I Claudia | Genuine |

Because now I am Emperor. Not by ambition—never that. By exhaustion. By the simple, brutal math of murder. They have run out of killers and victims, and only the "Claudius" remains.

They do not know that I have buried three men in my heart and two more in the ground. They do not know that I learned to lie before I learned to pray—that my hands are steady not because I am calm, but because I have already survived the worst tremor of my life. i claudia

But an idiot does not survive Tiberius. An idiot does not watch Germanicus die and keep breathing. I limped through the purges, played dice with madness, and ate the dust of their triumphs. And when the knife finally came for the last of the bloodline? They found me trembling behind my books. Not from fear. From laughter. Because now I am Emperor

I, Claudia—wife, mother, woman of a certain invisible age—stand at the window and watch the world walk past without me. By the simple, brutal math of murder