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“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?”
