“He’d be twenty now,” said Mark. “For all I know he’s married and has a dozen children.”

“At twenty?” said Cristina. “He’d have to have been having triplets every year for four years!”

“Or two sets of sextuplets,” said Mark. “It could happen.”

They were both laughing now, softly, in the way of people who were just glad to be with each other. I missed you, he had said, and for a moment Cristina let herself forget the past days and be happy to be with Mark in the beautiful night. She had always loved the stark lines of deserts: the gleaming tangles of sagebrush and thornbushes, the massive shadows of mountains in the distance, the smell of sugar pines and incense cedar, the golden sand turned silver by moonlight. As they reached the flat top of a steep-sided hill, the ground fell away below them and she could see the ocean in the distance, its wind-touched shimmer reaching to the horizon in a dream of silver and black.

“This is one of my favorite places.” Mark sank down onto the sand, leaning back on his hands. “The Institute and the highway are hidden and the whole world goes away. It’s just you and the desert.”

She sat down beside him. The sand was still warm from the sunlight it had absorbed during the day. She dug her toes in, glad she’d worn sandals. “Is this where you used to do your thinking?”

He didn’t answer. He seemed to have become absorbed in looking at his own hands; they were scarred lightly all over, calloused like any Shadowhunter’s, his Voyance rune stark on his right hand.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right for you not to be able to stand the iron, or inside spaces, or closed rooms or the sight of the ocean or anything at all. Your sister just died. There is nothing you could feel that would be wrong.”

His chest hitched with an uneven breath. “What if I told you—if I told you that I am grieving for my sister, but since I five years ago decided she was dead, that all my family was dead, that I have already grieved her in a way? That my grief is different than the grief of the rest of my family, and therefore I cannot talk to them about it? I lost her and then I gained her and lost her again. It is more as if the having of her was a brief dream.”

“It might be that it is easier to think of it that way,” she said. “When I lost Jaime—though it is not the same—but when he disappeared, and our friendship ended, I grieved for him despite my anger, and then I began to wonder sometimes if perhaps I had dreamed him. No one else spoke of him, and I thought perhaps he had never existed.” She drew up her knees, locking her arms around them. “And then I came here, and no one knew him at all, and it was even more as if he had never been.”

Mark was looking at her now. He was silver and white in the moonlight and so beautiful to her that her heart broke a little. “He was your best friend.”

“He was going to be my parabatai.”

“So you did not just lose him,” Mark said. “You lost that Cristina. The one with a parabatai.”

“And you have lost that Mark,” she said. “The one who was Livia’s brother.”

His smile was wry. “You are wise, Cristina.”

She tensed against the feelings that rose in her at the sight of his smile. “No. I’m very foolish.”

His gaze sharpened. “And Diego. You lost him, too.”

“Yes,” she said. “And I had loved him—he was my first love.”

“But you don’t love him now?” His eyes had darkened; blue and gold to a deeper black.

“You shouldn’t have to ask,” she whispered.

He reached for her; her hair was down and loose, and he took a lock of it and wound it around his finger, his touch impossibly gentle. “I needed to know,” he said. “I needed to know if I could kiss you and it would be all right.”

She couldn’t speak; she nodded, and he wound his hands into her hair, lifted a handful of strands to his face, and kissed them. “Lady of Roses,” he whispered. “Your hair, like black roses. I have been wanting you.”

Want me, then. Kiss me. Everything. Everything, Mark. Her thoughts dissolved as he leaned into her; when she murmured against his mouth, it was in Spanish. “Bésame, Mark.”

They sank backward into the sand, entwined, his hands running through her hair. His mouth was warm on hers and then hot, and the gentleness was gone, replaced by a fierce intensity. It was gorgeously like falling; he drew her under him, the sand cradling her body, and her hands ran over him, touching all the places she’d ached to touch: his hair, the arch of his back, the wings of his shoulder blades.

He was already so much more present than he had been when he’d first come to the Institute, when he’d looked as if a high wind might blow him away. He’d gained weight, put on muscle, and she enjoyed the solidity of him, the long elegant muscles that curved along his spine, the breadth and warmth of his shoulders. She ran her hands up under his shirt where his skin was smooth and burning hot, and he gasped into her mouth.

“Te adoro,” he whispered, and she giggled.

“Where did you learn that?”

“I looked it up,” he said, cupping the back of her neck, brushing kisses along her cheek, her jaw. “It’s true. I adore you, Cristina Mendoza Rosales, daughter of mountains and roses.”

“I adore you, too,” she whispered. “Even though your accent is terrible, I adore you, Mark Blackthorn, son of thorns.” She smoothed her hand along his face and smiled. “Though you are not so prickly.”

“Would you rather I had a beard?” Mark teased, rubbing his cheek against hers, and she giggled and whispered to him that his shirt was buttoned wrong.

“I can fix that,” he said, and pulled it off; she heard some of the buttons pop and hoped it hadn’t been a favorite shirt. She marveled at his lovely bare skin, flecked with scars. His eyes deepened in color; they were black as the depths of the ocean now, both the blue and the gold.

“I love the way you look at me,” he said.

Both of them had stopped giggling; she ran the flat of her palms down his bare chest, his stomach, to the belt of his jeans, and he half-closed his eyes. His own hands went to the buttons that ran down the front of her dress. She continued to touch him as he undid them, neck to hem, until the dress fell away and she was lying on it in only her bra and underwear.

She would have expected to feel self-conscious. She always had with Diego. But Mark was looking at her as if he were stunned, as if he had unwrapped a present and found it to be the one thing he’d always wanted.

“May I touch you?” he said, and when she said yes, he exhaled a shaky breath. He lowered himself slowly over her, kissing her mouth, and she wrapped her legs around his hips, the desert air on her bare skin like silk.

He trailed a path of kisses down her throat; he kissed her where the wind touched her skin, on her belly and breasts, the peaks of her hips. By the time he slid back up her body to her mouth she was shaking. I want to touch him, I have to, she thought hazily; she slipped her hand down his body and under the waistband of his jeans. He inhaled sharply, murmuring between kisses for her not to stop. His body kept time with the movement of her hand, his hips pressing harder and harder against her. Until he pulled away, sitting up, his breath coming in harsh gasps.

“We have to stop—or it’ll be over now,” he said, sounding more human and less faerie than she remembered him ever sounding before.

“You told me not to stop,” she pointed out, smiling at him.

“Did I?” he said, looking surprised. “I want it to be good for you, too, Cristina,” he said. “I don’t know what you and Diego—”

“We didn’t,” she interrupted. “I’m a virgin.”

“You are?” He looked absolutely shocked.

“I wasn’t ready,” she said. “Now, I’m ready.”

“I just thought—you’d been dating a long time—”

“Not all relationships are about sex,” she said, and then wondered if making that statement while lying half-naked on a hill made it slightly more unconvincing. “People should only have sex if they want to, and I do want to, with you.”

“And I want to with you,” he said, his eyes softening. “But do you have the rune?”

The rune.

The birth control rune. Cristina had never put it on; she’d never thought she was that close to needing it. “Oh, no,” she said. “My stele is down in the Institute.”

“Mine as well,” he said. Cristina almost giggled at the disappointed look on his face, though she felt the same. “Still,” he said, brightening. “There is much else I can do to make you feel good. Allow me?”

Cristina settled back into the sand, feeling as if she might die from blushing. “All right.”