“This isn’t—”

He caught my elbows behind me and popped my knees out with an expert jerk. Even before I hit the mosaics, he had his foot planted firmly between my shoulder blades.

“What are you doing?”

He doubled my arms up behind my back and began looping them with coils of cord pulled out of his sleeve.

I twisted and writhed underneath him, scratching at his hands. He shifted out of reach, his knee sinking into my back like lead. Impossible. Absurd. I was a grown woman; he was a boy of thirteen. Ridiculous that he should—get—the upper hand—this way—impossible—

I drew breath to scream, and he slapped a rag into my mouth.

This couldn’t be happening. He was a child.

He was tying up my ankles.

I kicked and struggled. I screamed curses through the gag. He took me by the feet and dragged me along the hall like a sack of potatoes. Dragged me to a little door in the wall that looked like a closet. It couldn’t be a closet.

It was a closet.

He calmly put me in it. I doubled my feet up to kick him, but he jumped to one side and stuffed my knees through.

No. No. Lepida Pollia, soon to be Empress and Augusta of all Rome—stuffed into a broom closet by a thug of a child?

The door clicked shut. He stood on the other side, breathing a trifle heavily, and I waited for mockery. But like his father, he wasted no words. Just turned away and left me there, doubled up in the dark. Dimly I heard his voice farther down the hall.

“That you, Nessus? Look, do something for me—”

“The Emperor wants you.” The astrologer’s vague tones. “Now.”

Vix cursed. “Look, find Prefect Norbanus for me and tell him Lady Lepida’s been taken care of. All right?”

“What do you mean?” The astrologer’s voice held a faint question.

“None of your business. Just tell him she’s out of the way. And, um. Don’t go looking in any closets.”

Retreating footsteps—and then I was alone.

THEA

THE look in my son’s eyes appalled me as the guards shoved him through the door, but for a moment all I could do was drink in the sight of him. Taller, almost as tall as me, with new muscle in his right arm where he’d practiced with a shield. Oh, Vix—

“Spring for my throat, Young Barbarian,” said the Emperor, “and she dies.”

I could feel Domitian grinning over my head. His eyes sparkled, color rose high in his cheeks, and his mouth parted in that Flavian smile that could charm the gods. His hand rested casually on the stem of my neck, and my hair coiled over his feet where I crouched on the floor.

“Say hello to your son, Athena,” said the Emperor, stroking my throat.

“Hello, Vix.” Through the curtain of my hair I saw the shock jagging away from his face, swiftly replaced by terror.

“Say hello, Vercingetorix. Like a good boy.”