His official resistance to her suicide had been a mere formality, a necessary evil meant to win her subjects to his side. He’d imagined she would be more resourceful. Every time he met with her, he’d half hoped to find her strangled or stabbed, and instead, she looked at him through sunken eyes, starving herself for all to see.

At last, gritting his teeth, certain that Cleopatra would be forced to kill herself to avoid being taken as a trophy to Rome, he leaked the rumor himself and caused the guards about her chamber to be reduced. Then he waited, tapping his foot, agonizing with both guilt and rapture.

Five hours later, it was done. The spy sent to peer in at the peephole confirmed as much, and now it was time for the official discovery of the body.

He could barely contain the sound that threatened to erupt from his mouth, a sort of gasping sob. He clenched his teeth. It would not do. Marcus Agrippa was looking at him, and as a concession to his general’s paranoia of lurking assassins, the new ruler of Egypt sent Agrippa before him to knock down the door of the queen’s bedchamber, while he tried to master his emotions. It was triumph, that was all. Triumph long desired, long deserved.

Cleopatra had sent incoherent messages to Octavian in the last few days, demands that she be placed beside her husband in the mausoleum, whether she be dead or alive, begging pleas about the fate of her children, but he would not honor them. They were the requests of a whore. He was an emperor. What use did he have for her last wishes? He had what he needed from her. The locations of Alexandria’s treasures, including Caesarion, the heir to Egypt’s throne.

Only Marcus Agrippa disapproved of Octavian’s methods. He was more tight-lipped than usual, more terse, but the man was a traditionalist. Octavian was the new world. Agrippa would come around. He always did.

Octavian stepped into the room, behind Agrippa. It was aggravatingly dark in here, but a couple of lamps burned low.

He started at an unexpected movement in the shadows, near where he assumed the body of Cleopatra would be lying. His men raised their swords, only to see that the queen’s pretty little serving slave was still in the room, on her knees beside the queen’s body, adjusting the diadem.

Octavian looked at the girl’s trembling hands. No doubt, they’d surprised her as she was in the act of thieving.

She was strange-looking, this servant. Her skin seemed bruised, and her eyes rolled in her head. Her lips were blue.

“What is wrong, Charmian?” one of Octavian’s soldiers asked, moving toward her.

She turned toward the men and gave them a look of betrayal.

“The queen is dead,” she said. “And I am dead, too. I do my last duty that I may go to heaven.”

She slipped to the floor, and Octavian’s man ran to her side. He looked up, grim. At his feet, the body of the other handmaiden lay contorted.

Octavian rejoiced internally. All were dead, and at the queen’s hand. That made things easier. He’d make a show of sorrow and convince the citizens that none of it was his doing. Tears sprang to his eyes in advance of the performance. He’d trained himself well. Some of the tears, it occurred unpleasantly to him, were real, but he would not think on that now.

He’d bring her corpse to Rome with him. Those mummies of the ancient days were impressive things, in their gilded wooden cases. Octavian’s hero, Alexander the Great, had been treated so, and his grave, near Cleopatra’s palaces, contained his body, glittering in a sarcophagus. That was an old tradition, though. Not Roman, not Greek. And he wouldn’t do Cleopatra such honors. To be worshipped long after her death.

Octavian would have her corpse draped with plain linen, and he’d place her atop a rolling cart surrounded with flowers, a parade spectacle with her children in chains behind her. They’d all know it to be her that way. There would be no rumors of an empty coffin.

When that was finished, he’d scatter Cleopatra’s ashes in Italy, do it himself, make a public ceremony of it. She, who had stolen Mark Antony from Rome, would feed the soil of his country with her dust.

Tensing his jaw, Octavian stepped closer to the queen’s corpse, dodging around Agrippa, who stood, ridiculously, with his sword still drawn.

There she was, wrapped in a cloth of sheer, spun gold with a royal purple border. She reclined on a gilded dais, her body as supple and curving as it had been in life, and—

He would not look at her body.

