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blight burned deep into the man’s body. Nearly the length of a woman’s hand, the scar ran curved around the man’s right hip, a stylized S intersected by a small circle. It was the mark of someone caught in the unnatural act of loving a man, and Marcus’s belly clenched at the sight of it.
    The once-Honorable Robin Harris now carried the shame of his perversion for any intimate to see. Any woman Harris bedded would know she lay with a perversion, and any man—any respectable man—would abandon Harris, for fear he’d be caught and branded as well.
    Yet Marcus couldn’t stop staring at the shiny, slick area. For all its portent, the sigil was elegant, nearly as striking a piece of scrollwork as any found on an elaborate frontispiece. For all its initial beauty, Harris’s seared flesh had healed unevenly, puckered in some areas while stretched out to a nearly painful pinkness over his hip bone.
    The mark was something whispered about behind closed doors and in the dark recesses of particular clubs, a fleshy boogeyman carrying with it a two-year sentence of hard labor. Suddenly, the slender man in his arms weighed more than the sum of his bones and flesh, and Marcus shuddered at the thought of what Harris had endured in earning his mark of shame.
    “It’s horrific, isn’t it?” Horan murmured, nodding at the scar. “That’s how they punished him, you know? A vigilante group targeted him. Sent a man ’round to seduce him and then brought him up on charges. The boy never stood a chance. Damned lords and their revenge.”
    “Not all lords.” He hardened at the slander, drawing himself up as much as he could. “I certainly didn’t. If I’d known—”
    Horan’s chin lifted, a small challenging tilt to her head. “What would you have done, my lord?”
    She was Harris’s mouse, come to pluck the thorn from a lion’s paw, and in that moment, the mouse donned her armor to slay the man’s dragon if it was needed. Bemused, Marcus wondered if he had someone who’d do the same for him. Sadly, the only one he could name would be his grandmother. Whether or not she could was a very different story altogether.
    “Would you have spoken up for him? The mechanisms he’d created in his workshop had their purposes twisted to destroy our Empire, but no one cares of the genius behind them, only the tragedy they’d caused.” She pressed on. “Would you have spoken up against his incarceration? Even if you knew he’d been searching for some kind of escape from the burden of his shame? Especially when that search led him to another man’s arms?”
    “Yes. I would hope I would,” Marcus murmured as he brushed Harris’s inky hair from the man’s battered face. “I would hope I would have it in me to do so. I would hope to be a better man than those who condemned him.”
    “So many of us begged for leniency for him. The court literally turned a deaf ear to every single one of our pleas.” Horan’s stern expression melted away, leaving a faint blush to her cheeks. Her hands were still on Harris’s chest, but her eyes were sharply focused on Marcus’s face. “Do you really think it would matter? Your one voice—as much weight as a noble might have—would your one voice have been heard?”
    “I would hope it would,” Marcus admitted softly. “Especially since it would be the voice of a man whose father died by one of Harris’s devices. I certainly hope they would have listened. And I would have spoken—if only I’d known, Doctor Horan. If only I’d known.”

Three
     
    H E WAS naked.
    That much Robin was sure of.
    He also knew he hurt. His body made certain he knew that . It ached. Mostly in his joints, although his skin appeared to be tender in spots. His head also pounded, and he could only hope his vision was merely impaired because he wasn’t wearing his spectacles.
    What he didn’t know was how he got home and who exactly stripped him of his clothes, but that appeared to be the least of his