He lifted his head from the pillow and took mine again, his tongue surging into my mouth, drinking, dancing, the stud in it teasing, his fingers slid over my behind, still at the edge of my panties, and then slid back.

Even more lovely.

I ground into his hardness.

His fingers retraced their path, going farther this time, farther, and I felt them tickle the wetness between my legs.

I pressed into them, seeking more.

They retreated. They were there, tantalizing, but not there, giving me what I needed.

“Mars,” I begged, our mouths brushing.

His fingers skittered through my folds as he murmured hoarsely, “My wife is very wet.”

“I—”

He rested his head on the pillow, taking his lips from mine, as his fingers went from between my legs and clamped on the back of my thigh, right under the cheek of my bottom. He held firm, locking me on him and against him, his maleness hard, hot, thick and pressing into me.

He then moved my head so my face was shoved into his neck, his beard grazing my forehead.

“Let this be a lesson learned, Silence,” he murmured.

A…

What?

I stared at his neck.

“Tonight you will sleep as I have slept, every night since our wedding, in need of the body so close to mine, unable to have it, unable to find release,” he declared.

I had no idea he slept as such.

I also had no idea why he would make me do it because I already knew it was wholly disagreeable.

“If you want something, my wife, you ask your husband for it,” he instructed. “If you need something, you request it.” His hands at my thigh and neck squeezed in a manner that was a clear rebuke even as his next words confirmed just that. “If something matters to you, you communicate it. I’m understood, yes?”

He was talking about the marital chain.

He was punishing me for having a response to him taking off his marital chain when it was he who had proclaimed we’d take off the other’s every night for the rest of our lives.

This angered me.

But I could not think on my anger.

I needed to squirm.

I could not squirm.

I needed to shout my desires.

I could not shout my desires.

All I could do was mumble, “Yes.”

“Good,” he muttered, giving me another squeeze, this one affectionate. “Now we will sleep with the lamps lit. Perhaps that will chase your bad dreams away.”

I did not think this was a possibility.

The sleeping part, that was.

Mostly because he was hard and ready against me, still. I was wet and ready atop him, definitely still.

And he seemed completely immune to both.

Like he was in the necropolis when the men he’d tortured begged him to stop.

Apparently, torture came in many forms.

And my husband was a master at all of them.