He opened his eyes. Domitian looked down from the dais, watching with impassive black eyes as his niece was buried alive. He smiled. “Some dice later, Prefect?” he suggested, and went back to his portfolios.

LET’S go,” Arius said quietly, putting a hand on Thea’s shoulder. “Vix looked all right,” Thea said in a thin, high voice. “He looked well. Didn’t he look well?” She paused, then added very softly, “She looked at me.”

“I saw.”

Thea didn’t say another word until Arius bolted the door of the tiny attic room in the slums that they’d managed to rent with the last of their money. Then she fell across the narrow fetid bed and lay shivering.

“Before she stepped down into that tomb—her eyes went over the crowd and she found me—like she knew I was there—”

“Thea—” Arius rested a tentative hand on her shoulder, and when she didn’t flinch, he crawled into the cold bed beside her and stroked her hair. No tears, but her body racked itself now and then in a great shudder. Arius thought of the man she had shared with Julia.

Careful. Careful. He banished the demon, burying his face in Thea’s hair. He touched her temple with his lips, meaning only to soothe her, but his mouth somehow strayed to the curve of her ear, then to the hollow behind her jaw.

She stirred and he pulled away, terrified of frightening her. But with a ragged sigh she nestled against his chest, settling her head in the hollow of his shoulder.

For a moment he lay still, holding her as if she were made of glass. Then he slid his fingers up into her hair, tipping her head back so he could kiss her. She had as cool and sweet a mouth as she’d had at fifteen.

He could feel the tension coiling back into her body, but when he pulled back she clutched him fiercely. So he kissed her again, soft as snow, then kissed the weals around her throat left by an Emperor’s collar, and then the first of the white scars left under her breast by an Emperor’s games. He pulled her tunic over her head and loved the abused, luxury-whitened body underneath; loved it and grieved over it, smoothing the scars away with his hands and his mouth, doing his rough and imprecise best to give her back the sun-browned, work-hardened, unscarred body she’d once given him.

She closed her eyes, back arching with a tentative pleasure, and he touched her with all the eloquence his voice could never find, fighting with all his strength to make her stubborn, clever brain understand how much he loved her . . . and maybe something worked, because she kissed him with half a sob as her arms closed like a vise around his neck, and through every bone in his body he felt a thrum of quiet, quiet joy. They fell asleep knotted like a tangle of warm rope, without saying a word.