The messenger bowed his head in respect.

“Say it,” barked Antony. “You waste my time.”

“The queen is dead,” said the messenger.

Antony thought he’d misheard. He leaned closer to the boy, looking him in the eye.

“What did you say?”

The boy spoke slowly, as though the words were painstakingly memorized.

“The queen has killed herself. She betrayed you to the Romans, and in her guilt, she took her own life.”

Antony stood very still, hearing the words echoing, and then fell to his knees, the room spinning around him. Though they’d talked of suicide, planned for it, he never imagined her dead. His mind filled with an image of her desecrated body, bruised and battered, held in the air as a trophy by Octavian’s centurions.

She loved him, or she would not have died for him. If she betrayed him, it no longer mattered. He would not be apart from her for long.

“Eros,” he said. His servant ushered the boy out the door, giving him some coins for his toil.

Antony removed his armor, piece by piece, until he stood before his servant in only his tunic. He passed the man his sword.

“Do you remember your promise?” he asked.

“I do,” said Eros, but his eyes were uncertain. They’d been together for years, and Mark Antony had been a good master to him. He hesitated.

“Then fulfill it,” Antony said, spreading his arms, exposing his chest. “Go to Octavian when this is done. End the war before any other men die. He will reward you, and you may go then and do as you will.”

Eros nodded, and drew up the sword over his head, but at the last moment, he turned the blade, and stabbed it into his own body.

“No!” Antony yelled, leaping forward to catch the hilt, a second too late.

Everything was crumbling. All the precision of the Roman army, all the years spent as a general, and it had come to this: chaos, desperation, his city invaded, his beloved dead, and his manservant sprawled on the floor, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, his eyes glazing over even as Antony knelt beside him. Antony felt his mind twisting, felt the walls tilting around him.

Outside the door of the room, another messenger demanded entrance. Antony tried to plan. He’d be taken prisoner. He’d be transported to Rome, put on trial, buried away from her.

Antony pulled the sword from Eros’s body. From the pouch at his waist, he took two coins and placed them over his servant’s eyes. He could do that much to help the man to his rightful place in Hades.

“I come from the queen!” The door rattled. “Cleopatra demands that I speak with Mark Antony!”

Antony swayed against the wall, hearing her name. She’d never call for him again, never laugh with him again.

“I am yours,” he had told her, wherever she was. “I am yours.”

With all his strength, he drove the blade into his stomach. A fiery pain, his body resisting death, just as his mind had. Despite the pain, he felt a sense of deep satisfaction. There would be no more uncertainty. It was done. He closed his eyes and lay slowly back on the floor, thinking of his wife.