Page 113 of Of Love and Treason
Titus didn’t answer. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He only knew he needed to leave before he killed someone.
Moonlight turned the puddles in the street into white luminaries, splashing light onto the buildings on either side. Another night he might have admired it; tonight he didn’t bother. The chill air felt good against his anger.
Jupiter Optimus Maximus!He’d always tried to convince himself he would be glad to see Iris fall in love and marry someday. In those thoughts, however, the groom had always been faceless, vague, and above all, not real. Certainly not the most wanted man in the empire. He wouldn’t be so upset if she were with some dull barber or a glassblower, or—
Mars and Jupiter!What was she thinking?
Sweat dampened his back. Not even the dank frostiness of the night had any effect on him until the Castra Praetoria loomed ahead. How could she do this to him? Everything he’d done had been for her—his friend, the only trustworthy constant in his world of backstabbing rank climbers. He flexed his fingers, half-hoping someone would jump him out of the shadows so he could expend some of the violence he felt. It wasn’t about Iris falling in love. But the principle of the thing. The... theprinciple.
She knew Titus had been assigned to find Valentine. And all along she’d known—for months she’d known—that Valentine had remained in Rome and had kept it from him. Quintus, too, must have known.
It didn’t matter that he couldn’t imagine either of them actually turning Valentine in after what he’d done for Iris. Even he hadn’t. Still, the secrets they’d kept from him cut. Quintus and Iris against him. When hadhebecome the enemy? They’d obviously felt they could not trust him. And now what was he supposed to do? Confirm their suspicions and arrest the man Iris claimed to love? She’d never forgive him. Somehow that prospect seemed worse than losing her to Valentine.
Entering the Castra Praetoria, Titus stormed to his closet office in the record building, barely aware of the strange looks and how his tunic clung to his sweaty body even as white clouds of his breath puffed before him. He’d freeze once he stopped. As he stepped into the darkened halls of the record building, hobnailed footsteps rushed toward him in the dark.
“Liberare?” Bato rounded the corner, lips tight. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where in hades have you been? You’re going to miss it! Everyone else has left already.”
“Miss what? What’s going on?”
Bato grabbed his arm and spun him back toward the door. “Urian came back right after you left—he’sin. He’s got himself a wedding set for tonight in the Gardens of Maecenas. If you want to be there for the arrest, you’d better pray Mercury lends us wings.”
They crashed into the moon-splashed streets, running faster thanthey ever had in training. Titus’s mind raced in time with his feet, recalling Iris’s face, the satchel slung over Valentine’s shoulder, his words“I was just going.”
His eyes slammed shut, what he suddenly wanted to do at incompatible odds with what he realized he had to do.
Forgive me, Iris.
LI
IRIS TIED THE ENDSof her red-orange palla into a neat bundle around the things Delphine had insisted she take with her. A bone comb, two dresses, a heavy woolen palla, a fine linen wrap nearly sheer with lightness. A purse. A pair of beaded sandals. An extra belt.
“Your pater will need some things too.” Delphine spread a blanket and added a few of her husband’s tunics and belts to the middle.
Overwhelmed by the swiftness with which everything was happening, Iris could only nod her thanks. Cato and Abachum had taken her pater to the clinic, where they remained, cleaning his wounds and stitching cuts. She’d stayed by his side as they all discussed what to do. Cato and Marius insisted that Valentine, Beatrix, Iris, and Quintus leave that night. Marius’s ship had not yet arrived, but they could hide in one of the warehouses for a few days until it did. Approving the plan, Valentine had refused to go before he’d performed this final wedding and sent Hector word of his departure. Iris had begged him not to go, but he’d simply kissed her and promised to return soon.
He’d left and returned every night for weeks. Tonight would be no different.
“I wonder how Beatrix is coming along.” Iris tried to steer her thoughts away from Valentine and renewed her focus on packing.
Delphine chuckled. “I can only imagine the sorts ofnecessitiesshe’s bringing.” She tied the bundle for Quintus and lifted it from the bed. “We’d better go help.”
Beatrix had several piles strewn over her and Iris’s couches and still she dug through the mass of crates and baskets lining the walls in search of more.
“Bea.” Delphine surveyed the mounds. “You know you’ll only be able to take what you can carry.”
“I’m surprisingly strong.” Beatrix bent over a crate. “I can’t seem to find the bag Lucan gave me for that trip we took after our wedding.” Her voice echoed in the crate. “It held everything—ah, here it is!” She held it up, her triumphant smile fading. “I remember it being bigger.”
Delphine smiled and turned toward the bed, selecting and folding a pink stola.
“Lucan was a good man.” Beatrix took the gown from Delphine and nestled it into the bottom of the bag. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him, but...” She paused and added a second dress of warm pink and a third of a paler shade. “Even in the sadness, God has given me deepest joy.”
“How?” Iris folded a garish palla of lemon yellow embroidered with pink-and-orange flowers. It completely suited Beatrix.
“I clung to Him. Tighter than I ever thought possible. I had to. If I didn’t, I’d have clung to my grief and turned bitter. I clung to God until He became my everything. And once He was my everything, I needed nothing else.”
Iris shot a glance toward the wall of belongings. Beatrix giggled and shrugged. “Well, I didn’t say I stopped being sentimental.”
“What happened to him?”
