I never feared you, I told him. I never feared you.

I looked into his black eyes until they glazed over.

FOR a long time there was no talk. I lay across Domitian, covered in his blood. Vix sat frozen in his corner. Arius half-knelt beside Paulinus’s body, gazing blindly ahead. No one stirred. No one spoke.

Then Arius threw the dagger away from him. It bounced off the opposite wall, and at the clatter Vix gave a violent tremor.

“God,” he said in a cracked voice. “God.”

Arius stretched out a tired arm, and Vix turned into the hard shoulder. Arius reached around the back of his weeping son’s neck, took the welded silver collar between his hands, and snapped it in two. He flung it against the wall where it fell with a soft rattle, the black eye just a lump of jet. Arius’s eyes squeezed shut a moment, and when they opened again the demon had gone out of them.

I crawled over Domitian’s body and collapsed on my lover’s other shoulder. He turned his lips into my hair, and I felt the tremors deep in his body.

We were still sitting like that, three locked in one, when the world crashed in.

LEPIDA

HOURS in the dark—hours and hours. I screamed through the gag, pounding at the door of the closet with my sandaled feet, but no one came. Domitian had ordered most of the slaves away, on the day he was supposed to die.

He wasn’t dead yet. He couldn’t be dead yet. He’d live to hear me speak, and then he’d kiss my feet and crown me Lady and Goddess, because thanks to me he was alive.

Scuffling sounds outside. I shrieked through the gag, drumming my heels. A scraping sound, and then light blinded my eyes as the door dragged open. I blinked furiously, and saw the blank round face of the astrologer. Nessus.

“There are a great many closets in this palace,” he said, expressionless. “I must have looked through a hundred.”

“Untie me at once,” I spat as he pulled the gag from my mouth. “Where is the Emperor? I have information about a conspiracy. The Empress is involved, and his precious pet Vix—”

“Ganymede,” said the astrologer.

“What?” Loosening cords from my wrists. If I could just get to Domitian, I could have Thea and Arius and Vix and Marcus and Paulinus in chains by night’s end, every enemy I had—

“Ganymede. Do you remember him?”

“Remember who?”

His hands locked about my throat before I knew what he was doing. “Nessus—” I choked out, and then his fingers took my breath away.

“Ganymede.” He crushed me back against the wall, squeezing. “Ganymede.”

I gasped, scrabbling at his wrists. Two of my nails broke—he’d pay for that—!

“Ganymede.” His face was blank as marble as his hands sank deeper and deeper into my throat, like a ring of red-hot iron. “Ganymede.”