Am I in heaven?

Should I feel pain if I’m in heaven?

I reach out and cup the angel’s face with a shaky hand, my wrists bloody and my fingers purple. He flinches, moving out of my reach.

“Am I dead?” I think I ask, but the angel doesn’t respond.

“Stay with me,” I murmur. I grope for a hand. When I find what I’m looking for, I lace my fingers through it. “Please.”

Not supposed to say that word.

Why am I not supposed to say that word?

Something about begging, but now I can’t quite remember …

Everything is drifting farther and farther from me.

I squeeze the hand I hold tightly. “Stay with me,” I say again.

But the angel and the rest of the world melts away.

I blink my eyes open, staring at the popcorn ceiling above me. For a moment, my life is normal, my mind is wiped free of memory.

Someone squeezes my hand, and I turn my head, bewildered. And then I see him.

I scream.

There’s nothing—nothing—more monstrous than that beguiling face Pestilence wears, his golden crown resting proudly on his head.

It’s only once he drops my hand like it burned that I realize the fucker was holding my hand. It takes another second for me to process why exactly that fills me with blinding fury.

Fleeing the horseman. Arrows to the back. Tied to his steed and forced to run. Falling. Dragging. Pain. Dying.

I gasp at the memory, and now the full force of my agony surfaces.

“I’m … alive.”

It seems impossible in light of everything I went through. It felt as though I was being torn apart.

“Suffering is for the living,” Pestilence replies from where he sits. I glance around at the room we’re in. It’s another guestroom, presumably in another house Pestilence has decided to invade.

My hands delve into the worn sheets beneath me. He brought me to this room and laid me on the bed, and presumably I’ve been here ever since.

I can’t tell whether this scenario utterly terrifies me, or whether it takes the edge off my fear.

He didn’t let me die. He intends to let me heal—

Only so that I can suffer more.

I push myself up in bed, biting back a yelp at the intense pain that flares across my back.

“Why am I here?” I ask.

“I won’t let you die.”

Again, I don’t know whether him saving me is a kindness or a curse.

It’s obviously a curse, you dumb bimbo. He ain’t saving you to romance your ass.

“You shot me, then tied me up and dragged me through the snow.” Just saying those words forces a shiver through me.

His blue eyes are steady on me. “I did.”

I roll a shoulder, the joint achingly sore.

“My arm was pulled out of its socket,” I say, remembering the excruciating sensation.

He gazes at me for a long moment, looking every inch the damnable angel, then nods.

I glance down at myself. My shirt is gone, replaced by some stranger’s—a large woman with an outdated wardrobe, judging by the garish floral print of it.

Someone saw me topless. My eyes slide to Pestilence, who’s staring at me passively.

It was probably him, which means that he’s now seen both my vagina and my boobs.

Ugh. Why me?

I move my hand, the action feeling constrained. Pushing back a sleeve, I notice that my wrists are bound in soft white linen. I thumb one of the bandages.

Had Pestilence tended to me?

I remember the vicious way he yanked the arrowheads out of my back.

There’s no way …

My attention is distracted by the horrible throb of my back. I sit forward, to take some of the pressure off, and I feel cloth dig into the skin of my stomach.

Lifting up the edge of the shirt, I stare at my torso, which, like my wrists, is wrapped in layer upon layer of bandages.

I run my thumb over the linen. “Who did this?”

Pestilence levels me an unreadable look.

“You?” I finally ask.

I feel my blood burning beneath my skin with horror and embarrassment and … something else at the thought of him ripping away my clothes and mending me. I try to imagine him cleaning and dressing my wounds, and I find I can’t. I don’t want to.

His lips thin. “Remember my kindness.”

“Your kindness?” I say in disbelief. “You were the one who inflicted these wounds.”

And you’ll do it again and again and again until it breaks me.

Gah, he was right when he promised me suffering.

His upper lip ticks, like he’s fighting a grimace.

Pestilence stands, his large frame looming over me. “Don’t try to escape again, mortal,” he warns, and then he leaves the room.

“Pestilence!” I shout for the five billionth time.

I pause, listening.

Still nothing.

Of course he can catch me fleeing in two-point-five seconds flat, but when I actually need him, he’s nowhere to be found.

“Pestilence!”

In the distance, I think I hear a moan, which sobers me up real fast.

Is there someone else living here?

Heavy footsteps interrupt that thought. The door opens, and there Pestilence is, looking like a prince from a fairytale.

His eyes first go to the bed, where I should be, before dropping to the floor, where I am.

“What are you doing out of bed, human?” he asks, looking at me all suspicious-like.

Because I’m so ready to attempt escape again.

“I need help.” It hurts a good deal of my pride to say this.

His brows furrow, and he steps farther inside the room, closing the door behind him.

“You do understand that I am reluctant to offer you any such thing, given our history.”

Our history. He somehow makes it sound like there’s this whole saga between us.

“I know,” I say.

He waits for me to continue. But now that he’s here, looking like some airbrushed male model, I’m losing a little of my nerve.

“Um,” I say, fidgeting on the floor, my back screaming in pain, “I have to go to the bathroom.” This is technically no different than any other time I’ve asked him to help me to the bathroom, and yet it is, because now I’m injured rather than bound, and my frailty makes me feel vulnerable.

That’s why I’m sitting here on the ground. I tried to get out of bed and mosey over to the bathroom on my own. I just hadn’t factored in how weak I’d be, or how sharply my wounds would ache.

I made it halfway to the door before I gave up.

And now here we are.

For a long moment, Pestilence doesn’t react. Then, silently he comes over to me. I tense a little as he kneels at my side. I know I asked for assistance, but I can’t help even now remembering all the agony he’s inflicted on me.

It’s a horrible twist of fate that I have to depend on the very person who put me in this position.

Pestilence’s arms slide under my body and he lifts me up. I yelp at the sharp stab of pain that lances through me at the movement. To my eternal humiliation, I wrap my arms around the horseman’s neck to ease some of the pressure on my back.

The position puts me uncomfortably close to the horseman’s mouth, and I have the misfortune of noticing how his upper lip is fuller than his bottom one.