina mused. “My father would be very disappointed in me, of course, but I doubt he’d flog me or exile me from the family.”

“And what about me? I’m off to the galleys for deflowering a senator’s daughter—”

“No, because we won’t get caught.” Vix might be a terrible liar, but that didn’t mean Sabina was. Hadn’t she grown up seeing her father work on his fellow senators in pursuit of some new law or edict, so expertly they didn’t even know they were being strummed like harps? Hadn’t she seen the effort that went into all that expert strumming, the preparation and care that backed all her father’s plays in the Senate?

By comparison, a clandestine love affair was child’s play.

“Well, not child’s play,” she explained that night as Vix let her through his door. She tossed herself down on the moonlit bed, crossing her arms behind her head to look up at him. “It just takes a certain amount of groundwork, that’s all. Like taking a few weeks to establish myself among the slaves as a bad sleeper—one regularly to be found slipping out of her room on a hot night to read in her father’s study.”

“Have you been slipping out seeing someone else?” Vix scowled down at her, arms folded. “Like that skinny boy Titus you’re so taken with? Not that I understand why—”

“Don’t be silly, Vix, I really was reading in my father’s study. You have to be caught a few times in innocent pastimes,” Sabina explained, “before you can move on to the guilty ones. Next, I made a habit of slipping down to the kitchens after these midnight reads to grab a snack before going back to bed. The kitchens that are just a dozen feet or so from your door.”

A grin was starting to tug at Vix’s mouth, but he refused to give in to it yet. “So?”

“So, there is not one slave in this house who will blink at finding me out of my own bed at night, sneaking through the slave quarters toward the kitchens.”

“It’s no guarantee,” Vix warned. “The wrong person at the wrong time—”