“Keep the senator from interfering again,” he told the Praetorians, and moved toward Thea.

“No!” Paulinus stumbled forward, actually seizing the Emperor’s arm. “You can’t do this, sir—it’s wrong, all of it—just let me explain—”

Domitian looked at Paulinus with a kind of crazy compassion. “You’re too good for all this, Paulinus. You don’t see the enemies around me, the snakes in the grass—you don’t have the eye for evil.” He flicked his fingers, and two more Praetorians seized my astonished stepson by the elbows. “It’s for your own good,” Domitian said earnestly. “Watch, now. This is how an Emperor deals with snakes.”

He took two deliberate steps across the room and crashed his fist across Thea’s face. She staggered, blood flying from her broken lips, and he hit her again, a blow across the back of the head that drove her to hands and knees. There was a dry crunch of snapping bones as he stepped on her fingers, then twisted her hair around his hand and pulled her up like a doll. Her breath coughed out in bloody bursts.

Domitian raised his hand for another blow, but it never landed. He staggered back instead, hit from behind by a soundless streak that darted from the crowd of slaves in the anteroom, and I was astonished to see a broad rip in the Emperor’s toga.

“Vix—” I heard Thea shout. “Vix, no!”

The slave boy was tall, compactly muscled, hair shining nearly red under the lamplight, an ivory-hilted table knife growing from his fist like it belonged there. Perhaps twelve years old. So familiar—if I could just place him . . . He swept in toward the Emperor of Rome, blade scything down in a smooth lethal arc, and we were all frozen to our couches.

Domitian’s body bent and blocked with the automatic speed of his years with the legions. The knife carved a path through his sleeve instead of his throat, and he captured the boy’s wrist in his hand. The boy wrapped his arm around Domitian’s throat and they stayed locked for a moment, swaying back and forth.

Then the Praetorians swept in, smashing the boy into the floor—“Don’t kill him!” the Emperor rasped, and they wrestled the knife away. Even then he tried to fight, butting savagely with his head and nearly knocking himself out on a bronze breastplate.

Thea was screaming. Calpurnia had her arms around Marcus, still in the grip of his guards. Flavia’s hands were over the eyes of her sons. Paulinus struggled uselessly in the grip of his own men.

“Lord and God, are you hurt?” One of the Praetorians stepped toward Domitian.

He gazed at the shredded folds of his tunic. “The blade tangled in the linen.” Turning puzzled eyes on the boy, now forced bleeding to his knees between two guards. “Are the slaves going mad now?”

“Lord and God!” I looked rapidly from the boy to Thea and back again. “I think I can tell you who our little assassin is.”