The Gaul who held my elbows loosened one hand to scratch his cheek. I wrenched an arm free and hit my former mistress a savage blow across the face. One blow, before the bald man’s hand shot out to seize my hair and snap my head back so hard the tears sprung to my eyes. “You didn’t tell me she was vicious,” he objected.

“No matter.” Lepida climbed back into her litter, my handprint scarlet across her cheek. I saw her pull out her little gold hand mirror and examine her face coolly. “She’s your responsibility now.” The silk curtains dropped shut, hiding her from view.

“Stand up, girl.” The bald man frowned. “Can you understand me?” Ostia. Brundisium. Port cities, waterfront brothels, unwashed men. Just six hours ago I’d lain in Arius’s arms and dreamed that nothing could ever hurt me again.

I made another despairing lunge toward Mars Street, and was wrestled down to the ground. I drew breath to beg and got a mouthful of dust. Sandaled feet stepped around me in the street: a party of tribunes enjoying a good laugh, matrons drawing their skirts aside, slaves who looked away before they could catch my bad luck.

My new owner surveyed me clinically. “Better put the chains on her,” he rapped out to the big servant at his back.

They locked the manacles around my scarred wrists. I turned my face away and howled into the earth like a dying animal.

BUY her?” Gallus paused, lifting his pen from his account slates. “Dear boy, you don’t have to buy her. You’ve been getting what you want without that, haven’t you? Why buy a cow when—”

“My prize money would buy her three times over.”

“Your prize money? Dear boy, who does the managing around here? Who does the organizing, the planning, the marketing?”

“Who does the dying?”

“But you’re not dead, are you?” Gallus tapped soft fingers on a rouged cheek. “Well, you have been quite well behaved lately. I suppose you deserve a reward. Win your next fight, and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Done.”

Arius waited by the garden gate that night, but Thea didn’t come. Well, she wasn’t always able to get away from that ferret of a mistress. The bed seemed very empty without her. He missed the warmth of her body curled inside his, her fingers laced through his, her hair falling over his arm. He smiled, and it no longer felt unnatural.

He sparred the next afternoon with the trainer, then sat back to watch the beginners hack and slash at each other. “Keep your feet planted,” he called out to an Oriental boy with a trident. “Here, let me show you—” and found himself drilling them, as his brothers had drilled him. As he would drill his sons someday, his and Thea’s.

“Barbarian,” one of Gallus’s pretty slave boys piped from the shade. “Your lady’s here.”

Arius sent the practice sword thudding point-down into the sand and swung into the corridor. He pushed open the door to his little cell, grinned to see her standing at the narrow window slit with her hood still drawn up over her face. “Thea, are you—”