Another fistful of silky black hair slithered to the floor. “Where?”

“Do you think I know? Do you think I care? She’s miles away, that’s where she is—servicing every brute in Ostia or Brundisium, and you’ll never see her again!”

Another white explosion rocked his eyes, and Lepida Pollia let out scream after scream as he carved her hair to pieces. Her necklace snapped, pearls falling with a soft rattle like rain on an upturned shield. It took five of Gallus’s thugs to pry his hands off her throat.

“Lady Lepida!” Gallus fluttered. “My sincerest apologies—the severest punishment will be—”

She shoved him away. Hideous now, Arius thought disjointedly, with her face mottled red with fury and her hair shorn within an inch of her scalp. He saw her mouth open, spitting vitriol, but nothing reached his ears. Even when they packed her out the door, still shrieking her vengeance, and Gallus laid into him, he didn’t hear a word.

HE fought three Moroccans in the Colosseum the following month, and it was a fight no one would ever forget.

He slipped his blade through the ear of the first, then stove in the skull of the second with the boss of his shield, and when the third dropped his sword and raised a hand for mercy, he curled his fingers into hooks and ripped out the man’s throat with his bare hands.

The mob carried him shoulder-high through the streets that night, breaking windows, breaking jugs, breaking heads, and he smashed and roared and caroused at the fore. He hoisted an entire barrel of wine over his head to drink, he shattered a drunk’s jaw for stepping on his foot, and when a prostitute wound an arm around his neck and kissed him, he kissed her back and drew blood from her mouth. The winter dawn showed cold and steel-gray before Arius staggered back toward Mars Street, spikes of pain driving through his temples, his tunic stained with somebody’s blood.

“So you’re back,” Gallus said coldly. “I should have you knocked on the head like a rabid dog.”

Arius swayed, indifferent.

“But we can consider ourselves blessed, dear boy, for two reasons. First, Lady Lepida Pollia evidently has elected not to inform her father of your appalling behavior. Or else we’d have had the Pollio guards knocking on our door calling for your blood. And second, the Spanish governor sent this, as reward for a splendid fight.” He held up a heavy purse. “Keep the purses coming, gladiator, and I’ll keep you. Hear me, boy?”

An eruption of animal snapping and snarling drowned him out. “Dogs,” said Arius, weaving. “Killing something.”

“I’m not finished with you yet. Come back here!”

Striding unsteadily across the street, Arius waded into the writhing mass of dogs. Growls became yelps as he booted them out of the way, and they fled snarling. All but the one they’d attacked: a silky little gray bitch covered in bite marks, one leg a tangled ruin. He dropped to one knee and pried up a cobble to crush its skull.