“Just do—”
Scaevola broke off abruptly. I glanced at him to find his gaze riveted to Nero, lips parted.
A fold of Nero’s cloak, with which he’d half muffled his face, had fallen as he’d turned his head to speak to the landlord who refilled his wine cup. The princeps once again wore the clothes of a pleb his the haughty arrogance and supreme confidence would betray him to anyone observant.
Scaevola turned to me woodenly, his entire body stiff.
“I heard him send the landlord to find you.” His words held shock.
“Yes.”
I couldn’t explain my relationship to Nero, because I didn’t understand it myself. Even acquaintance sounded more intimate than what it was. One whose help Nero could demand in an instant, was closer to the truth.
Scaevola continued to stare at me. “No wonder you were released.” He shook his head and turned from me, but his expression held more disgust than respect. “Do as you like, then. If you steal from him again, he can do far worse to you than I can.”
With that pronouncement, Scaevola swung from me and marched away.
The landlord had returned to his place behind the counter by the time I entered. I slid past him and sought the table in the corner.
“Game?” Nero asked, dropping a small bag that clattered to the table. “As long as you don’t throw my tesserae into the stew.”
“I didn’t trust him not to cheat.” I jerked my chin at Blasius who nursed a cup of wine and pretended not to notice me.
“His sort always cheats,” Nero said with a dismissive wave. “I like winning anyway and infuriating them. You needn’t have protected me.”
Not exactly true. He’d never have overcome Blasius’s devious dice, and Nero’s volatile temper might have caused a bloodbath.
“I took your point about finding plainer tesserae.” Nero dumped out his dice, which were carved from ordinary bone, the sort sold at any shop in the Subura. “Put down your coins, Leonidas, so I can win them.”
I obediently picked out coppers from the bag at my side. Cassia never put a great amount of money in it, in case a cutpurse managed to slide it from me. I also suspected she wanted to prevent me from spending too much.
Nero shook the dice in an empty wine cup and slammed it to the table. I saw, to my consternation, that he was wearing the ring. No mistaking the glimmer of deep gold, the worn crest.
Had he thought that by making the ring his, he’d negate its prophecy? If it was a real prophecy in the first place. And why had he decided it a good idea to wear that much gold in this part of the city?
Nero lifted the cup away and turned over the dice. “Ah, the six.” Only one six in a throw was a winner. Nero scooped the coins to him but returned two to the table. I obligingly set down another two ases.
My throw resulted in nothing, and Nero’s next was a Vulture, every dice a four, and we had to add money to the pile in the middle.
Others in the room were ignoring our low-stakes game. Blasius continued to drink by himself as though uninterested in the rest of the popina, but I saw his eye on us. He’d have noted the gold on Nero’s hand. The landlord had as well, I could tell by his nervous glances. I hoped the praetorians again hovered in the darkness to make certain their master returned home unmolested.
Servius had told me Nero was angry with me, but I did not see that in him tonight. Perhaps he’d come here when I’d had Servius send him the hint about playing dice with me again because his curiosity had overcome his pique. Nero was also good at hiding his true feelings until time to smite people with them.
I wondered if he’d return the ring so Cassia could investigate it, if I asked him. I dragged my gaze from the dangerous ring and related in a low voice all Cassia and I had discovered since our last visit to the Palatine. When I told him about the body at the building site, Nero’s eyes narrowed.
“Who is he? This dead man?”
“We don’t know.” I took a large gulp of wine. “Marcianus is examining him, but there is not much left. Cassia is reading over the history of the piece of land—maybe that will say who had been there, and why they’d been killed.”
“How can it? This happened, what did you say, ten years ago?”
“That is what Marcianus thinks.”
“My uncle was still princeps then. Just the sort of thing that would happen while he hid himself away writing books. I don’t want people murdered in my city.”
A number of people were killed in Rome every week, but of course, Nero would only hear of the deaths that his advisors thought important enough to bother him with.
“I want to know who this dead man was,” Nero continued. “And who killed him. And what it has to do with this ring.” He moved his hand so the gold glittered in the lamplight, drawing the attention of every man, thief and otherwise, in the place.
