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honorable. She had rescued me out of the loneliness I hadn’t realized I was suffocating in until I’d found her. And I wanted that forever, for as long as I managed to live.
    I looked toward the closed bathroom door that separated me and Fawn, thinking.
    Wasn’t that what she was asking for?
    Forever. A symbol for all that our bond would not end?
    My soul felt split in two.
    I wanted the same thing, and while I knew we had it, there was something primal in me that wanted to show the entire world she was mine.
    But there was something else, something bigger, holding me back. It was shameful, cowardly, but the thing that held me back was fear. I reached to Fawn’s side of the bed and turned on the lamp, brightening the dark room. But the new light did nothing to dissipate the clouded feelings swirling through me like a storm.
    I tried to keep quiet, didn’t want to burden her any more than I already had, but I worried over her and Maria every moment. Things had been going well. They’d been safe since the last trouble, and I made sure they stayed that way. I could never rest, though, and I couldn’t bet their safety and my sanity that the recent calm would continue.
    One slip, one mistake, and they would be taken from me.
    I turned and buried my face in Fawn’s pillow and breathed deep, the sweet smell a poor substitute for her, but it seemed the best I was going to do at the moment.
    Marriage, the lack of it, would not protect her.
    It was no secret we were together. The news of our coming together was old and well-known by now, and it was plain to see that the best way to get to me would be through Fawn, or, God forbid, Maria.
    Maria. But marriage…it was a risk.
    Being with me was dangerous, but marriage only made the risk greater still. She’d be a Petran, with all the risk that entailed. Yes, we had rules, and only the lowliest dogs would go after women and children. But it happened.
    There was another element to consider. Harming my wife, killing her, would be the ultimate trophy, the most prominent sign of a man’s bravery and fearlessness in taking me on, a testament to his intelligence at outwitting me. The man who got to her would be a legend, one who would live on in memory long after I’d ended his life.
    And I’d be a failure, broken because of her loss, a laughingstock because I hadn’t been able to protect what was mine.
    The temptation to take her, the benefits of doing so, would be less acute if she was simply my girl. So keeping her close to me but still far enough away to protect her was the only smart thing to do.
    Liar . Coward , a voice whispered in my mind.
    Marrying her would be a risk, dangerous, but that wasn’t the entire truth. It was more palatable, easier to deal with perhaps than the more pressing truth that I was trying to ignore.
    Fawn loved me. I knew it as much as I knew anything. Could see it so clearly in her eyes, in the way she worried over me. But how long would it last? Would that love bridge the challenges we would face, the risk that being with me would pose every single day? Or would the risk wear on her until she broke?
    I didn’t know the answer to that question, and that, more than anything, stilled me.
    I belonged to her completely, irrevocably, and nothing would ever change that. And though I knew she felt strongly for me, loved me, I couldn’t say that there wouldn’t come a day when she decided the risk wasn’t worth it.
    That I wasn’t worth it.
    It held me back.
    I was afraid of almost nothing, but a world where Fawn had decided I wasn’t worth it wasn’t one I was anxious to live in. Better to maintain the status quo, stay frozen here, where we were happy, safe.
    I opened my eyes when I heard the bathroom door open, and watched Fawn as she came toward me. Her face was set in an impassive expression, one that enraged me. She did this sometimes, shut down, and shut me out, pretended to be a blank, empty canvas, one who didn’t have emotions, one who