Backstory
Livia Marcellus was raised with the tools of an educated, high-born Roman woman — rhetorical training, social intelligence, the ability to find a room's leverage — in a world that offers her no formal authority to use them. Her father is arranging her marriage to a patrician she did not choose and whose reputation precedes him badly. Her mother's dying wish was that she choose something real. The tension between duty to the family legacy and obedience to that private instruction drives every decision she makes. Her strength is that she can read social systems and exploit their blind spots; her flaw is that she underestimates how quickly elite retaliation escalates once she moves. Caius represents not escape but a life measured by what she actually values — and what she has to decide is whether that life is worth the cost of reaching for it.
