“I could have made us five times as much.” Felix does not pick her up on her use of the plural, though she knows he has heard it. “For a man who likes making money, I never understood why you didn’t pursue your own interests better.”

“You think you’d have made a good business partner?”

“You know I would. You just couldn’t bear to admit we’re the same.”

Felix laughs. “That’s what you think?” Amusement lights up his eyes, so easy to mistake for affection. “And tell me”—he leans his head on his hands, a pose of false intimacy she remembers from her life as his slave—“if you had been me, how welcoming might you have been, if you saw yourself in another?” Amara hesitates. She had not considered this, had not seriously imagined that Felix had, in fact, understood her. “Exactly,” he says, his voice dry. Felix opens a drawer in his desk and reaches inside without looking down, taking out an object whose place must be so familiar he can find it by touch alone. It is the statue of the hunter goddess Diana which she sent him after she gained her freedom. Her promise of revenge. He sets it gently on the desk. “You cannot fool me, Amara. I know what hatred looks like. And I know how my father died.”

Amara stares at the small figure. Diana with her bow, poised to strike. She flicks through her memories of Fabia, gossip stacked like a linen chest, the words she thought less important, shoved to the back. The old master died in a street brawl. Enough men wanted him dead, didn’t they? All that money he was owed. Amara thinks of Drauca, of Simo, of all those Felix has killed without wielding the knife himself. And she understands. Felix avenged his mother’s death, after all.

She does not dare return his gaze. “You’re wrong about this,” Amara says, picking up the statue and turning the roughly hewn god over in her fingers. “I wasn’t wishing you ill. You told me once that I reminded you of Diana when you bought me. What woman is not touched by being compared to a goddess?” Felix has narrowed his eyes, and she knows he is not convinced. She will have to give him something more, something that is closer to the truth. Amara reaches for the shame she carries in the darkest part of herself, letting it spill out between them. “I am like you Felix, but not you. If you could have brought yourself to acknowledge me, instead of humiliating me, nobody would have been more loyal.”

Amara’s cheeks are flaming, her emotion unfeigned. “So that’s what you wanted,” he sneers, as if cruelty can hide the answering flush on his own face. “Just like any other fucking woman. For a man to pretend he loves you. You’re no better than Victoria.”