“What is wrong, Charmian?” one of Octavian’s soldiers asked, moving toward her.

She turned toward the men and gave them a look of betrayal.

“The queen is dead,” she said. “And I am dead, too. I do my last duty that I may go to heaven.”

She slipped to the floor, and Octavian’s man ran to her side. He looked up, grim. At his feet, the body of the other handmaiden lay contorted.

Octavian rejoiced internally. All were dead, and at the queen’s hand. That made things easier. He’d make a show of sorrow and convince the citizens that none of it was his doing. Tears sprang to his eyes in advance of the performance. He’d trained himself well. Some of the tears, it occurred unpleasantly to him, were real, but he would not think on that now.

He’d bring her corpse to Rome with him. Those mummies of the ancient days were impressive things, in their gilded wooden cases. Octavian’s hero, Alexander the Great, had been treated so, and his grave, near Cleopatra’s palaces, contained his body, glittering in a sarcophagus. That was an old tradition, though. Not Roman, not Greek. And he wouldn’t do Cleopatra such honors. To be worshipped long after her death.

Octavian would have her corpse draped with plain linen, and he’d place her atop a rolling cart surrounded with flowers, a parade spectacle with her children in chains behind her. They’d all know it to be her that way. There would be no rumors of an empty coffin.

When that was finished, he’d scatter Cleopatra’s ashes in Italy, do it himself, make a public ceremony of it. She, who had stolen Mark Antony from Rome, would feed the soil of his country with her dust.

Tensing his jaw, Octavian stepped closer to the queen’s corpse, dodging around Agrippa, who stood, ridiculously, with his sword still drawn.

There she was, wrapped in a cloth of sheer, spun gold with a royal purple border. She reclined on a gilded dais, her body as supple and curving as it had been in life, and —

He would not look at her body.

“You will have a long life,” she’d said sixteen years before, and now she was dead, and he stood over her corpse.

She was still wearing the same perfume.

Disgusted with himself, Octavian shook the past from his mind.

He would melt this entire palace into money and thank the gods for it. Rome would be rich again, as it was meant to be. He’d pay his soldiers. It had been a near thing, bringing them here unpaid, with all her treasure hidden in that mausoleum, and her threatening to set the place on fire, but Egypt was conquered at last.

Cleopatra’s breasts were clearly visible through the cloth, he noticed, one completely bare, the nipple erect, as though recently touched. Or kissed. Her arm was thrown back, the better to display the indecency.

Octavian —no, Augustus; that was the name he’d chosen and by which he would soon be known— snorted in revulsion. Whatever poison the queen had consumed, it had treated her as a lover. She was a changed woman from their last meeting a few days earlier, when she’d inexplicably revealed the location of Caesarion. He could only assume she’d been delirious with grief. Why else would she have been so foolish? Gray and gaunt, her eyes blackened, she’d certainly looked ill. Nothing about her had attracted him then. It had been a relief.