But the bitch had huge eyes that stared up into his. Dark, desperate eyes.

He dropped the cobble and scooped her up, careful not to touch the mangled leg.

“No vermin in my barracks.” Gallus drew the folds of his tunic aside as Arius brushed past. “It’s probably diseased.”

Arius banged his door shut on the querulous words. He laid the bitch down on his bed and stared at her a moment. “You’ll be dead by tomorrow.”

He was surprised when the dog chewed feebly on his extended finger. Useless little thing. It would be kinder to wring her neck. He got some scraps from the kitchens, coaxed her to eat.

“Thea,” he said, and his voice sounded loud in the still room. “Is that what I call you?”

The bitch started at the sound of his voice, the thin silky skin quivering in the cold room.

“No. Too scared to be a Thea. She wasn’t afraid. Not of anything.” Except the night he’d lost his first fight, when she burst into the middle of the barracks with eyes like holes burned into her face and sobbed in his arms, saying that she couldn’t bear to lose him . . .

“No name. You don’t deserve a name—you’ll be dead by morning—”

The nameless dog gnawed on a corner of his pillow as Arius buried his face in the bedclothes and wept.

THEA

I opened my wrist with one firm stroke of the knife, watching as the blood dripped out of the vein. No blue bowl anymore, just a common copper pot, but my wrists were latticed with fresh knife scars and I sleepwalked through my days with the old mists clouding my eyes.

“Thea!” The harsh shout of my pimp. “Thea, get down here!”

I tied off my wrist indifferently and rose, straightening the dark robe and saffron-dyed wig that marked me a common prostitute. I’d worn them for two months. I smelled like a hundred unwashed men: sailors, galley slaves, tavernkeepers. In Brundisium, over two hundred miles from Rome, we had all kinds.

“Thea!”

I swayed as I started down the rickety stairs, but it wasn’t the bloodletting. I only drained a drop or two at a time these days. I wanted to lay my wrist open to the bone, but I didn’t. There was a fierce little presence kicking inside my belly, planted during those few snatched hours in the cold barracks cell that had once been my heaven. Arius’s child. It appalled me—but when I poised the knife over my wrist, the knife that would release a quick rush of blood and take the child with it if I bled enough, my hand stilled. Bring a child into this life? I told myself savagely. A girl to be a whore like her mother? A boy to die in the arena like his father?

But I couldn’t kill it. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t think it would die.

No child of Arius the Barbarian would ever be scared away by a little blood.