“My father.” No hesitation.

“Why not ask him? This isn’t about your stepmother, after all. It’s about politics, and people. You can ask him what’s right.”

“When I can’t even look him in the face?”

“Well, who else could you ask?”

“I could ask you.” His eyes came up, locking hungrily on hers. “Do you—do you believe in the rumors?”

She folded her hands. “Yes.”

He closed his eyes. “Then what should I do?”

“Are you asking me to be your conscience?”

“Yes, I—I am.”

“I can’t do that for you, Paulinus. No one can.”

“Advise me, then. Help me.”

“Tell me this. Of all the wrongs you’ve heard attributed to Domitian, which would you right if you could? What would you undo?”

“I’d have gone to Lady Julia and seen for myself if she was truly mad.” The words surprised him. “After a childhood of playing games in gardens, I owed her that.”

“It’s too late to help her. But it’s not too late for Thea. Help her, in Julia’s name.”

“. . . Don’t tell the Emperor about her old lover?”

“It’s a start.”

“I watched them,” Paulinus found himself saying. “All summer I watched them. Not that they met very often—two times, maybe three. They didn’t touch each other; she kept her word about that. But they were like—like a team of matched horses.”

“That’s love for you.”

“I’m not going to marry Calpurnia,” he said suddenly. “She and I, we don’t run in unison.”

“Rather unfair to her, isn’t it? You’ve been betrothed a long time.”

“She doesn’t want me. No more than I want her.” Paulinus shook his head. “No wedding. Not until I find the one who—who runs in unison with me.”

“Such things are rare.”

He looked at Justina: the narrow three-cornered face between the white wings of veil, the deep grave gaze, the pale eyebrows hinting at pale hair he’d never seen.

“I’ll wait.”

THEA

I heard the voices dimly, outside my door. “Gods, I don’t know what to do with her.” Nessus, agitated out of his usual ebullient cheer. “Hasn’t even come out of her room since she came back from Tivoli. Came to see how she was faring, and found her like this—I couldn’t even get the knife away from her!” Voice lowering. “Can you do something?”

A soft sound.

“Of course you can. No one’s better than you at the whole soothing bit.”

I looked up through half-closed eyes to see Ganymede drop a kiss on his lover’s head just at the spot where the hair was prematurely thinning and pad into my bedchamber. Such a nice bedchamber: all gray and white with its lavish silver-veiled sleeping couch and the statues of Minerva. The statues writhed when my blood-dreams were on me.

I fought him when he tried to take the knife, and the bowl upset. Blood everywhere, splashing the mosaics, from the bowl and from my arm, which I’d cut down to the blue gaping veins. But Ganymede paid no mind to the blood or my hazy cursing, just wrenched the billowing curtain off the sleeping couch and wadded the gauzy stuff around my wrist.