She froze, then slowly dragged her gaze up to mine.

“He’s just the first one I’ve killed here.”

“W…What?”

“This is a penal colony, Cherry. I am a convicted murderer.”

There was no sense in not telling her now. She’d seen me kill that man. I could think of no reason to conceal my past from her any longer.

My wife deserved to know who I was, and I began to hate myself for taking this long to tell her. I had been too selfish. Too caught up in the idea of keeping her when I never could have hoped to deserve her.

I grasped my data tab from my trouser pocket and held it in the air between us.

“Call the warden,” I told her flatly, not letting myself give into the pain of what would happen next. “Tell him what I’ve done.”

She took the data tab with a white and shaking hand.

“Mine’s dead,” she whispered. “I would have called him before, when you were out there…” Her throat worked as she stared at the blank, cracked face of my data tab’s screen. “What’s going to happen? Will you… Will you be in trouble? It was self defense, right?”

“That is not a legally acceptable defense for most castes in Zabrian culture,” I bit out. “I was trying to protect my mother from an intruder in our home on Zabria as a child and yet I was still convicted.”

Not that it had even done my mother any good. She was already dead by the time my tail had unloosed from that man’s throat.

Tasting ash and blood at the memory, I focused on Cherry and continued. “Now that I am an adult, my story will be even less sympathetic.”

“But you were saving me!” she insisted. “Your wife! Not to mention I’m, like, a foreign national, right? There would have been a huge scandal if I’d gotten killed here!”

“All of that is correct,” I admitted. “And none of that changes the fact that I could have simply incapacitated that human male and brought him to the warden. That is what I legally should have done. Technically, I did not need to kill him. But when I saw him with his hands on you…”

Now I was the one who paced the room, fury spiking motion into my limbs.

“There is a part of me that is broken, Cherry,” I said in a hateful, hollow voice. “And it shattered entirely when I thought that he might take you from me. My control was gone and I had to kill him. Even knowing what it would cost me.”

“What will it cost you?”

Everything. Absolutely everything.

I came to a stop in front of the oven. Staring into the glow of the coals, I started making plans. Plans to keep my wife safe and comfortable after I was gone. The words burned me like I’d reached right into the fire but I said them anyway. “You may be permitted to stay here if you agree to marry another man.”

“Absolutely not!” she retorted.

“I will not be allowed to remain here,” I went on as if she had not spoken. “I will likely be sent back to the Empire, to labour in the mines until my death.”

“No!”

“Call the warden, Cherry. What’s done is done.”

“Fuck the warden!” she cried. “Fuck that and just fuck all of this!”

“This is my second offense. I-”

“I don’t care! Whatever happened in your past, you’re still my husband. I’m still your wife. Do you hear me, Silar? It’s you and me. Together. Forever. That’s it. End. Of. Discussion!”

Apparently this was not the end of the discussion, because without even so much as stopping to take a breath she then furiously asked, “Do you have a shovel?”

The unexpectedness of her question finally made me turn to look at her once more.

She no longer seemed pale and shaken, but fiercely determined, two spots of colour burning high in her cheeks, her eyes agleam.

“Why?” I asked.

“Goddamnit, we do not have time for your millions of fucking whys right now!” She stamped her little foot. “Do you have a shovel, Silar? Yes, or no?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She sighed, then began speaking so rapidly I feared my translator would not keep up. “We’ll dig a grave. You’ve got tons of land. We’ll bury him in some random-ass forgotten corner and no one will ever know.”

I stared at her, astonished that she would do such a thing when my own father had once turned me in. My sweet, beautiful Cherry, was offering to drag the filth of that man’s corpse away from here, to help me hide it, all to protect me. She’d watched me kill him. She’d seen the blood on my hands and yet was still offering her own to me.

A thread of hope wound through me. Hope that, even though I’d killed not just one man, but two men, I’d still somehow get to keep her.

But no. Of course not.

“His ship.”

“Shit!” She paused to think, appearing to barely rein in panic. “OK. His ship can’t be that big. Maybe we could get the shuldu to drag it. Maybe even hook up some bulls, too, if the shuldu aren’t enough. Get it into the treeline, just so it’s covered and out of sight. Then we’ll decide what to do. We don’t need to tell the warden-”

The kitchen door swung open behind us and a deep voice boomed through the air.

“You don’t need to tell me what?”

29WARDEN TENN

“Iwant you to know,” I said tersely, “before you attempt to answer that question, that I’ve already seen the human ship. And the body of its pilot.”

My eyes snapped back and forth between them. I fought to keep my eyes orange, to maintain the cool, disciplined disposition needed for a warden.

Not so easy to do when I’d come here to deliver Silar’s Terratribe II order and had instead found a crime scene. I took note of every detail in the room. The white-knuckled grip Cherry had on Silar’s data tab. Her small hands were clean.

Silar’s were not.

“That man came for my wife,” Silar answered, not even a hint of regret or guilt in his voice. “I killed him.”

I sighed, briefly closing my eyes. This was going to be a very long night. I could already feel it.

“You could have incapacitated him until I got here, Silar.” I opened my eyes and fixed my gaze on him. “You know that is what you should have done.”

“He touched her.”

Curse it all, Silar.

“It wasn’t him!”

I flicked my tail in a questioning gesture as Silar’s tiny human wife shoved herself between us.

“It wasn’t Silar,” she said stoutly, shoving her completely clean and blood-free hands into fists on her hips. “So if you have to blame someone, blame me. I’ve got to be protected by some kind of international immunity. Plus, I killed another human, not a Zabrian.”

Absolutely none of what she’d just said was legally sound. Not to mention the fact that she didn’t even do it.

“Tell me, Cherry,” I inquired in a low voice. “Just how, exactly, did you overpower a man approximately twice your size with nothing but a Zabrian knife, all the while keeping your hands completely clean in the process?”

The round dots of colour in her cheeks vanished as she raised her hands in front of her face. She then took pained note of Silar’s bloodied ones.

“We both know it was not her,” Silar grunted. “Do what you must, Warden.”

“No attempts at denial? You aren’t even trying to argue,” I said with narrowed eyes, frustration rising. I should not have been looking for a way to give Silar an out. The law was clear and so was my role and responsibility. Silar would have to be on the first available transport out of here to face trial on Zabria. But… I had to admit. I did not wish for that.

“You would go to the mines for her, without complaint?” I pressed.

“I would die for her,” Silar snarled with sudden ferocity. “Also without complaint.”

I stood still, feeling my gaze turning briefly white with astonishment. A man who would kill for his wife…

And a wife who was more than willing to take the fall.

Each of them ready to throw everything away for the other.