Free Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 by M. C. Scott Page B

then, smiling, in love, ‘I will know all of you in a moment, all those places I could not find,’ because this has been a joke between them, that he had no past before he came to her, and he knows all of her but she knows so little of him.
    And in this last moment, he smiles for her and says, ‘You will, and gladly so. I give you all of myself, in love, for now and ever. Wait for me.’
    Before he can fail her, he slides the knife forward and up, through skin, through muscle, past the grate of her bone, through the sudden give of her lungs and up to the beat of her heart that makes the blade twitch like a live thing in his hand.
    He almost stops there, but her eyes draw him in, and her voice, whispering, because she cannot speak. But she has not cried out, and will not, and so he slides the blade on, and tilts the point upwards, cutting the great muscle of her heart, and she bleeds, as their daughter Gunovar bled, but inwardly, so that she lives and lives and only leaves him when her eyes can no longer hold his face, and her mouth can no longer speak his name.
    In his mind, he lowers her to the floor, as he has done every waking morning since. As every morning, he hears her voice, echoing in the sea’s rush of her eyes, I will know all of you in a moment, all those places I could not find , and his own voice, rich with his love for her, poisoned for ever by his own cowardice, You will, and gladly so. Wait for me .
    Wait for me .
    He had meant it, and would have joined her then but that, in wanting to leave both mother and child untainted by Rome, he had taken time to build a pyre for them, laying down his weapons for the first time in days. He had fought like a cornered rat against the men who came for him and four had died, but not him. Later, he came to understand that a part of him had wanted the kind of death they offered by taking him alive, in all its lingering pain.
    They gave him his wish. With a skill born of fury, they had slowed the passage of his days until each hour became an eternity spent in agony. The pain surpassed anything he had ever known and his life had not been one of overwhelming comfort. But even then, he did not go to join Aerthen, however close to the brink they might have driven him.
    In the end, that, too, was his fault. In a moment’s weakness he had lost the sense of her presence and called instead on the god that Rome had given him, and that god had answered, granting the blessing, or perhaps the curse, of life.
    Wait for me .
    Every waking moment, Pantera could feel her there, waiting on the other side of the silk-fine divide between living and dying. He had only to reach for her and she came.
    Thus it was that in the attic room of the Striding Heron, on the morning of the day he was due to meet his emperor, Sebastos Abdes Pantera, who had also been Hywell the Hunter, gave his customary morning greeting to the woman who had been his wife and then, forcing himself to look beyond her ocean-green gaze, opened his own eyes and began to take stock of the day.
    He started with his own body, documenting the pain, beginning with his ankles, working up through his spine and chest to his arms and last to his face. After the sea ride, his shoulders were on fire where the muscles had torn and never fully healed, and a nagging ache in his left ankle where the legionaries had seared the tendon had become sharper.
    None of it was new or unexpected, only to be noted for how it might affect his movement in the day.
    Rolling over on his side, he turned his attention to his immediate surroundings, to the straw in the mattress beneath him, to the rat urine recently voided near the foot of the bed, upward to the first grey light of dawn outlining the shutters, to the door a few feet away, which remained closed and had not been opened in the night; and finally, when he was sure he was alone in a room that had not been disturbed while he slept, Pantera directed his attention out to the coughs and curses of the