Lady of the Eternal City by Kate Quinn

for administration and he was practical enough to work directly with me once it was clear that his fellow Prefect was useless. Turbo handled the administrative duties in Rome while I handled the Emperor’s security when he traveled. It was a sensible arrangement, but I didn’t like it. For one thing, it took me away from Mirah, because I usually refused to take her along. “You should have stayed behind,” I grumbled, but couldn’t resist tracing a slow circle around the point of her shoulder. “You’d be safer.”
    “You really think the
Emperor
will concern himself with the likes of us?” She gave me one of those wifely looks, amused at my thickheadedness. “Just to keep you reined in?”
    “He likes keeping his thumb on people—even little people. I don’t want you anywhere near me if he gets in one of his moods.”
    “What moods?”
    “When he decides he wants to punish someone.” My stomach tightened at the thought of Hadrian’s idle, shining gaze turning on Mirah.
    “What does it matter if we’re under his eye or not? If the Emperor of Rome wants to find your family, he can find us!”
    “But I want you out of his sight.” An old argument, and I attempted to distract her by nuzzling her neck. But she remained undistracted. In fact, her eyes had a mutinous glitter that meant
challenge
.
    I lifted my lips from her throat and leveled a hard stare at her instead, the one that shriveled my centurions inside their breastplates. “Glare all you like, Mirah, but you and the children will keep to your own apartments as long as we travel together. You don’t visit my quarters in the Praetorian barracks, not ever. You’ll stay out of sight, and I’ll come to you when I can, just as I do in Rome when I’m not toddling along in the Emperor’s shadow.”
    She gave a scowl to match mine, turning on one side to face me. I ran my palm slowly over the slope of her hip, banded with alternating stripes of shadow from the shutters of the window. “Isn’t it good,” I persisted, letting my hand slide to her knee, “that I can at least
afford
to keep you separate?” It did pay well, the Praetorian Guard. “And I’ll be able to see you more often. Hadrian sent me ahead to make preparations—as soon as he arrives, I’ll press to make the crossing to Britannia to prepare again. I’ll stay ahead of him, lay preparations for his retinue wherever he goes, and let the centurions tramp around in his shadow for a change. It means I can arrange my own days,” I insisted, aware I was losing the argument though she wasn’t saying a word. “You know we might be going as far as northern Britannia, after Londinium? My mother and father settled near Vindolanda. Never mind you getting the chance to meet them, I haven’t seen them since I was eighteen—”
    “There are other places we could go, you know.” Mirah’s voice was noncommittal. “Besides Britannia.”
    My hand dropped from her hip.
    Her eyes met mine. “If you despise the Emperor so much, we could leave Rome altogether.”
    I groaned, flopping over on my back. “That again?”
    “You agreed you’d think about leaving the Emperor’s service,” Mirah persisted.
    “I have thought on it,” I mumbled. “I am thinking on it.”
    Mirah raised her eyebrows. “And?”
    “You think the Emperor will be accommodating if I tell him I feel like quitting my post?”
    “You’d find a way, Vix. You
always
find a way when you really want something.”
    I had no answer for her. My stouthearted wife had been born and raised in Rome, but she’d never uttered a word of complaint coming with me on my legion travels. She’d gone with me all over Parthia; had shared tents and wagons and cramped temporary apartments while I marched on Trajan’s eastern campaigns. She’d tipped spiders out of her wine and swept sand out of her sheets; she’d given birth once in a tent and once in the wreckage of an earthquake and raised her babies in the makeshift camps of the