I laughed. Arius turned his cheek against the back of my hand, and his short beard scratched my knuckles. “Someday we’ll shave that off, too,” I said. “You don’t just prickle, you scrape.”

“I don’t—oh,” he said as I tugged the tunic off my shoulder to show a red patch left by his mouth. “Did I do that?”

“Never mind.” I pushed him straight, cutting around the nape of his neck. “He loves me hard,” I said in Greek, smiling. My Arius. Someday he wouldn’t need a beard anymore, or silly eye patches and hats. We’d live on a mountain where no one had ever heard of the Barbarian, and no one would care if they did know. And our son would never, ever get near an arena.

I stepped back, brushing the last stray bits of hair from Arius’s shoulder. He pulled me down onto his lap again, and I laid my head on his shoulder. Sliding my hand along his chest under the tunic, I felt the heat of his hard flesh, the heart pounding underneath. “Will it be all right? Going to the Colosseum?”

“Yes.” He kissed my eyebrow. “We’ll be watching Vix, not the games.”

“We won’t be allowed to watch together—women have their own section.”

Arius scowled. “They’ll let you sit with me.”

For two weeks we’d tried to keep an eye on our son, merging with the crowds that followed the Emperor on his daily tours of the city and watching the figure in the red tunic that always sat at the Imperial feet. “The Emperor’s pet,” the citizens of Rome called him, and they speculated that he was the Emperor’s bastard son. Never more than an arm’s length away from the Emperor. Never a chance to snatch him and run for it. And no way to get into the palace grounds; not two ragged runaway slaves who could bribe no one.

Even if we somehow got Vix away, where could we all run where Domitian couldn’t find us?

The bright morning dimmed a little.

Arius’s hand enfolded mine. “Let’s go.”

For the first time since we’d come back to Rome, we headed for the Colosseum.

LEPIDA

IT was perfectly sickening, the roar that went up from the crowd when Thea’s brat came into the Imperial box and waved. “Behind me,” I hissed, swatting at him.

“Lay off, cow,” he said bluntly, and flopped down at Domitian’s feet. I settled fuming on the other side. Not only was he a brat and a boor, his red tunic clashed horridly with my rose-colored stola and pink sapphires. I beckoned a pair of slaves forward with their ostrich fans. The Matralia games were always hideously hot.

Domitian was busying himself with a load of scrolls and his hovering secretaries, but Vix sat drinking everything in. “Whoa,” he whistled at the vast expanse of sand stretching before the Imperial box. Usually he was tensed statue-hard in the Emperor’s presence, but now he gaped as eagerly as any pleb brat in the stands. “This being-the-Emperor’s-shadow thing has its benefits. The view here—”