“You will have a long life,” she’d said sixteen years before, and now she was dead, and he stood over her corpse.

She was still wearing the same perfume.

Disgusted with himself, Octavian shook the past from his mind.

He would melt this entire palace into money and thank the gods for it. Rome would be rich again, as it was meant to be. He’d pay his soldiers. It had been a near thing, bringing them here unpaid, with all her treasure hidden in that mausoleum, and her threatening to set the place on fire, but Egypt was conquered at last.

Cleopatra’s breasts were clearly visible through the cloth, he noticed, one completely bare, the nipple erect, as though recently touched. Or kissed. Her arm was thrown back, the better to display the indecency.

Octavian—no, Augustus; that was the name he’d chosen and by which he would soon be known—snorted in revulsion. Whatever poison the queen had consumed, it had treated her as a lover. She was a changed woman from their last meeting a few days earlier, when she’d inexplicably revealed the location of Caesarion. He could only assume she’d been delirious with grief. Why else would she have been so foolish? Gray and gaunt, her eyes blackened, she’d certainly looked ill. Nothing about her had attracted him then. It had been a relief.

In death, however, Cleopatra nearly glowed, and a sheen of perspiration covered her skin. Her position was appalling, one knee bent, the other leg dangling off the edge of the couch. Her back had arched, seizing in her last moments, no doubt.

It was too quiet in this room, far from the noise of the city.

He’d won. His enemies were dead. It puzzled Octavian that he did not feel peaceful.

He moved toward Cleopatra to adjust her draperies, he told himself, to protect her from prying eyes, but in fact, he wanted to run his fingers over her skin, press his lips to her throat. He wanted to—

“Summon doctors,” he said, jolting away from her. “Let them determine how she fell.”

Agrippa bent over the queen, pulling aside the scarf twined about her neck.

“There’s no need,” he said. “It was an asp. Here’s the mark of its bite.”

Octavian leapt back.

“Kill it,” he ordered, suppressing the tremor in his voice.

“It has gone already,” Agrippa replied. Octavian glanced suspiciously about the throne room. It could be hiding anywhere: in the queen’s garments or those of her maids. Beneath the furnishings. How had it gotten into the room in the first place? Smuggled in, no doubt. The queen was sly. He approached her again, willing himself to breathe normally.

“Show us the marks,” he ordered. “And summon the Psylli. We will do everything that can be done. Perhaps she is not dead yet.”

The marks of the fangs were strangely large, and bright against the pallor of her skin. Octavian looked at them for a moment, disturbed, and then turned away. Whatever had bitten her, it had not been a typical asp but something much larger. It was a painful and strange way to die. Why did she look so calm?

The troupe of snakebite magicians came and knelt to the queen’s throat to suck forth the venom, but she did not revive.

“She is dead,” the leader of the Psylli said, his dark face grave. “But her soul is not far gone. Something is strange with her. She is not as she seems.”

Octavian shrugged at the man’s phrasing. What did Rome care for her soul?

He dismissed the Psylli, paying them in gold. Word of the queen’s suicide and of the emperor’s attempts to save her would be all over the city by nightfall.

Agrippa hesitated at the doorway.

“Go,” Octavian said. “I’m nearly done here.”

When Agrippa had gone, Octavian bent over Cleopatra one last time, to remove her crown. He let his hand rest on her breast, still amazingly soft. One would think her heart still beat.

He bent closer, inhaling her perfume, telling himself that he was simply taking the measure of his enemy. One last conversation with his foe, before she was gone forever.

“Caesar taught me that true leaders fight with words instead of swords,” he told her. “An army hears an order they think is from their queen, and they turn on their commander. A man hears a message that his queen has killed herself, and he acts to save his own honor. Have I done as you would have done, had you come to my country with your army? Now you will travel to Rome with your emperor. You, who said you belonged to no one, belong to me.”

He leaned closer yet. He pressed his mouth against her parted lips, and then—

The queen’s eyes opened.