“Why?”

I plucked it out of its sheath at his waist, and pricked my wrist in one smooth motion. He whipped it out of my hand. “Thea—”

“No, that’s all.” Smiling, I held my hand over the rail and shook a single drop of blood into the Tiber before pressing the cut closed. “Last time.”

He looked at me.

“I swear.” Holding up my hand in pledge.

He took my wrist, blocking the trickle of blood with his hard thumb. He wound his free hand deep into my hair and kissed me.

I lifted my head, dizzy and laughing, and saw the sea. I hadn’t even noticed that we’d left Rome behind.

Historical Note

Emperor Titus Flavius Domitianus died at five in the evening on September 18, A.D. 96. He was a man of many contradictions: a soldier idolized by his legions, an administrator admired for his attention to detail, a paranoid given to random executions. Many of the peculiarities described in this book are true, and were described by Suetonis in his gossipy first-century memoir The Twelve Caesars: Domitian’s popularity among common soldiers, his jealousy of his elder brother Titus, his dislike of Jews, his love of the gladiatorial games, his black dinner parties, his treatise on hair care, and his peculiar habit of killing flies on the point of a pen.

Thea is a fictional character, but her background at Masada is real enough. An entire city of Jewish rebels committed suicide there rather than submit to Roman rule, and only a handful survived. I wondered what kind of survivor’s guilt would manifest from surviving such a horrific experience, and so Thea was born. Lepida Pollia and Marcus Norbanus are also fictional creations, but many of the others are based upon fact. Emperor Domitian did take his niece Julia as a mistress until she supposedly died of a botched abortion; her continued existence as a Vestal Virgin is my own creation, though such an escape would have been far more difficult than I have implied here, given that the Vestals were chosen as children with much pomp and public ceremony. However, Domitian did execute several Vestals during his reign in the manner described, for the crime of breaking their vows. His second niece Flavia (in reality Julia’s cousin and not her half-sister) was eventually exiled to Pandateria as a convicted Christian, her husband executed and the fate of their two young sons unknown. Domitian was often attended at the games by a young boy garbed in a red tunic, leading to the character of Vix. There was a Praetorian Prefect Norbanus whose role in Domitian’s assassination is prominent but unclear, and his death unknown. The Empress was also a conspirator; she did discover a death warrant with her name upon it, which prompted her to put the assassination forward, and she did manage to live to a virtuous old age after her husband’s death. Domitian’s principal assassin was a slave of Lady Flavia’s, a man named Stephanus who smuggled a knife into the Imperial presence in a sling. History proclaims that he died after a bloody struggle with the Emperor; in my imagination he became the gladiator Arius instead, and escaped to a happier life. I have taken some liberties with the games as depicted in Mistress of Rome: The Roman gladiatorial games were every bit as violent as described, but there were strict rules that would have prevented Arius from fighting one against six, or unarmored against wild beasts, or against women. Fik Meijer’s excellent book The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport proved invaluable in providing details about the games, as A. J. Boyle’s Flavian Rome, Michael Grant’s The Twelve Caesars, Brian Jones’s Emperor Domitian, and Matthew Bunson’s Encyclopedia of the Roman Empire proved invaluable for their descriptions of Domitian and the empire he ruled.