Antony was expecting something else entirely when he told Atia he was marrying her daughter. A flying rage, sudden as a summer storm, nails drawing across his chest, her red hair flung about her like flames.

This silence frightened him, the stony facade that chillingly reminded him of her son. She sat up, her spine erect as the columns in the Forum, smoothed the sheets around her with a trembling calm.

"It won't change anything," Atia says, her voice earnest and yet there's a pathetic desperation somewhere in the back of her throat. "Octavia - Octavia will understand."

Octavia was the least of their worries, Antony thought as he cradled her waist. Her brother, her traitorous, scheming, little deviant of a brother, would be the only one to benefit through this marriage. Denying his mother her lover and Octavia hers, if he read Agrippa's pitiful glances right, was only part of it. Humiliating Antony - that was his entire intent.

"She's a sport," Antony murmured, the memory of a dinner party, long ago, Octavia's scathing and precise imitation of her mother.
Perhaps the taste for humiliation ran in her veins as well. Perhaps-

As Atia buried her head against his shoulder, Antony realized, with a vague, distant pain, it wasn't about her. It was about vanquishing her son, once and for all. Even if Atia was the price he paid in the end.