Even though Agrippa had begged her to let him handle matters on his own, Julia had glared him into submission and made him promise that he would return to his villa and have his servants allow no one to come or go for the next several days. In fact, she told him to instruct everyone in his household to pretend that he was dead. As drastic as that was, she was confident that Rome would recover from incorrect rumors in time, so she didn't care about the massive storm of gossip that would overtake the city because of it. This wasn't just for the sake of safety and ensuring that no further assassins managed to sneak in, after all. There was another reason.
Because she had a plan.
When Marcellus finally appeared, he looked twitchy, nervous. But it could be that he had just come off of a bad
