HE hated her. He hated the leap of triumph in her blue eyes every time his feet dragged him unwillingly toward her bed. He hated her little pink tongue flicking catlike over her lips. He hated the cruel, casual words that fell so easily out of her lovely mouth.

He couldn’t stay away.

“You all right, Norbanus?” Verus tossed out at him one evening at the barracks. “You don’t seem yourself these days. That singer giving you hell?”

Athena. He hadn’t gone to visit her in a month. She seemed cool and colorless beside Lepida’s fiery insolent dash.

Sabina was wistful. “You never play with me anymore.”

Centurion Densus was more blunt. “Snap out of it, Norbanus. Or I’ll have you on punishment detail till Saturnalia.” Centurion Densus was a legend among the Praetorians; graying but still vigorous, a hero who had once fought off a mob in the terrible Year of Four Emperors and saved the life of a young Empress-to-be. Paulinus had looked up to him like a god. Now he couldn’t even meet the centurion’s eyes.

In his sleep he heard Lepida’s sly whispers. He saw her demure and shy on her wedding day under the red veil; saw her shameless and hopelessly tempting on his father’s bed. She lived under his skin like a thorn.

“You hate me, don’t you?” she asked suddenly one evening after he’d finished in sweat and despair.

He turned his face away.

“Yes, you do. Whatever for?” She propped her chin on her hand. “Because I’ve cost you your honor? What a bore. Why is it always the woman’s fault if a man loses his honor?”

“No,” he jerked. “My fault.”

“Well, at least you’re honest.” She curled her finger around his ear.

“So if it’s your fault you’ve lost your honor—such a quaint phrase!—then why hate me?”

“Because you don’t care,” he said baldly.

“Neither do you, darling.” She pinched his earlobe between her lacquered nails. “Or else you’d leave me right now. And you can’t, can you?”

He opened his mouth—and paused. The pause stretched out into minutes.

“Didn’t think so.” She crooked a slender white ankle around his chin. “Kiss my foot, Paulinus.”

He bent his head, pressed his lips against her instep—and saw his father’s eyes. Her skin tasted like honey and betrayal.

THE letter fluttered from his hand, and his stomach rushed into his mouth. He barely made it to the lavatorium, throwing up again and again.

“My dear Paulinus,” Marcus had written in his firm unaged hand. “The Senate has finished its wrangling over the problem of the drains and the new aqueduct and the declining birth rate (at least briefly) so I am coming home to visit. You may expect me—”

“I thought I’d see you this morning,” Lepida yawned as Paulinus appeared in the atrium. She was still wrapped in her white sleeping robe. “Got one of these, did you?” She waved a roll of parchment between the tips of her fingers.

“He’s coming back.”