Back at the Forum, Felix grants the women freedom until evening and wanders off. Victoria extracts a free drink from a wine seller and then shoves him off when he tries to expose her, before shouldering into a dance circle to challenge rival Drauca. Nicandrus arrives and presents Dido with roses, visibly lifting her mood.

While wandering alone, Amara encounters Menander, who admits that he has returned to The Sparrow every evening hoping to find her. They walk together for the hour he has free before rejoining Dido. Menander then persuades Amara to borrow a nearby musician’s lyre. She and Dido perform a Campanian folk duet and Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite, winning over a growing audience. Two wealthy young men, Quintus and Marcus, move in and ask whose women they are. Felix steps forward, negotiates 50 denarii for the night plus 20 for the lyre, accepts a partial payment of 20, and agrees that the pair will attend a party hosted by a man named Zoilus.

At dusk, Quintus and Marcus escort Amara and Dido through the streets. Outside Zoilus’s door, the men decide that entering with the women naked will heighten their joke, and Amara agrees. The men strip the women of their togas and hand the garments to a slave.

Inside, the vast atrium is crowded with silver and gold objects. Quintus presents the naked women to host Zoilus as a gift from his absent father—clearly intended as a slight against the wealthy freedman. Zoilus’s wife, Fortunata, who conceals branding scars from her days of enslavement beneath thick face powder, delivers a pointed response while Zoilus smooths things over. A drunk neighbor named Nicia recounts how Zoilus freed and married Fortunata out of genuine devotion. Zoilus’s showpiece pastry dish, designed to release a flock of live sparrows, fails when the birds emerge dazed and several collapse; Quintus leads exaggerated applause to spare the host embarrassment. After Amara and Dido perform Sappho’s hymn and a comic folk song, a new arrival named Cornelius watches with calculating interest and asks Amara whether they would consider performing at a proper party.

The following morning at The Sparrow, the women recount the Zoilus party—sex was minimal despite the high payment; the evening was primarily entertainment. Felix arrives in high spirits, confirms that Quintus and Marcus settled the balance that morning, and orders food and wine for everyone. He takes Amara upstairs, where she reports Cornelius’s offer: a trial performance at the upcoming Floralia festival for 70 denarii, rising to 90 for future bookings. Felix demands that they rehearse at the Wolf Den so he can monitor their work. Amara presents some silver that she received as a tip from Nicia and makes the case for spending it on clothes and lessons. Felix hands it back but insists on proof of how it’s spent.

He then reveals with satisfaction that Simo’s bar was wrecked during the Vinalia and that Drauca lost an eye. Amara is devastated. Felix reminds her that she once hinted at retaliation against Simo and then makes a veiled threat against Dido if the secret spreads. Amara resolves to tell no one.

While shopping with Dido at Cominia’s dress shop, they’re outfitted in near-transparent silver Assyrian silk with bird-shaped pins and gold body paste, exhausting nearly all the tip money. On the walk home, Amara stops at Menander’s lamp shop to thank him for prompting their performance. He suggests that they leave messages for each other on the wall outside The Sparrow under coded names to avoid detection.

While waiting at a busy well, Amara and Dido discuss their new bookings and what songs they need for Cornelius. A young woman named Pitane—an enslaved sex worker at The Elephant Inn—approaches them for help obtaining an abortion after watching her friend Martha die in childbirth. Amara tells her that she knows of a woman who can help, but she must act quickly; since Pitane has no money, Amara suggests that a loan may be possible.

At the ironmonger’s, Amara and Dido ask Salvius to teach them new material for the Floralia. He agrees in exchange for deferred payment—a couple of evenings of company at his home, with his friend and fellow musician Priscus also invited. Dido accepts before Amara can propose consulting Felix. Salvius teaches two tunes on his flute, patiently breaking each into phrases while Amara finds the corresponding chords and Dido sings the melody to commit it to memory.

Back at the Wolf Den, Amara finds herself unable to play on demand and asks for more practice time. Felix pulls her aside and warns that showing visible fear is dangerous—anyone watching carefully might guess what she knows about Drauca—and makes clear that Dido could be targeted. When Amara asks about a loan of two denarii for Pitane’s abortion, Felix refuses and uses the moment to bring up the loan that Amara brokered for Marcella. Marcella has been repaying the debt in installments, but her payments are short, testing his patience. He implies that if she’s late in repaying the full debt, he will turn to violence in order to collect.

