“No!” I roared.
Cassia took a step back, but she was in no way submissive. “I will watch and report to someone respected, such as Sextus Livius. Vestalis himself can help—he’d not be happy to learn he has a crazed murderer for a wife.”
“Now I must ask ifyouare mad. If Severina or her bodyguards discover you, you will be dead on the spot.Ican at least defend myself. You cannot.” I pushed myself from the wall to tower over her. “You already nearly died once when you got in the way of a killer.”
“Does that matter?” Cassia asked in a reasonable tone. “Hesiodos can always find you another slave.”
“I don’t want another slave,” I shouted. “I wantyou.”
Cassia went still, her voice falling a notch. “Hesiodos will make certain someone else can do your accounts.”
“Accounts?I don’t give a dog’s ass about my accounts.” I leaned to her, menace in every line of me. Seasoned gladiators had scrambled hastily away whenever I did this, but Cassia only gazed up at me, her eyes round. “I can’t do without you, Cassia. I need you.”
She continued to stare, as though what I said confounded her. I straightened, trying and failing to stem my rage.
“You willnotgo to Severina’s, and you willnotspy on her,” I said in a harsh voice. “You will go nowhere until this killer is found, even if I have to lock you in here.Iwill go, andyouwill stay.”
Cassia did not respond, not to argue or weep or rant. She stood very still, fingertips on the table, the folds of her tunic unmoving.
I swung away from her, but I could not go tamely to bed as I’d planned. I slammed open the door and charged down the stairs and out into the darkness.
I had the presence of mind to lock the door behind me, then I strode away into the Roman night.
* * *
Cassiaand I did not discuss the invitation to Severina’s over the next day and a half. She had been asleep when I’d returned the night I’d stormed out, and I hadn’t awakened her. In the morning, she’d tidied the already tidy rooms without a word and departed to bring home water and breakfast.
We didn’t speak about anything at all. Cassia busied herself with her tablets, and I went to the baths, then returned to Chryseis’s insula and warehouse in the hopes that I would find something—anything—to confirm who the killer was, but I was unlucky. I found nothing but the scraped-clean floor where I suspected the bodies had been cut up, and perhaps where Ajax and Rufus had been killed in the first place, carted here while stupefied or unconscious.
I questioned those who rented part of Chryseis’s warehouse from her, but they’d claimed to never have seen anyone suspicious.
Likewise, the family who’d lived across the hall from Chryseis, who had taken my advice and moved to the next building over, could tell me little. The father, after much persuasion, admitted that a big man had paid him well to vacate the rooms and move upstairs the day Cassia and I had found Rufus. His description matched what Albus, the armorer’s apprentice, had given me—large nose and thick dark hair.
This did not help much, though I scoured the streets every time I was on them for a man matching such a description.
The basketmaker had suddenly taken his family to visit his mother in Ostia. This from the coppersmith in the next shop, who also had no information for me.
The Subura revealed even less, and I returned home, discouraged.
The day of Lupercalia dawned.
This festival for the purification of the city was so old few remembered how it began, but the populace, as usual, turned out to celebrate. In front of the cave where tradition had it that Romulus and Remus had been raised in infancy, two young men were anointed with blood from animals sacrificed there. Armed with strips of these animals’ flesh, they then began a sprint around the lower slopes of the Palatine, merrily striking out at those they passed.
I had walked to the Palatine to join the crowd for the festivities, but Cassia had declined to accompany me, saying she had things to put in order. I’d simply departed—we’d been stiff with each other since our argument.
Women thrust out hands and arms as the young men ran past, eager to be struck by the bloody strips, which conveyed fertility. The youths happily obliged.
One of the young men came at me. His eyes were wide under a forehead smeared with drying blood, his red mouth open in laughter. I tried to dodge, but he ran resolutely into me, stinging me on the forearm with his makeshift whip.
The woman next to me flung herself at him as the whip came down, managing to catch the end of it on her hand. She spun away, smiling.
I studied the tiny spatter of blood on my arm from the strip of animal flesh. I’d never thought about my own fertility—my focus in life thus far had been surviving to live another day.
As my skin tingled from the brief slap, I wondered if I would ever have children. A boy, perhaps, to dog my footsteps and listen to me drone on about building walls or traveling around Roman lands in exhibition bouts to cheering crowds. Or a daughter, one to buy pretty trinkets for and to hoist on my shoulders so she could watch the chariot races.
I shut down the thoughts. Children lived perilous lives—accidents and fevers took away so many, not to mention people ready to steal a child for the price he or she would bring. Parents grieved for children all the time, as Marcianus, who tried to save many of them, attested. Small stones erected up and down the Appian Way and other roads outside the walls were sad testaments to short lives.
A man’s hope for a child to carry on his name could quickly end in tragedy. Having a family was a frightening business.
