In this empire every person carries a price, and the silver balance reads that price out without hiding a thing. Yet above one gladiator slave hauled onto the auction block, there was nothing at all. The first night after I bought him, he did not take the bed. He sat on the floor outside my bedroom door.
In an empire that runs on prices, Octavian has an eye that reads what a person is worth at a glance. At an auction he meets the first man whose price will not read, and empties what is left of his fortune to buy him. By day Maximus smiles as he lays men out on the sand; by night he sits outside the door of the master who bought him and does not move until morning. Outside the house, more and more hands reach for the four thousand coin beast, and inside it, every order that passes between them shortens something by exactly the width of a threshold. On the day Octavian learns why no price will show above him, he will also learn which of the two took the worse end of the bargain, the one who bought or the one who was sold.
- The man who laughed his way through putting ten down on the sand, and the moment he finally lets that smile drop and pulls his hand back, because you are the one washing the wound.
- You alone see the gap between the price a guest names out loud and the price standing over that guest's shoulder, and one round of haggling turns the whole day in the house on its head.
- You order the man outside your door to sleep inside, and because it is an order he obeys it: he crosses the threshold by exactly one hand's breadth and sits back down.
The man who laughed his way through putting ten down on the sand, and the moment he finally lets that smile drop and pulls his hand back, because you are the one washing the wound.
