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“What of it?”
“I’d have thought you’d select Scipio? She will be your toughest competitor for censor when the time comes. Erato is a nobody! A mercator from some third-rate house of scribes!”
The thin boy flushed red and shot the briefest of looks toward a young woman across the crowd. At first, Aurelius didn’t recognize her, but then recollection crept in.
Dorina? Eldest daughter of House Mattic?
Had it really been five years since she was posted as low envoy to Ardora? And yet, the evidence of the passage of time was all over her body. Even Aurelius, no expert on the female figure, could see that she had blossomed during her time in the land of fertility and passion. And he had heard the none-too-subtle whispers that she’d declined the customary five-year extension usually given to low envoys, instead returning home in search of a mate.
“Oh, Domi!” he said, licking his lips. “That is your play? You get one chance to borrow from my well of intrigue, and you select a love rival?”
“There is more to life than power and infamy, Aurelius. There is such a thing as love. As actually making a connection with someone.”
Aurelius scoffed. “With an attitude like that, you may well avoid both. You know as well as I do that power and infamy are all that matter in this game.”
“For you, perhaps. But that is my price. Erato. And I want something shocking—no two-drachmae rumor. Something a young lady of noble repute would find...”
“Discouraging?”
“Exactly.”
Aurelius shrugged and leaned in closer, sharing a tasty morsel about the fifteen-year-old daughter of a plebeian parchment maker, whose house had recently come upon a new baby daughter with the most beautiful mass of curly black hair, and a magnificent nose that looked nothing like the rest of the brood.
Domi grinned widely. He moved right up to Aurelius’s ear and whispered one word.
That one word was as sweet as summer honey. As welcome as a thick-bodied lover.
Benedict.
His heart soared.
Finally! Good gods, finally!
In just a few days, Benedict would be flung off to the far corners of Dynosia as the new herald, doing his mother’s seedy bidding, and Aurelius would replace him in the senate.
And from there, it would only be a matter of time until he reclaimed the real prize.
The prize that was rightfully his.
The prize that his little brother had tried to snake for himself.
The prize that his bitch mother had tried to rip from his grasp!
I will be the next fucking archon!
4
TEIGRA
Guilt crawled across Teigra as Aurelius berated the horrible boy—leaning in close, no doubt chastising him for his wayward eye and coarse manner. Treating a fellow patrician like that would risk his own ambitions. But he was doing it anyway, stepping in to protect her, just like he always did.
Just like he had in this very spot, three years earlier, grabbing the youngest Malus boy by a fistful of toga when he’d heard what they’d all been calling her. Whispering some secret so dark into the boy’s ear that Malus had turned as white as his garment. Giving the rest of them a look of such ferocious “do you want some too?” that the whispers had stopped completely.
At least for a few days.
But even that brief respite was more gift than she could ever repay. Without it, she wasn’t sure she would have survived those first, crushing nights.
Teigra sighed as she watched Aurelius work. She didn’t know how he did it.
