Augustus lay carefully back, anticipating a story and fearing it at the same time. In his life, he’d hired many tellers, heard many tales, and he had slept little. He found himself nearly looking forward to it. Sleep. Rest.

The woman looked steadily at him.

He thought suddenly of two little boys, lost long ago on a battlefield. He’d brought the last of the Egyptian children, Selene, back to Rome and married her to the king of Mauretania, giving her a dowry of gold as though she were his own daughter. He owed her something, though even then he could not remember why. Selene was dead eight years past. He’d commissioned a Greek poet to eulogize her. A good daughter. The only good daughter he’d had, and she was not even his own.

“The moon herself grew dark, rising at sunset,” Augustus whispered. It was a lovely epitaph, the eulogy, and somehow it reminded him of the woman before him. Selene had looked like her, perhaps that was it. “Covering her suffering in the night, because she saw her beautiful namesake, Selene, breathless, descending to Hades. With her, she’d had the beauty of her light in common, and mingled her own darkness with her death.”

The woman before him smiled. He thought he saw her eyes shining with tears, though it might have been the moonlight.

He regretted everything on earth.

“A soul?” he asked. “Whose soul? Yours?”

“Not my own,” she said. “I had already sold my own soul when I made this bargain. No, Octavian. I did not act to save my soul but that of my love. Your soul has been with me all these years, since the battle at Avernus. You’ve lived without it, as I have lived without mine. Did you never notice its absence? Tell me, Octavian, was it a glorious life? Did you love? Did you find joy?”

Augustus looked at her miserably. She was so beautiful. Her lips were bright, even in the darkness.

She seemed taller now, somehow, and her skin paler, as though she had absorbed the moonlight. She smiled indulgently upon him.

Her teeth were pointed.

His throat was closing. He could scarcely breathe. A name drifted up from out of his past, a name he should never have forgotten. He did not understand how he had.

“Cleopatra,” he said.

“Te teneo,” she told Augustus. “You are mine.”

She bent toward him, taking his body in her strong hands. She came closer, brushing her cold lips over his cold lips, and the emperor looked up into her eyes, seeing fires, seeing volcanoes, seeing destruction.

He watched Rome fall in a moment, watched the sky fill with metal wings, watched all he had built crumble.

He felt Cleopatra biting into his throat, and he struggled weakly. Her hand pressed down upon him, heavy as a coverlet, and he relaxed under her weight. It was a kiss.

Yes. They had once been lovers, he was sure. They were lovers again, it seemed. The kiss was sweet.