“Put on a mask, Montes.” I can’t think about the fact that I’m actually concerned about his wellbeing.

“I’ll be fine.”

I want to place my hands over his lips to stop him from speaking, but that might just increase his chances of catching whatever I have.

“Please.”

A knock on the door interrupts us. A moment later the doctor, who had left to run my bloodwork, returns, clad once more in a hazmat suit.

One look at his face and I know whatever he has to say won’t be good.

“Montes,” he says, not meeting my eyes, “a moment please?”

The King

DR. GOLDSTEIN PULLS me to the edge of the room.

“I sent Serenity’s bloodwork to the lab,” he says when I approach him. He looks tired, which is not the expression I want to see on his face.

“The lab confirmed that the queen does in fact have the plague. However,” the doctor looks more than a little concerned, “this strain … it’s new.”

“It’s new?”

How does a new strain of plague show up out of thin air and choose my wife as its first victim?

“Where did it originate from?”

“One of your laboratories—the one stationed in Paris.”

It takes me a moment to register his words. I’m expecting him to say a general region like the Balkan Peninsula, not a specific location, and definitely not one of my labs.

“From what I was able to gather, it matches a strain of plague your researchers have been testing.”

The news is a shock to my system.

“They’re in the initial stages of creating an inoculation for this strain,” Goldstein continues, “but an inoculation won’t do Serenity any good now that she’s already caught it. We’ve already given her the antidote for the old virus.”

“What good is an old antidote if this is not the same illness?” My voice is rising. I pinch the bridge of my nose and pace. “And how the hell did this get leaked?”

Heads are going to fucking roll. Now I just need to figure out whose those will be.

“Your Majesty, we have no idea. No one at the research station in Paris has reported a contamination, but that could be a failure in oversi—”

“Don’t feed me that bullshit.”

This was a deliberate attack. Someone went into one of my laboratories and harvested a super virus to kill my queen with.

I run a hand down my face. I’ll torture all those technicians one by one until I have my answers, and then I will hunt down whoever did this and I will kill them slowly. A point must be made: those who dare to turn my weapons against me and my own will die, along with many innocents.

“What’s the kill rate?” I ask.

“Pardon?” Dr. Goldstein says.

“The kill rate. How lethal is this strain?”

“Your Majesty—”

“Just give me the goddamn number, Goldstein.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Your researchers in Paris didn’t know, but they thought it was somewhere around,” he takes a breath, “eighty percent.”

Eighty percent.

Eighty percent.

I’ve turned away from him before even realizing I’ve done so. I rub my mouth at the horror of it all. Four out of every five victims die.

I glance over at Serenity just as she lets out a wet, rattling cough.

“What happens at this point?” I ask, returning my attention to Dr. Goldstein. “Do we move her into the Sleeper?”

Goldstein shakes his head. “The Sleeper specializes in trauma, not illness. It won’t work for this, just like it won’t cure Serenity of cancer.

“Your Majesty,” he continues, his voice already apologetic, “this is out of our hands. If the queen is to live, she’ll have to beat this on her own.”

SERENITY’S CONDITION WORSENS. By the evening, she’s strapped to several different monitors, and I tense at every beep.

No one else in the room contracts the plague. It’s not too surprising given that on this end of the hemisphere, people have either survived the plague once, or been inoculated against it. Goldstein speculates that this mutated strain is much less transmutable, meaning that while lethal, it won’t readily spread. This only strengthens the argument that someone deliberately infected my wife.

And Serenity, who’s never encountered the plague before, has no defenses against it. The pills that should’ve protected her from this pathogen, the pills that prevent me from aging, she hasn’t taken since the bombing on the palace, which was a month ago. Any she took before then have long since been purged from her system.

I watch her toss and turn in the hospital bed.

I brought one of the victims of my war into my house, and she’s brought the world’s blights in with her.

I run my hand over hers. Scars mar her knuckles; it’s the same hand that wears my rings. Love and war—they battle it out across her skin. I thread my fingers between hers and bring them to my mouth.

Serenity doesn’t react to the touch, but I do. My hand trembles, and I can’t be sure whether fear or fury are responsible for the palsy.

Even as I sit here, my researchers are being interrogated and punished.

It’s not enough to slack my need for vengeance. Not nearly.

Serenity lets out a moan and tugs against my grip. Only then do I realize I’ve been squeezing her hand so tightly my knuckles have whitened.

That night in Geneva, when I first held her under the stars, I told her all the ways she was unexceptional—how she wasn’t the prettiest, or the smartest, or the funniest person I’d encountered. I didn’t bother to tell her that she was the most ferocious woman I’d ever met, or the most tragic. I didn’t tell her that whatever combination of pain and hardship she’d endured, it enthralled me completely.