Up-time politics would wreck them for her.
Chapter Three
Marcus had not known such fear since his one-time master had tricked him through the station’s Roman gate and sold him back into a slavery from which Skeeter Jackson had rescued him. Abandoning the Down Time’s bar without a backward glance, he bolted into the chaos loose on Commons, hard on the heels of Robert Li, the antiquarian who’d burst into the bar with the white-faced news: “Marcus! Someone’s shot at Skeeter and Ianira!”
Ianira! Fear for her robbed breath he needed for running. Everything that was good and beautiful in his life had come through her, through the miracle of a highly-born woman who had been treated cruelly by her first husband, who had still managed, somehow, to love Marcus enough to want his touch, to want the love he had offered as very nearly the only thing in his power to give her. He had been a slave and although Marcus was free now in a way he had never dreamed possible, he would never be a wealthy man, could never give Ianira the kind of life she deserved.
If anything had happened to her, anything . . . He could not conceive of a life without her. And their children, how could he tell their beautiful little girls they would never see their mother again? Please, he prayed to the gods of his Gallic childhood, to the Roman gods of his one-time masters, but especially to the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, the Great Mother of all living creatures, whose temple Ianira had served as a child in that ancient goddess’ holy city, please let her be unharmed and safe . . .