“I must command you not to disappear like that again,” Mars said. “It’s not safe.”

He was right, in a manner, so I nodded.

It was then, his hand came up to my face and he touched the hoop in my nostril lightly, murmuring, “Your woman did not take your chain.”

And it was then I noticed he was no longer wearing his.

“I—”

“This I like,” he decreed. “Of a night, every night, if we retire together, and even if we don’t, I shall come up with you and take your chain and you shall take mine.”

I was surprised.

“You don’t wear them to bed?”

He smiled tenderly at me. “No, my Silence. They would catch on pillows and might cause harm. We will wear them when we make love. We will remove them after.”

As this was the thornier subject I had intended to broach, the fact I didn’t wish to do that tonight, I felt my heart start beating harder, and Mars surely felt it too, as I was lying atop him. But, with some expertise, he unhooked the chain at my lip and upper ear and carefully unthreaded it from the hoops.

He then set it aside on his nightstand, and I gasped when he immediately rolled me—and rolled over me—but he did this to blow out the lamp on the other side of the bed. He rolled us again and he blew the lamp out there.

Directly after, he pulled the hides and silks out from under us. He drew them over us and arranged our bodies so mine was in the curve of his, my bottom in his lap, my back pressed to his chest, the backs of my legs riding the fronts of his thighs.

He held me close at the waist and I felt his breath stir the hair on the top of my head.

I had never—in my life—slept thus with anyone.

And it was…

It felt…

Lovely.

I stared into the dark and heard a lone female laugh drifting up from the gardens below.

Someone was dallying.

“Sleep, Silence,” Mars said into my hair.

But I was no longer sleepy.

“Did you see to it that Tril had a special place to watch our ceremony?” I asked in order to confirm my earlier thought.

He squeezed me with his arm lightly and then it relaxed.

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes tight.

And saw the inside of the necropolis and all that had happened there in a grisly flash.

I opened my eyes.

“That was very kind,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

“You will have more friends,” he decreed. “You will have a fuller life. You will be revered by our people. You will be cherished in our home. But she will always be yours, the only thing of worth you brought from your country of birth. And thus, she earned where she stood this eve.”