Lady of the Eternal City Read Online Free PDF

course.” His flesh had a stone coolness, as though the skin were only a thin coating over granite. She had forgotten it, that cold touch of his. He might have been absent from Rome only a year, but they had not touched flesh against flesh in far longer than that.
    Hadrian led her a step or two across the atrium, away from Vix, who had gone to his bloody duty, and toward the pool in the center of the room under the open roof. Others still clustered, Praetorians and freedmen, slaves and courtiers, but none within earshot—and the Emperor stopped, bringing her about to face him. “Do not try to maneuver me, Vibia Sabina.”
    Sabina kept her voice bland. “Is that what I’m doing?”
    “Yes. You maneuvered me into pardoning your brother-in-law, and you are now attempting to turn my temper away from Vercingetorix.”
    “I was thinking of your safety,” she managed to say. “And mine. Vix may be a savage, and gods know he’s as dense as a brick, but he has a strong sword. I never particularly wanted to be Empress, Hadrian, but I have no intention of being sent off to Hades by some madman with a knife because I don’t have a good protector at my back.”
    Hadrian smiled faintly. “How blunt you are.”
    “You used to like that about me.”
    “Did I?”
    “You used to like a great many things about me.” There had never been love between them, even in the earliest days of cool-headed courtship, but there had once been friendship. Sabina still missed that old camaraderie, when her husband had been an eager world traveler with a thirst to see everything the Empire had to offer.
    Hadrian began to walk again, idly circling the pool, his hard hand bringing Sabina with him by the elbow. It seemed an apt moment for a few honeyed words, so Sabina sweetened her voice. “Thank you for sparing my brother-in-law’s life. It was kindly done.”
    “No. It was done for a purpose.” Hadrian spoke prosaically. “Execute four men, demonstrate ruthlessness. Spare one, demonstrate mercy.”
    “You’d already decided to spare Titus?” Maybe her desperate little tableau with Faustina had been entirely unnecessary. She felt a moment’s anger at the thought—all the racking of her brain these past months, trying to think of a way to extricate him from his fate.
    “I had decided to spare
one
of them,” Hadrian corrected. “Your brother-in-law, I thought, might be best. The death of the legionary commander sends a message to any of my other generals who may prove overambitious; the deaths of the consuls gut the Senate and tell them not to cross me. Titus is a dullard of no particular ambition, and he is family. I assumed you would trot out some little plea for his life, and I decided in advance to grant it.” Hadrian looked down at her: capricious, amused, merry-eyed, cold. “Had I wanted him dead, his head would be in a basket regardless of your pretty pleading.”
    “I see.”
    “I hope you do. Don’t attempt to manage me in future.”
    Sabina laid her challenge down, not flung at his feet like Vix’s but gently unsheathed and offered hilt-first. “Then what is it you
do
require of me, husband?”
    His eyes went over her, considering. “You look well, you know. Most Imperial.” His gaze lingered on the purple draperies, the very proper wig over her shorn head. “You say you have no great wish to be Empress, but now that you are, I suppose we
should
have a chat about that.”
    “Let’s do,” Sabina said sweetly. “Difficult to stay within your lines if I don’t know where you have drawn them.”
    Secretaries, chamberlains, senators hovered, impatient for a moment of the Emperor’s time, but Hadrian kept them at bay with a glance. “I am told you spent much of this past year sulking in the country.”
    “Plotina was only too happy to shove me out of the way, so I stayed with my sister and her mother. Faustina had a difficult confinement.”
    Hadrian brushed that aside. “Your place was at the palace. Not in