I glanced sharply at her, but Cassia serenely turned her gaze to the street. People milled along this quiet lane, visiting the wine merchant or other small shops tucked nearby. None looked up to see us sitting above them.
“I don’t know.” As I’d reflected before, I wanted it with my whole being, but the fear of it reached up to choke me. “Would our benefactor stop me?”
“I think not,” Cassia answered. “The instructions Hesiodos gave me were that you should employ yourself to pay the rent and feed the two of us until our benefactor is ready to reveal himself and his purpose. Hesiodos did not specify what sort of jobs you should take. You and I assumed bodyguard, because that is what most gladiators do.” Cassia spread her hands. “Working for a builder can pay the rent as well, depending on how much he offers.”
“Possibly not much.” A cloaked woman hurried by beneath us, a flurry of white and muted blue. “When I worked for the builder who apprenticed me, my payment was food and a place to sleep.”
“You were in training,” Cassia pointed out. “And a youth. From what Gallus said, he wants you as an assistant.”
“Which sounds like not much pay at all.” I leaned back on my hands, enjoying the sunshine. “Gallus will judge what I’m good at. I barely remember my life from before the games. I’ll have to learn about building all over again.”
“It will come back to you,” Cassia said with confidence. “I think you ought to take the employment if Gallus wants you in truth.”
“The last builder I worked for died,” I said, the words low but succinct.
“That was not your fault.” Cassia regarded me with sympathy.
“I thought it an accident.” I tried to push away memories of that horrible day, but the images came to me before I could stop them. The brick structure, not yet finished, along with the roof scaffolding, in a pile of ruins. The broken and bloody body of the man who’d taken a chance on me found under the stones. “Then others discovered evidence of deliberate damage to the building. I was convenient to blame, so I was arrested.” I’d been sixteen, defiant, and terrified.
“And sent to the games,” Cassia concluded. “The true killer never found.”
“Why should they look for one?” I shrugged. “I’d never have hurt my master, but he’d shouted at me the day before when I was slow, and the magistrates said I pulled the building down on him in revenge. Stupid.”
Cassia reached a hand toward me then withdrew it before she touched me. “That does not mean it will happen again. Gallus is a gentle man, and clever. I doubt he will anger anyone enough for them to try to kill him.”
I rubbed my upper lip, which was growing bristly. I needed to visit the barber. “My builder might not have angered anyone at all. A rival who wanted the site could have had him killed.” I’d never learned exactly what had happened, and that had always bothered me.
“The past does not necessarily repeat itself.”
Cassia gazed across the rooftops before us. Above the low buildings on this street, we could just see the hills beyond the river.
I wondered if Cassia reflected on her own experiences. Though born a slave, she’d been raised in some comfort, as her father had been a trusted member of the household. Cassia had enjoyed her father’s protection, and he’d taught her everything she knew.
Her exit from that house had been hard on her—her mistress angry for her husband’s attentions that had been no fault of Cassia’s. A slave, even a learned one, was at the mercy of her master’s whims.
I’d made clear from the start that I did not expect Cassia to warm my bed. If I wanted to sate myself, there were plenty of women in brothels up and down Rome’s seven hills. I was supposed to take care of this woman, and I felt protective of her, even from myself.
“I believe I will tell Gallus I would like to work with him,” I said after a time of silence. “I’ve found all Aemil’s gladiators for him, which is what he originally hired me to do. We should collect our fee, and be done.”
Cassia smoothed a thread of her already neat hair. “The killer is still out there. Gladiators from other ludi might be next.”
“The urban cohorts will have to find him, then.” Though I knew she was right, I did not want to endanger Cassia any more than I already had. She’d been hurt when I’d pursued a killer before.
“Nero instructedyouto find him, remember? The urban cohorts will simply nab whoever is convenient.”
She was reminding me in her gentle but pointed way that my entire life had changed becauseIhad been a convenient suspect. I might condemn another to my fate if I gave up now.
I wanted to argue that Ajax’s and Rufus’s deaths had nothing to do with me. Aemil had asked me to find his missing gladiators, and I’d found them. Regulus had brought himself home, and now he was locked in, his lock pick out of reach.
I knew, though, that if I woke in the morning to hear that another gladiator had been found in pieces and I’d done nothing to stop it, I’d not forgive myself for a long time. Even more so if an innocent was condemned to death for it, as I had been long ago.
I leaned back again, studying the tattered clouds in the blue sky, the storm spent, and let out a long breath. “I will find whoever it is and make sure it stops. But I don’t know how to go about it.”
“We will think on it,” Cassia spoke with confidence, then both of us fell silent as we watched the clouds disperse on the warming wind.
* * *
In the morning,I was awakened by a thumping on the door at the bottom of the stairs. Cassia, already up and having fetched water and bread, started toward it.
