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“What happened?” Agrippa asked quietly, and Octavian shook his head. He could not answer.

Cleopatra had stayed motionless as they lifted her, a smile on her lips, as though taken with a pleasant dream.

The monster slept, Octavian knew. She slept. But for how long?

“And chain her,” he ordered.

15

She awoke in darkness. The sound of marching steps encircled the building she found herself inside. High above her, the pale heat of moonlight transferred through the stone. Here, the smell of new mortar and dust. Her mouth was dry. She shook at the cloth that covered her and stretched her fingers. They curled at the touch of teak.

She was naked, she realized now. Naked but for her crown, and a silver chain that wrapped about her body, binding her to the wooden slab.

The pain of the silver had woken her.

The queen knew the place now. This was her own mausoleum, but the room was changed, all its treasure stolen, even the pearls pried off the walls. How had she come to sleep here? How had she come to be bound? Where was her gown? She’d been dressed in her finest garments, she remembered, glorious in her silken wedding clothes, decked in jewels.

The chain scored her flesh, wrapped about her body like a strangling serpent, pressing in upon her tender skin, biting at her. It crossed her at the shoulders and bound her arms to her sides before wrapping again across her breasts and, again, over her stomach. Her legs were chained together, and her entire body was secured to the wooden pyre she lay upon.

Dread filled her. Was she to have her liver plucked out by birds, as in the Greek story? Was she to be immobilized as she was tortured, crying out to the gods, unanswered?

The smell of burning flesh lingered still. Antony’s ashes. The silver box sat on the pyre beside her, open to the air. She could taste his bones each time she inhaled, and worse than that, she could taste his sorrow, his great losses, his fears. Until the end, he’d believed that she had traded him for Egypt, given him up to Rome, conspired secretly with his enemy. Her eyes welled, but there was nothing she could do to change it now. Her beloved had died mistrusting her.

There was a movement of some kind, just outside the walls. Leathery wings. Bats returning home after their hunting, hiding themselves in cracks in the stones. It must be near dawn. How many days had passed? How long had she slept? Why had she slept here at all?

She recalled only snatches of what had passed in the hours before she’d arrived here. A hunger. A feeding. The feeling of her body swelling with pleasure, warming. What had she eaten?

She remembered the touch of the emperor’s lips on hers. She’d felt the pressure of him against her thigh, his hand on her breast, yet she’d been unable to move. He’d spoken to her. She struggled to remember what he said.

A confession. He had told her how he had sinned against her, but she could remember only the taste of his words, not the sound of them.

Something had terrified him. He’d lost his pride and confidence and turned back into a boy scared of the dark. He knew she lived, and he had buried her because of it.

She quivered and then cried out as her skin shifted against the chain. Each link burned and cut her flesh. She tried to still herself, hoping that her body would cease screaming if she were immobile.

It was airless, or nearly so, in this crypt. They’d bricked up most of the air holes near the roof. The window upstairs was gone, too, she could sense that much, and when she stilled herself and stretched her senses—what strangeness, to be able to feel the edges of things far beyond her sight—she knew more. They’d placed a layer of stone outside the mausoleum’s walls and then a layer of alabaster, sparing no expense, finishing the structure as she herself had meant to do. She could feel the chisels, the inscriptions carved into its surface. She could feel the march of the guards, several of them, encircling the building, armored as if for battle.