The wine in my patera was the color of a fresh bruise.
I watched it tremble. My hand would not stop shaking.
"Fortuna has spat on us!"
My palm slammed the table. The wood groaned like a dying man. Wine leapt from the rim—a crimson wave spreading across the polished cedar, soaking into the grain like blood into linen.
"Luck is for the beloved of the gods!" My voice tore from my throat. "What use is coin? What use is silk? Mother, we cannot eat gold!"
Across from me, she did not move.
She sat like an empress on a throne of bones—draped in Coan silk so fine I could see the candleflame through it. Gold cuffs weighted her wrists, each one stamped with the leering, ithyphallic face of Priapus. At her throat, a collar of Ethiopian emeralds strangled her pale skin—gems that could feed the Subura's poor for a year and buy their silence for a decade.
And she watched me.
Those eyes. Grey as the winter Tiber. Cold as a tomb. They held no love—only appraisal. The same look she gave a new girl on the auction block.
"Really?" Her voice was a serpent uncoiling in the stillness. "Coin means nothing? Then why do I scrape and scheme to keep you fed? Dress you? House you?"
She leaned forward. A predator's shift.
"Without me, you'd be begging in the Forum, selling your body for crusts. Life is suffering, Aurelia. No one is spared."
I wanted to scream. To tear down the frescoed walls with my bare hands. To rip the gilded lewdness from the plaster and hurl it at her perfect, painted face.
Father made us happy. Father loved us.
Why did the gods take him?
"That doesn't mean you sell Livia! And Aelia! And Carla to the flesh-traders!"
A small hand clutched my stola from behind.
Flavia.
My youngest sister. Twelve years old. Her fingers trembled against the fabric, the tremor running through her whole body like a plucked string.
I shook her off.
Please, Aurelia. Her lips moved. No sound came. Her throat was too tight for sound.
I did not stop.
"What are we to you? Cattle?" The word tasted foul. "You raise us, fatten us with pretty words—then sell us to the highest bidder?" My whole body shook, fury and grief twisting into something wild, something that wanted to break the world. "You trade your own blood!"
She watched.
Silent.
Then she laughed. A low, awful sound, like a dagger dragged across marble.
"You think I don't know sacrifice?" She stood, her saffron-dyed palla pooling around her like liquid gold. "Livia fetched fifty denarii. Aelia, sixty."
Her lips curled.
"And Carla? She was sold before the auctioneer finished his chant."
Fifty. Sixty. Sold.
The numbers hung in the air like smoke from a funeral pyre.
I wanted to strangle her. To watch the life leave her eyes and feel nothing.
Instead, I stood frozen.
What could I do? Kill my own mother?
"You, Aurelia..." She tilted her head, studying me like a slave-merchant assessing prime stock. She reached for my face. I flinched, but her fingers caught my chin, forcing me still.
"These eyes—" Her thumb brushed my cheekbone. "Violet as Tyrian dye. Rare. Exquisite." She said it like a merchant praising imported silk. "That's why I saved you for last."
The room swayed. The perfumed air turned thick, suffocating.
"The slaver returns at dawn." She released me, turning away as if I were already gone. "Run if you wish. The streets will chew you up. The vigiles will drag you back by your hair. And I?"
She glanced over her shoulder, her profile sharp against the lamplight.
"I will count his coin and forget your name."
Flavia sobbed behind me. A tiny, broken sound.
I did not turn.
If I saw her tears, I would crumble to dust.
My fingers found the fruit knife on the table. Small. Meant for peeling apples.
I did not think.
I lunged.
The blade flashed toward the pale column of her throat—
She caught my wrist. Her fingers closed like iron. A grip born of a lifetime of breaking girls.
Flavia's arms wrapped around my waist. Her tears soaked through my stola, warm against my back.
Then the slap came.
I did not see it. I felt it.
My head snapped sideways. My teeth clacked together. Blood flooded my mouth—copper and salt. I was on the floor before I knew I had fallen.
The mosaic tiles pressed into my cheek, each tiny stone a separate point of pain. Somewhere above me, the knife skittered across the marble, a sound like a dying bird.
I did not move.
I could not.
A thin red line marred her perfect cheek. She touched it. Studied the blood on her fingertips as if it were a curiosity—a stain she could not quite name.
Then she looked down at me.
For a heartbeat—a single, suspended moment—something flickered in her eyes.
Not love.
Not regret.
Something worse.
Recognition.
"I should kill you for that," she murmured, her voice almost conversational. "But you're worth too much alive."
She crouched, bringing her lips to my ear. Her perfume—jasmine and myrrh—cloyed in my nostrils.
"Dawn comes, daughter. And so does he."
Then she was gone. Her footsteps echoed down the colonnaded hall like a judge's sentence.
Flavia collapsed beside me. Her small body wracked with silent sobs.
I lay on the cold floor, staring at the cracked ceiling fresco—some forgotten goddess of love, her face split in two by a fault in the plaster. One eye wept. The other stared blankly at nothing.
There has to be a way.
The thought was a spark in the dark.
There has to.
---
I do not know how long we lay there. The moon crawled across the barred window, painting a silver path across the floor. When Flavia's voice finally came, it was a whisper fragile as a bird's bone.
"Aurelia... we can escape."
"To where?" My voice was ash. "The slaver, Gallus, owns this quarter. He pays the vigiles to look the other way. This place is not a home—it is a lupanar. A wolf's den. A fornix where men pay to spit on the memory of what we were."
"Who cares what they call it?" Her fingers found mine in the gloom. Her hand was ice-cold. "We are different. We are not them."
Yes. My younger sister was different.
