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“Livy,” Safinia whispered. “She’s not here.”

“I know,” he whispered back. Livy ran his fingers over a small—child-sized, really—writing desk, then absently rubbed the dust from them. “I’ll see if there’s anything from Hersilia in her correspondences.”

Safinia supposed she had expected to find Sylvia confined to her rooms, possibly ill, but no Sylvia at all? She was furious with herself for not anticipating this. It couldn’t be coincidence if the girl was missing, too. Thank the gods she’d found Livy along the way; at least she could still pace this empty room and hang on to hope that he would find something useful in her writings.

Sounds from the hallway. Safinia and Livy both froze. They were footsteps, halting in front of Sylvia’s door. Whoever it was couldn’t miss that it was slightly ajar.

“Safinia?” a soft voice called.

“Say nothing,” Livy hissed.

“Quintus?” she asked. At the desk, Livy threw his hands up in frustration. But she was right: Quintus slipped into the room, carefully shutting the door behind him. Only when it was fully closed did he round on Safinia and Livy. “What are you doing?” he whisper-shouted. “You can’t be in here.”

“Can you?” Safinia folded her arms. “Why not just call a guard on us?”

Quintus sighed. “The governor doesn’t know I’m sleeping here. I want to be here in case her captors come back.”

“Safinia, tell the catamite he’s not needed here,” Livy said. He was absorbed in a wood tablet that he held to the moonlight.

“What did you say?”

The change in Quintus was instant. He went rigid, his face flushed. Instinctively, Safinia put a hand on his arm, as she might Mettius, though Quintus was much smaller. The word Livy had used was Latin—she didn’t know it. But it was clearly insult enough to derail any friendliness between them. Quintus shook her off.

Livy, for his part, stared at the pair of them as if he was shocked simply to be noticed. “I apologize,” he said stiffly. “I spoke out of turn.”

“Like fuck,” Quintus said. “Get out of Sylvia’s room.”

“We’re not enemies, Quintus.” Safinia stepped between the two men, forcing his attention away from Livy. “We’re looking for a friend. Before she disappeared, she was corresponding with Sylvia. All we want to know is where she might be.”

“Why should I tell you?”

He knew something, then. Safinia rested her hand on his arm again, and this time, he begrudgingly allowed the contact. “If Sylvia is in the same kind of trouble, we want to help.”

“I can believe you do.” Quintus shot a look at Livy. “But I’m not talking with him in the room. You shouldn’t have snuck him in. The governor will be furious.”

“I think we’re past that,” Livy said. He was still eyeing Quintus, with a look on his face Safinia had come to recognize that meant he was putting something together, some surprise in the world around them that he needed to track to its logical conclusion in the version of it he knew. “Safinia will tell me what you have to say. It’s more efficient if you just pretend I’m not here.”

“It’s true,” Safinia admitted. “I’m sorry, Quintus, I can’t do this without him.”

The young man worked his jaw as he looked between them, deciding. “Fine,” he said at last. “For Sylvia, I will. She’s been missing almost a month. I’ve sent runners, I’ve questioned every slave, servant, and domestici who’s had contact with her in the last year. I’ve been half-mad worrying about her. It happened when I was in Collatia handling some trade for the governor. The slave who took my post for those nights was killed.”

Livy and Safinia exchanged glances. A month put her disappearance a little earlier than Hersilia’s, and a murder took the danger she was in from assumed to assured. “So you don’t know where she could be?”

“I know she’s not being ransomed by the Marcii,” Quintus said bitterly. “The governor is fixating on them as an excuse to have his biggest political rival executed.”

“You’re very comfortable saying so,” Livy said. “Suppose you were overheard.”

“No one who works for the governor would tell him I said so. He doesn’t reward loyalty. He doesn’t reward anything. Faustus is his fifth head guard this year. The other four were exiled.”

“What about the letters she was writing?” Safinia asked. “Our friend is Numae Pompilia Hersilia. We don’t know how long they were in contact, only that they were.”

Quintus’s shoulders sagged. He slid down the door to a seat, hugging his knees. “I wrote the letters for her. Sylvia still writes like a child. She is a child.”

“What did they say?” Safinia’s pulse quickened. “We have a letter Hersilia never sent suggesting they meet to discuss a proposal.”

“They were innocuous enough. An invitation for friendship. She wanted Sylvia to . . . to have a mentor, a woman of similar breeding who could explain how the world worked for their station.” He sounded miserable. “She gave Sylvia advice. Fashion and hair and things. How it might be when her husband was arranged. Sometimes she sent jewelry.”

Safinia sat down next to Quintus, her body open and turned toward him so that he could, if he wanted, shift closer. It was a way she often sat with Attice, in the evenings. “You care for her.”