At Cornelius’s house for the Floralia, Amara and Dido wait among rehearsing mime actresses who initially regard them with amusement. Egnatius, Cornelius’s theatrical and exuberantly gracious entertainment manager, weaves roses into the women’s hair and asks to hear a sample. When Amara plays and Dido sings, the mime actresses’ attitudes shift to grudging respect. Egnatius then produces a scroll of Cornelius’s own Floralia hymn—short, crudely sexual, and poorly written. A look between Amara and Egnatius confirms that it must genuinely be performed; she and Dido plan to sing it quickly as comedy, only once the guests are drunk enough.

Egnatius leads them through the house into an open garden dining area dominated by a gilded marble fountain. Marcus and Quintus are present but guarded, fearful of being associated with the she-wolves. After an opening spring song and a comedic performance of Crocus and Smilax around the fountain, the women earn genuine applause. Throughout the evening, Cornelius relentlessly belittles his wife, Calpurnia, until she silently withdraws. Former magistrate Fuscus arranges through Egnatius to keep Amara’s company after the party. Late in the evening, Amara and Dido deliver Cornelius’s hymn at breakneck pace; he accepts it as praise. Once the mime performance ends and Egnatius resolves a dispute over Dido, an enslaved person leads Amara and Fuscus to a private room.

Amara wakes alone in Felix’s room in the afternoon. She pieces together the night: Gallus escorted her home in the early hours while Dido was still occupied. She found that Felix had been awake and waiting for her, eager for the money and her account of success. With the earnings spread across the bed, he had been unusually warm, and the encounter was unexpectedly intimate. Now alone, Amara cycles through self-reproach—rehearsing every cruelty he has committed against the pull of memories she cannot dismiss—before slipping out of the room and going downstairs to find Dido. She reports that Cornelius maintains a concealed luxury brothel at the end of his garden, including a room fitted for observation, and that he apparently watches rather than participates.

The other women return with news that Drauca has been murdered, with rumors pointing to Simo, who reportedly couldn’t bear to keep her after the loss of her eye made her undesirable to customers. Victoria erupts when Amara draws a parallel between Simo and Felix. Cressa steers Amara away for a drink. At Marcella’s food stall, Cressa quietly mentions that Drauca had a young daughter who works at Simo’s tavern.

When Marcella appears, offering a necklace in payment of her loan, Amara rejects the necklace as insufficient. With an implied threat to burn down Marcella’s bar, she forces Marcella to surrender a cameo ring—her dead mother’s—to close the loan. While walking away, Amara notes with revulsion how closely her parting words resembled Felix’s.

Amara and Dido honor their arrangement with Salvius by joining him and Priscus for a simple dinner at his home. The mood is warm and easy, with bean stew, shared wine, and much laughter at the expense of Cornelius and his Floralia guests. Priscus and Salvius reveal that their fathers collaborated on public paintings in Pompeii and that Salvius’s late wife was Priscus’s sister. A well-meant remark about the women’s evident education briefly tightens the atmosphere before Dido steers everyone toward singing. They perform folk songs late into the night, and Amara allows herself a fleeting sense of what freedom might feel like.

When Priscus leaves and takes Dido with him, Amara is left alone with Salvius. He tells her that he hasn’t been with anyone in the two years since his wife died and that Amara reminds him of her. In the bedroom, he asks her to change into the dead woman’s robe and apply her perfume. He then gently offers to pretend to be someone else. Amara declines, thinking of Menander. When Salvius asks whether she has ever chosen to be with a man, she honestly says that she has not. He asks her not to perform an emotion and holds her carefully.

The next morning, Amara joins Victoria, Beronice, and Dido in an openly joking conversation about customers. Beronice quietly admits that Gallus slapped her last night, claiming that she enjoys sex with the customers too much. Without warning, Paris enters and punches Victoria hard in the face after she mocks him for being routinely raped by the customers. Beronice jumps on his back while Amara and Dido move in front of Victoria. Felix arrives and angrily throws Paris out for violating the Wolf Den’s cardinal rule: never to mark a woman’s face. He then turns on Victoria for provoking Paris and predicts that she will be out of service for days. He angrily alludes to Drauca, who became worthless to her enslaver after losing her eye. All the women retreat to their cells in silence.