“I told him to ask anyone else on the villa if he wants to know.”

“So what now?”

“That depends on you.” She folded her hands, looking with absolute stillness out through the curtains.

“Me?”

“Will you tell the Emperor or not?”

Tell the Emperor. “He’ll kill you,” Paulinus said suddenly, and there was no excusing or apologizing or explaining away the bald words.

“Oh, yes.” Calmly. “And he will kill the man you know as Stephanus . . . and our son. He might punish Flavia, too, for allowing us to meet. So the choice is yours.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“You serve him.” She turned her eyes back, away from the curtains. “I am owned by him, but you serve him. Nothing is fair.”

He stared back at her. Another secret. Another secret between him and the man who held his oath.

Another secret.

“If I don’t tell,” he said, “what happens then?”

“I’ll continue to see Vix,” she said. “I’ll see Vix’s father, too, now and then. But nothing will happen. You have my word on that.”

“Your word?”

“My solemn promise. Quite a selfish promise, really. If I took another man for a lover, then Domitian would know—he’d smell it on me—and that would be the end of both me and—and Stephanus. I don’t want that.”

She took a breath, stirring in her silks as if they were chains. “So, Paulinus. What’s it to be?”

“We’ll talk about it more in the morning,” said Paulinus.

“Thank you.” She leaned back against the cushions, closing her eyes. Tears glittered and ran down into her hair.

“One thing.” Suddenly. “Your Stephanus—have I seen him before somewhere?”

“No.” She opened her eyes. “Never.”

For the rest of the ride back to the Villa Jovis, there was silence.

DID she say who her jealous lover was?” Flavia’s voice, at Arius’s elbow.

“No.” Wrenching his eyes away from the departing litter, he turned to the Emperor’s niece. “You knew her—all this time you knew her—”

“Yes. Ironic, isn’t it? The fates must have had a good laugh at our expense.”

“Her lover—who is he?” He hadn’t pressed Thea when she’d declined to say the name. Too glad to hear her voice, too glad to have her back. As long as she was close enough to hold, the lover didn’t matter.

But now . . . “Who owns her?”

“Ask anyone.” Flavia patted his arm and drifted out.

He collared the first slave he found. “The lady in that litter”—pointing to the cloud of dust that marked Thea’s departure—“who is she?”

The slave looked at him as if he were half-witted. “I know you never come out of that hut, but don’t you know anything? That’s Lady Athena. The Emperor’s mistress.”

The Emperor.

Arius turned away blindly, latching his hands onto the wooden rail around the garden gate.

The demon, so long asleep in the bottom of his mind, stirred murderously.

Thea and the Emperor. His Thea, in the bed of a man who’d denied him his rudius, who’d shot arrows at him in the arena, who’d thought it funny to hack up his best friend.