She reached up and touched her neck before she'd finished processing the answer. The skin there was tender and fresh and warm under her fingertips, and underneath the physical sting the bond between them felt different this morning, closer, fuller, settled into her in a way that yesterday it had not been.
She turned and hit him in the chest with her fist. "You marked me again. You... You..."
"You were not yourself last night," he said, without any particular remorse. "I didn't have another option."
She drew breath to argue and he rolled toward her and kissed her, and she pushed against him with both hands and then somewhere in the space of a few seconds stopped pushing entirely. When he finally pulled back she was breathing harder than she wanted to be and her thoughts had scattered in several directions at once.
"You cannot do things without asking me," she said. Her voice had very little hardness behind it.
