“I do not think you know,” he rasped, “or that you could ever really know, just what it all meant to me tonight. What it meant when you refused to call the warden to turn me in. When you instead asked me if I had a shovel and then just as quickly said that you would help me use it.”

“Of course I’d help you!” I cried, tears biting in my throat. “I’d bury a body for you any day of the week, Silar. Hell, I’d bury a hundred of them. I love you!”

“I believe that my father loved me, too. At least in some small way. But love does not always equal loyalty.”

“Well, it does in this marriage,” I said, fusing my gaze to his. “And don’t you dare forget it!”

His mouth drifted against my forehead, my eyelid, my ear, the breath of his reply like a kiss.

“I will not.”

31CHERRY

Warden Tenn’s prediction came true. The body was gone by morning. Silar and I stood hand-in-hand in dawn’s rosy light, staring down at the patch of blood-stained ground with its new, distinct drag-marks leading away towards the trees. We didn’t stay out there long. Silar wanted to get me back inside the fencing. Once there, he pulled out his data tab to make his call, alerting the warden to everything he already knew.

While Silar spoke to the warden, I wandered aimlessly around the back of the house, rubbing my hands up and down my arms in a shivering motion. My brain felt oddly thick and numb, and I decided to try to make myself useful and maybe find a little calm by throwing myself into my newfound love of gardening.

I turned towards the closest patch of soil with sprouts, suddenly starting when I noticed something I had never seen before.

It was a plant, I was fairly sure. A big one, too. It was about a metre tall, with a spindly brown body and branches stretching out from its core. The bottom of it – presumably the roots and some soil – was wrapped up in a plump fabric sack, allowing the thing to balance upright without yet being buried in the ground.

“Is this a tree?” I asked Silar, hearing him step up beside me. He shoved his data tab into the pocket of his trousers.

“Yes,” he answered. “I ordered it recently. The warden was dropping it off. That’s why he was here last night.

“Huh. I didn’t realize you were looking to add to the trees on the property. What kind of tree is it?”

It didn’t appear to match the native ones on this planet. It just seemed… different, somehow.

Silar’s silence stretched for longer than it should have. Feeling uneasy and suddenly filled with the need to protect the little tree, I hoisted it up, holding the bulging sack part against my chest.

Silar’s eyes settled on the tree. On me, holding it. His expression grew softly raw.

“It’s from Terratribe II,” he finally said. “It’s a cherry tree.”

I almost fucking dropped the thing. Gasping, I adjusted my hold, surprise jolting through me.

“A cherry tree?” I stammered, “from Terratribe II?” I wrenched my gaze from my husband and looked at the bare brown body of the tree with new eyes. “It must have cost a fortune!”

Silar gave a casual flick of his tail.

“Surprisingly, it would have cost more to order cherries,” he said calmly, as if he hadn’t just spent what I knew had to have been an astronomical amount of money on this thing. “So buying the tree seemed like the better investment. This way you might have cherries every cycle.”

“Oh… Oh my God,” I said, swallowing thickly and hugging the tree hard. “Thank you, Silar.”

“I said you might have cherries.” His mouth twisted. “It might not thrive here or bear fruit.”

“But maybe it will!” I said, about to sob at the fact that Silar had spent so much of his savings on something that he wasn’t even sure would bloom. Because of me. “If we work hard, and take care of it… Maybe it will blossom.”

A soft whiteness bled out from the aqua veins in his eyes.

“Maybe it will,” he agreed softly. “And if it doesn’t, I’ll start saving up again and buy you the cherries instead. Even if it takes another fifteen or twenty cycles, I promise that you’ll get to taste one.”

“This is more than enough,” I whispered, giving my tree another teary hug before setting it gingerly back down. “There are probably a million other things you could be spending your money on instead of saving it up to get expensive fruit shipped in!”

“There are,” he admitted. “But none of those things matter.” He took my hands in his, running his thumbs gently along the backs of my knuckles. “Every credit to my name,” he said gruffly, “every piece of this property, every store of my strength, every beat of my heart… It’s all for you, Cherry. Everything’s for you.”

I nodded wordlessly as Silar tugged me to his chest.

“Where will you put your tree?” he murmured against the top of my head.

“I don’t know,” I said with a tremulous sigh. A moment later, I pulled out of Silar’s hold, considering the question more thoroughly as I gazed at the property. But it felt too overwhelming, trying to figure it out from down here. Without speaking, I turned and headed for the ladder at the side of the house, pulling myself up onto the roof so that I could get a better sense of placement and scale.

Only my view was blocked by Silar’s broad body suddenly hauling itself up behind me. He planted himself firmly between the edge of the roof and me.

“You didn’t have to come all the way up here,” I chided, even though I was glad he’d followed. After everything that had happened, I just wanted him near me.

“You make me nervous when you come up here,” he grunted, looping his tail in a protective sling around my waist. “I told you last night. I cannot live if you are not alright.”

“It’s not like I’m going to fall off!”

“Not with my tail around you, you won’t.”

I chuckled and shook my head.

“Can you at least move out of the way? I was trying to decide where to put my present.”

Silar seemed to consider this and then finally stepped aside and around me. He moved in behind me, his tail still wrapped around my waist, his hands firm on my hips. My insides tightened with a trilling sort of joy when he lowered his chin to rest on the top of my head.

In the early morning quiet, we surveyed our home together.

“I think over there,” I finally said, breaking the comforting hush. “There’s a nice spot between the other fruit trees and that one patch of garden.”

Silar gave a rumble of agreement.

We lapsed back into silence as the sun rose higher and higher, sending its warm light down. Suddenly, Silar spoke again, this time on an entirely new subject.

“Will you tell the others?”

“Tell the others… Tell the other men, like Fallon, about your murder conviction?” I asked in confusion.

“No. They already know. We are all convicts.” He paused, his hands sliding in a distracting motion from my hips to my waist and back down again. “Will you tell the other human brides of our convict status before they arrive?”

“Oh… I haven’t had a chance to even think about that, yet.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek, mulling it over. “On the one hand, they really should know what they’re getting into. So that they can make an informed decision. But on the other…”

“What?”

“On the other, they also deserve a chance to meet their grooms without too much bias. To get the chance to know them, even love them, the way I did with you.”

I didn’t even want to think about what would have happened if I’d learned about Silar’s past and decided not to marry him after all. I wouldn’t have gotten to fall in love with the best man I’d ever known.

“It’s all a bit of a moot point,” I eventually said. “I don’t have a way to contact them before their arrival, anyway. My comms tablet signal can only reach to other devices on this planet. If I want to contact someone off-world, I’d have to use the warden’s signal tower. And if he’s trying to conceal the criminal history of the men here, I doubt he’d let me do it.”