Too smart. She could read a scroll once and recite it verbatim. In letters and numbers, she was a prodigy. Our tutor called her "Minerva born anew." She was our father's morning star.
She still is.
I wished she had never known this place. I wished her world had remained gardens and poetry and the clean light of our old villa's atrium.
But after Father died, Mother moved us here—to her hometown, to this walled compound nestled against the Aventine Hill. A place with barred windows and the perpetual stench of sour wine, cheap perfume, and sweat.
I watched men come and go. Heard the sounds through thin walls.
And when the coins still were not enough, when Father's legacy was spent, Mother sold my sisters one by one.
Livia wept.
Aelia screamed.
Carla walked away smiling.
I thought of her sometimes—Carla, the eldest, the one who was supposed to hold us together. She had been the first to smile when the slaver came. She had walked away without looking back, her hand in Mother's, her laughter trailing behind her like perfume.
She was my mother's favorite.
And you did not have to guess who my mother's enemy was.
I am.
I am my mother's enemy.
I hated her with a fire that burned clean through grief.
"Aurelia." Flavia's voice snapped me from the abyss.
I often retreated there, weaving conversations with Father's ghost or debating philosophers I had never met. Some think I am touched in the head. Maybe I am.
"I have a plan."
The words were taut with a tension I had never heard in her. My sister did not make plans. She read scrolls. She memorized poetry. She did not plan.
"Titus," she said.
The name hit me like a blade between the ribs.
Titus.
The man who swore his life to me when I was fifteen and he was a scrawny youth being kicked half to death by off-duty legionaries in the Forum.
He had fire in his eyes even then, a defiant spark amid the blood and dirt.
I stepped in. Used Father's name. Saved him. Fed him broth in our kitchens. Gave him a place among our clientes.
And he vowed, hand over his heart, eyes burning with fierce, stupid loyalty: "My life is yours, domina. Always."
But what help was that fool's pledge now? He was probably dead in some border skirmish, or drunk in a tavern, or worse—forgotten.
Flavia leaned closer, her breath warm against my ear.
"He promised he would do anything for you. He meant it."
"What are you saying?"
She hesitated. Then the words came in a rushed, desperate stream.
"I know he... holds certain thoughts when he looks at you. I have seen it. But he can be useful. He has a kindness in him. A debt."
My stomach twisted.
Titus.
The boy with the calloused hands and the awkward, earnest smile. The one who always seemed to be in my shadow, his gaze a tangible weight, heavy with something I never dared name.
Now Flavia was suggesting... what?
"Useful how?"
She glanced toward the barred window, where moonlight spilled like spilled milk across the floor.
"He has a horse. And he knows the roads outside the city. The back ways, the shepherd's tracks. If we can get to him..."
My heart, a dead thing in my chest, gave a single, painful thud.
Escape.
A real, tangible word. Not a dream. A path.
But could Titus really help? Or would he be another chain? A man's help always came with a price. Especially that kind of help.
"That is not possible," I snapped. "He is a soldier. He is probably stationed in Germania by now."
Flavia's eyes narrowed—a flicker of defiance so rare it shocked me.
"Do you have a better suggestion? Should we wait for Gallus and his chains?"
I faltered.
She was right. I did not.
"You are eighteen," she pressed, her voice dropping to a steely whisper. "Mother plans to sell you to the highest bidder. And I am eleven."
Eleven.
I blinked. Had I miscounted the years? I thought she was twelve.
But no. She was eleven. Barely more than a child. Her wrists were still thin as twigs.
Her next words struck with the precision of a surgeon's blade:
"If I am left alone with her, she will beat me for your defiance. And when my monthly bleeding starts—and it will start soon—she will sell me too. This is our only path. Our only one."
The truth of it settled over me like a leaden shroud. Cold. Final.
I could not deny it.
But still, the old fears rose, dark and clamoring.
"The slaver comes at dawn," I whispered, the hour feeling like a blade at our throats. "How can we meet Titus in time? And how can I trust leaving you with him? He is a man. Things could go wrong in a thousand ways."
She did not flinch. My little sister, the scholar, looked at me with the grim resolve of a general.
"Then you should have considered that before you tried to carve open our mother's throat."
Her tone was sharper than I had ever heard it. There was no child left in that voice.
Before I could recoil, she continued, her words measured and clear:
"I sent him a letter last week. Through old Linus, the baker's boy. He replied."
She paused. Her gaze unwavering.
"He said—'I am yours to command, domina. I wait at the Porta Capena at first light.'"
My breath caught in my chest.
I am yours to command.
Not "I will save you." Not a hero's boast.
A debt repaid.
A spark—tiny, treacherous, alive—flickered in the absolute dark.
"The Porta Capena," I breathed. "But if we are caught... if Mother finds his letter..."
Flavia's hand tightened around mine, a vise of cold flesh.
"She will not. And we will not be caught."
Silence descended, thick and heavy with all that was unsaid, with all that was at stake.
Outside, a dog barked in the distance. Somewhere in the sleeping city, a drunkard laughed—a burst of empty noise. The world kept turning, indifferent to two sisters huddled on a brothel floor, plotting their fragile rebellion.
I pulled Flavia against me. Her small body fit into the hollow of my side, trembling. Her heartbeat was a tiny drum against my ribs.
Dawn was coming. I could see it bleeding at the edges of the night.
Somewhere across the sleeping city, at the Porta Capena, a man was waiting. A man who had sworn his life to me. A man I had not thought of in three years.
I am yours to command, domina.
Did he mean it? Or was this another chain, wrapped in silk and called a gift?
I did not know.
But dawn was coming. And when it came, I would find out.
I held my sister tighter.
Titus.
--------------
To be continued...