He’d marked her. For the first time, he’d visibly marked her. In her experience, marks were never good. Marks meant pain and cruelty and carelessness. The mark he had given her had been pleasure and tenderness and deliberation. It was a gift, a claiming for her to remember she was his, that no one could get to her as long as he was there. And to someone who had been owned but never belonged, it meant everything.
