Tramping footsteps sounded from within and then Nero himself ripped back the curtain.
I glimpsed a smallish room beyond, as lavishly decorated as the corridor. A young man in a gold-colored tunic reposed on a bench near a window, cradling a lyre in his arms. He appeared in no way distressed that Faustinus had burst in.
Cassia and I dropped to our knees before Nero, Cassia lowering her face to the floor. It never did to look the princeps in the eye when he was in a rage.
“What is it?” Nero demanded of me. He wore a calf-length tunic of purple silk, his sandals gilded. My direct line of sight showed me the hairy leg between hem and gold-trimmed laces. “Did you find that nuisance’s money? Did you bring me the thief?”
Cassia raised her head but she kept her gaze on the tiled floor. “Where is she, sir?”
“Where is who?” Nero asked in annoyance.
He spat the question I wanted to ask, but then I abruptly realized the answer.
“The dancing girl,” I said.
Not the nobody senator who’d given up and gone home when I’d usurped his place in line to speak to Drusus. The burly bodyguard wasn’t the immediate danger either—he was waiting outside the gate for the young woman to finish her task.
Drusus must have arranged to meet her and her guard at the games, a neutral place to give them money and instructions. No one would notice another dancer among the many there that day, and it was not unusual for a highly sought-after dancer to keep a bodyguard.
When young Ariston had foiled Drusus’s plans by lifting his purse, Drusus, furious, had done everything to get the money back, and probably summoned the woman to his home to explain and make new arrangements. I wagered it had been the bodyguard who’d covertly returned to collect the twenty-aurei fee, the man intimidating enough to fend off thieves.
“You didn’t summon her to dance for you?” Cassia asked Nero. She glanced at the youth with the lyre, who patiently waited Nero’s return.
“No.” Nero’s frown cleared and then he froze, his eyes filling with fear. “She is with Poppaea.”
He immediately darted between Cassia and me, his sandal catching me in the side as he passed. I rose and helped Cassia to her feet, then the two of us rushed after the princeps and the guards who’d spun to keep up with him.
Faustinus shuffled behind us. “The dancing girl has been here before. She has been approved and scrutinized.”
“I’m certain,” Cassia said to him over her shoulder. “Drusus would have chosen someone who could get close to the princeps, or to his wife. She was paid quite a lot of gold to come here today.”
Faustinus whispered a string of foul words under his breath. He put on a burst of speed, passing us to catch up to the Praetorian guards.
“I thought she’d come to kill Nero,” Cassia told me as we ran. “But killing his wife would be a heavy blow.”
I knew that Nero loved his second wife, Poppaea, in spite of the rumors that swirled around her—how she’d divorced his friend Otho then convinced Nero to murder his disapproving mother so they could be together. As did most highborn Roman men, Nero took plenty of lovers—Poppaea had been his mistress before he’d divorced, exiled, and then executed his first wife. But he adored the beautiful Poppaea, in his own, intense way.
Anyone in the domus could have heard us and ten Praetorian guards running at them. By the time we reached the room that Nero burst into, the young woman I’d seen in Drusus’s tablinum was standing on the stone balustrade of a balcony that overlooked the Circus Maximus behind the Palatine.
Poppaea Sabina Augusta, a stately woman with hair a shade between red and golden and swathed in a purple stola, had risen in surprise from a cushion-strewn couch.
“Grab her,” Nero roared at his guards. “Search her.”
The dancer caught sight of me. She glared her fury and then drew back her hand, a blade glinting in it.
She threw, the knife flying in a perfect arch toward Nero.
Poppaea screamed. The guards surged forward but I reached him first.
I tackled the imperial Caesar, sending him to the floor, and the blade struck deep into my upper arm.
I grunted, but the blade was small and my arm was big. I pulled out the knife, the trickle of blood hot on my flesh, and hauled the snarling Nero to his gold-sandaled feet.
Cassia cried a warning, and we swung around. The dancing girl, with a final sneer at us, leapt straight from the balcony, her gold jewelry ringing as she plunged downward.
The guards and I rushed to the balustrade. I expected to see the young woman tumbling down, down, down the steep cliff to her death at its base, but there was no sign of her. Nor was she clinging to the underside of the balcony or creeping along the hill to find a safer descent.
She’d simply vanished.
