“Thea.” He cupped her chin in his hand, tilting up her face. “Stay away when I fight.”

“Lepida makes me come.”

“But I don’t want you watching when—” He broke off, but the sentence continued itself silently. I don’t want you watching when I’m killed.

He lowered his face into her hair as she wound her arms around his neck. The next week, fighting a Gaul, he took a trident through the shoulder.

The Gaul took Arius’s sword through the mouth.

“I still won,” Arius pointed out to an irate Gallus as the barracks doctor cleaned and bandaged the triple wound.

“Yes.” Frowning. “And since you can apparently fight with your right hand as well as your left, I’m not canceling your bout next month. You have commitments, dear boy, so don’t think you can cry off just because someone pricked you with a trident.”

“Bastard,” Thea fumed that night. “I’m going to learn how to hex, just so I can put a curse on Gallus.”

Arius threw back his head and laughed.

“Don’t laugh; it’s not funny. Well, I suppose it is, but . . . I take it back, about wanting you to get wounded. I’ll worry more than ever, since you’re fighting in another fortnight. Does it hurt?”

“It’ll still carry you to bed.” He scooped her up to prove it.

“You could just let me walk to bed.” Thea snuggled her head against his shoulder.

“I’m a barbarian.” Murmuring against her throat. “We always carry our women off like sacks of grain.”

“If you’re capable!” She poked his bandaged shoulder.

“Capable?” He flung her down across the bed, tickling her until she shrieked.

“All right, all right, I take it back! Stop it, you’ll kill me!”

“Good,” he growled, and covered her mouth with his.

Grabbing moments with Thea was surprisingly easy. There was hardly a day she couldn’t snatch an hour away from running errands in the forum and steal up to Mars Street. As the nights got longer and darker, she began slipping out of the house and through the garden gate to meet him. “Stay out of sight,” she warned, her bare arms prickled with gooseflesh in the cold. “If Lepida sees us—”

“You shouldn’t come, then. Not safe.” He drew her inside the warmth of his cloak and gripped her tight, a tumble of incoherent endearments running through his mind; all the things he wished he were clever enough to say properly.

“What is it?” Her eyes saw right through him.

“Nothing.” He pulled her close again. He didn’t know how to tell her that his knees dissolved every night when she ran through the door of his cell to land laughing and breathless in his arms. There were no words. All he could do was show her.

“Arius,” she laughed when he wrapped his arms around her. “I can’t breathe.”

He’d never had another woman before her, but that wasn’t why she turned his bones to water. That was just Thea herself.