I couldn’t help but smile, even if there was bitterness there. “You’re an intelligent woman, Lela.”
“I am,” she agreed easily. “People tend to forget because of my beauty.”
There was no arrogance in the statement. A bit of bitterness there as well. I suppose because her beauty had brought her more misery than joy.
“Tell me, Trajan. Why would you risk your life and your grandfather’s to kill Caesar?”
I never spoke of this to anyone but Julian. Grandfather and I hadn’t even spoken of it. My sisters Marilla and Junia had cried with me at their funerals before they moved to Ravenna and never returned. For the first time, I actually wanted to speak of it. I wanted Lela to know more of me.
“My father was a respected senator. Like my grandfather and many men in our family, he served the people in the senate house.”
I paused, thinking of the great man my father once had been, his smiling face when we gathered for family meals. Lela watched me and listened quietly.
“My father was also an incessant gambler. Grandfather had warned him to control it, but he couldn’t. He began to wander awayfrom gambling tables with patricians and played with merchants. He ran up high debts. So much so, that he couldn’t pay them.”
My chest hurt thinking about those last days, the last time I saw him before I went away to the campaign in Carthage.
“My father took coin from Caesar’s treasury. It was backpay he was owed for supporting one of Igniculus’s new fucking laws, but Caesar hadn’t paid him yet. My father took it on his own to pay his gambling debts. The emperor found out and tried him publicly then had him flogged naked in the middle of the forum right in front of the senate house. In front of every respected man of Rome.”
Acid burned in my belly. She said not a word, absorbing my family shame quietly.
“The humiliation was too great for my father. Immediately following his punishment, my mother carried him home in their litter and he killed himself.”
Lela gasped, but I went on and told it all.
“I was on a campaign when I heard, but I was given leave to return to Rome, to my family. But by the time I arrived, my mother had taken her life as well. Stabbed herself in the heart with the same dagger my father had.” I scoffed. “Caesar declared it an honorable death when I saw him at my mother’s funeral.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered gently.
“My father had his own sins, but it was Caesar’s cruelty that pushed him into death. My mother loved him dearly. They were gods-chosen mates, and she couldn’t live without him.”
“Mates?” asked Lela.
I was surprised she hadn’t heard this living in Rome so long. But I suppose no one in Valerius’s home spoke of the beauty of dragon lore.
“It is believed that dragons choose their own mates. Divined by the gods.”
As mine had chosen her, though I’d never tell her.
“I have sisters as well. Two of them. Junia and Marilla.”
Her eyes brightened, but she didn’t appear surprised by this news. “Where do they live?”
“I moved them to Ravenna after my mother’s funeral. They couldn’t stand the pity of the nobility here, and I could see the way Rome was changing for the worse under Igniculus. I didn’t want them here. They lived a quiet life in Ravenna for a while.”
“They don’t live there now?”
I shook my head. “I had them moved to a secret house of ours in a small province in Pannonia after Julian left. In the past few months, Caesar’s perversions have become more… pronounced. He enjoys abusing women to control the men in their lives, and I will die first before I allow him to hurt my sisters.”
Lela smiled, not the reaction I expected.
“You’re a good brother, Trajan.”
“Any brother would send their sisters away from this place for protection.”
“But not just any brother would send his sisters letters of comfort, or shawls and cloaks to keep them warm in cold winters.”
I blinked and stared. “You found my letters?” Obviously, she did, but I was so surprised I didn’t know what else to say.
