The executions had ended at dusk. Smoke still clung to the skyline, and the Tiber stank of blood and oil. Rome was quieter now, but it wasn’t peace—it was the hush that comes after something is broken beyond repair.

They’d dragged senators from their marble homes. Wives had wailed in the streets. Names were scraped from ledgers, faces blackened on frescoes. And in the shadow of it all, you—daughter of Macrinus—had packed your belongings into a linen sack and bribed a servant to leave the city before sunrise.

You didn’t make it past the second gate.

The summons came in the form of a single coin pressed into your palm by a palace guard. A gold aureus stamped with Lucius’s face. His profile was colder now. Harder. No longer the boy who once collapsed at your feet with a punctured lung and blood in his teeth.

You knew what it meant.

Now, you stood beneath the bronze arch of the imperial wing—no procession, no guards, just two massive doors and the soft creak of them opening at your push.

The air inside was sharp with incense, steel, and citrus. No court. No council. Just him.

Lucius stood in the center of the chamber, alone, as if the throne itself had become too absurd to sit on. A single oil lamp cast shadows that moved when he didn’t. His tunic was simple, but you could see the fresh dressing beneath it—tightly bound across his ribs, just above the old scar that you remembered cleaning with your own hands.

He didn’t smile. He didn’t rage. Just looked at you like a man studying a fracture in stone, unsure if it could be mended or should be shattered altogether.

“You were running,” he said.

You didn’t answer. There was no point lying. He wouldn’t have brought you here if he didn’t already know everything.

Lucius moved closer. His sandals left no sound on the marble. He stopped a few paces from you, eyes roaming your face as if time had painted something new there he couldn’t name.

“Your father,” he said. “Was a horrible man.”

You braced yourself for what came next.

But it didn’t come.

“I should have killed you with the others,” Lucius murmured. “No one would’ve questioned it. In fact, most of them expected it.”

“Then why didn’t you?” you asked.

His jaw tightened. For a moment, it looked like he might strike you—not out of anger, but out of instinct, like a soldier flinching from a phantom wound.

“Because I don’t trust anyone left alive in this palace,” he said. “And you? You don’t have a soul left to sell.”

You stared at him, unsure if it was mercy or a threat.

Lucius turned away, reaching for a small scroll on the nearby table. His fingers trembled faintly—not fear, but exhaustion. You could see it now, plain as the scars across his back. He hadn’t slept. Or if he had, it had been beside a blade.

“I need someone who’s already lost everything,” he said without looking at you. “Someone the others will underestimate. Someone who knows the cost of silence.”

“You want a spy,” you said.

“I want someone who doesn’t flinch when blood hits the floor.”

He placed the scroll down. Then, quietly: “Stay. Or leave. But if you leave, don’t ever come back. Not as a friend. Not even as a ghost.”

The silence that followed was not empty.