She was not among them, though part of the emperor now desired to execute everyone who had accompanied him to Alexandria. Any of them could be guilty of hiding her. Any of them could have been seduced by her magic. They could be plotting against him even now. He well remembered her beauty, echoed in that of her son. Now the son was dead and the mother was not, and Octavian could neither sleep nor eat. Dread overcame him in his bedchamber, and when he sat at his table, his fear of poisoning was too great to allow him to partake of anything more than a dry crust of bread.

He remembered a hideous story involving the queen of Parthia, who had dined in peacetime with an enemy. The enemy, watching the queen’s robust consumption of her meal, had believed he was safe.

He was wrong.

The queen had coated one side of the serving knife with a lethal dose of poison and left the other side clean. When she sliced the meat, the poisoned side calculatedly went to her foe, while she innocently served herself the other half of the dish.

This queen, Octavian’s enemy, was easily as intelligent and crafty. He trusted nothing, not until he was safely ensconced in Rome, though he knew that there was no way to be entirely protected, not even in his own city. How could he have let her escape him? She’d been his, conquered and killed. And yet she lived.

He had let her live, and every moment she lived ensured his death.

He sent patrols in search of her, turning up every paving stone, investigating every secret passage. Agrippa’s men searched the kitchens, the far warrens of the palace rooms, the Soma itself, and there was no trace of Cleopatra.

“Who is it we seek?” Agrippa asked him, for the hundredth time.

“The body of the queen,” he said. That it was a living body, he did not add.

The emperor instituted blockades on the roads and river, announcing that the body might have been transported by a solitary woman, smuggled out of Alexandria, but he knew that she would evade any such measures. What need had such a creature to travel by land and water? She could as well be traveling in the sky, taking flight like a sacred falcon or, more appropriately, like a vulture.

“Bring the children,” he ordered. He had them under guard, deep in the palace, and now he thought they might know something he did not.

He pressed his back against Cleopatra’s golden throne, cursing the discomfort of his position. The twins, when they came, unnerved him.

The boy looked down, as was proper, but the girl tilted her head to look at him. She was the image of her mother, black hair rippling down her back, though her lips held none of Cleopatra’s sensuality. The girl’s mouth reminded him of Antony’s, drawn tight in a moment of petulance, and below her lips was Antony’s own cleft chin. Cleopatra Selene’s eyes were large, black pools, also inherited from her father, who’d used his limpid gaze to seduce half the wives in Rome.