Free Pompeii: City on Fire by T. L. Higley

elaborate frescoes of deep reds and warm golds on the walls, and intricate floor mosaics. Before reaching the dining area at the rear, guests would cross a huge piece depicting a four-hundred-year-old battle between Alexander and Darius of Persia, a tessaraed mosaic that would make a Roman nobleman envious.
    All in all, the house made a statement favorable to its owner, if only he could erase the stigma of Saturninus's failure.
    A figure crossed the atrium before him and must have sensed his shadow in the doorway.
    "Quintus, what are you doing standing there?" It was his mother.
    "Admiring the view." He smiled and winked, and thought he saw his mother blush even from this distance. Since his father had passed, he had tried to remember to compliment his mother from time to time. The elder Portius Cato had been charming above all else.
    He crossed the atrium and met his mother in the garden. "We are going to have a dinner party, Mother." He brushed at some loose stones on the atrium half-wall. "How soon can the house be made ready?"
    Octavia's eyebrows shot upward. "You must be jesting, Quintus! The house is musty from disuse and in desperate need of repainting and tiling! A dinner party is out of the question!"
    Cato shrugged at his mother's outrage. "So we shall tell the guests to bring their rags and tools."
    "You most certainly will not���"
    He wrapped an arm around his mother's shoulder. "Be at ease, mother. I shall not embarrass the Catonii."
    A voice from the entry hall turned mother and son toward the door. "Is Quintus defiling the family name again?"
    Portia's question was asked in jest, but he winced at the bite of truth.
    His sister entered hand-in-hand with her husband Lucius, and Octavia pulled away to embrace them both. "Your brother wants to host a dinner party already."
    "Does he?" Portia did not share her mother's indignation, and instead her narrowed eyes spoke suspicion of his motives. As usual, Lucius remained quiet, content to let his wife speak.
    "We're going to prove to the town that we have something to offer that Nigidius Maius does not."
    "And what is that?"
    Cato shrugged. "Choice. Integrity. Change."
    Lucius's eyebrows rose. "Sounds more like a political party than a dinner party."
    Cato rolled his shoulders, tension sparking down his spine. "Only a social gathering, brother, I assure you." He turned away, but not before he saw Lucius's head bent to Portia's, and the two share a secret smile between them.
    He tossed off the chill at Lucius's words, and instead focused on the love between the two of them, but even that left him cold. He was keenly aware that the house was spacious enough for a large family, and that he was just as childless as his sister. At least she has someone to love. "Call a slave, Mother. I want to start writing the invitations."
    Despite his mother's objections, he had messages sent through the city before the day was out, inviting the nobility to a party to be held in his home, three nights hence. There would be no overlap with the scheduled arena games, but with his party the following night, would his guests still be in a celebratory mood?
    But the next morning, slaves began appearing at the front door, responses in hand or mouth. Cato had underestimated his opponent.
    "My master regrets that he is unable to attend." The latest messenger seemed to recite from a theater script given to each of the slaves before they arrived in his courtyard.
    "That is all?" Cato scowled. "No reason given?"
    A flicker of something in the slave's eye. Amusement? Did the slave think Cato a fool? The look disappeared, and the man bowed low and backed out.
    In the end, only two of his sixteen invitations were accepted. Hardly the stuff of a successful dinner party. He stood fuming in the courtyard as the last slave slunk away, and Portia and Octavia joined him.
    "I am a fool." He slapped a nearby marble column. It answered with a puff of stone dust that settled to the ground. "I was trying to