His frown deepened. Her fingers twitched, and the papyrus crinkled. His gaze jumped to it. “What’s that?”
Her legs were stiff, clumsy. She jerked back a step and bumped into the chair behind the desk. Her arm flung out to steady herself, and her fingers released the paper. It fluttered to the ground.
Aelius bent and picked it up. He read it over. “These are my notes.” He lifted his gaze from the paper and stared at her hard. “What were you doing with them?”
She could see in his searching stare that he was starting to put the pieces together. Her knees weakened, and she slumped into the chair. It was over. “I did something terrible,” she confessed, her voice small and pathetic. “But I had no choice.”
“I don’t understand.”
A wave of remorse flooded her. She forced herself to meet his gaze. Suspicion and confusion mingled on his handsome face.
“Rufus blackmailed me into betraying you. I’ve been giving him information on your plans for the past two weeks.” The words felt like shards of glass on her tongue.
Shock rippled over his features. He turned away, braced a fist against the wall. Tension filled every line of his body. Crispina bit her lip, waiting for an explosion.
“Why?” he murmured, face still hidden from her. “You must have had a good reason. Unless this has all been a lie, and you’ve hated me from the beginning. I did fear I would never be good enough for you.”
“No!” She rose to her feet, wanting to go to him but afraid to touch him. “I don’t hate you. I lo—” She broke off. It was almost too painful to admit now, when she was about to lose him, but she had to lay herself bare. She owed him that much. “I love you.”
His head jerked toward her. “You have a funny way of showing it.”
“I also love Max.” Her voice grew stronger. “Rufus threatened him. I did what I did to keep…” She cleared her throat. “To keep our family together.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “How could Rufus threaten Max? And why didn’t you tell me?”
She took a deep breath. “There’s something you don’t know about me.” She told him, in halting words, about her secret lessons. About how she had really discovered Max. About how Rufus had followed her and blackmailed her, threatened to take Max away from them.
Aelius paced while she talked, arms crossed tight over his chest. When she fell silent, he stopped and faced her. “How much does Rufus know?”
“Everything you’ve told me about your plans through the election,” she admitted, the words sticking in her throat. “He was relentless.”
Aelius absorbed this with a face like stone. “You have cost me this election. Do you understand that? I can’t doanythingif Rufus can anticipate my every move.”
She swallowed hard. “There will be other elections.”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “Yes, but if I want to become consul in ten years, I needed this election. I needed to winthis year. And your foolishness has taken that from me.”
“It wasn’t foolishness,” she snapped. “I was doing a good thing by teaching those children to read. Education is everything. You of all people should understand that.”
“Cavorting around slums dressed as a priestess is not a fitting endeavor for a tribune’s wife,” he shot back.
“Well, I won’t be a tribune’s wife now, will I?” The retort snapped from her mouth like an arrow from a bow. Once, she had entertained a brief hope that Aelius would understand and appreciate the passion behind her lessons. But deep down, she’d known he would react like this. Despite fostering a few radical ideas, he wanted to be seen as respectable, genteel, to put as much distance from his inferior birth as possible. And a respectable, genteel man did not permit his wife to “cavort around slums,” as he so eloquently put it.
His hands balled into fists. “Leaving that aside, why did you not tell me the moment Rufus approached you?”
“I feared if I told you Rufus had threatened me and Max, you’d drag him out of his house and beat him in the streets. Then you’d certainly not win the election, and you’d be arrested besides.”
He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I might have done that,” he admitted. “But you should have told me. Instead you lied to me. About many things.”
Tears pricked her eyes. The shattering of his trust felt like a hand squeezing her lungs, depriving her of air. “I know.”
“You should have told me about Rufus.” His voice grew stronger, angrier. “Maybe we would still be in the same place, but we could have dealt with it together, like partners. But you chose to betray me.”
A hot knife twisted in her stomach. She tried to mask her devastation with anger. “If I had been honest with you from the beginning about what I was doing with my pupils on the Aventine, would you have let me continue?”
He glared at her. “You know the answer to that.”
“Then we are not partners. You promised me freedom, but you would have sought to control me, to tell me what I can and cannot do, where I can and cannot go. We never would have had Max.”
