“I’ve never been more scared in my life,” I whisper.

He nods against me.

“For you, I mean.”

He pulls away to meet my eyes.

“I never want to see that happen to you again,” I say hoarsely.

Pestilence touches my cheek. “Nor I you.” Softer, he says, “I thought you were dead.” His voice breaks upon the last word.

I might’ve been, I think, remembering the strange vision I had of Thanatos.

He searches my face. “Never have I felt such … fear. It’s a horrible emotion.”

It is.

“And never have I felt such hate.”

I don’t blame him—what those people did was sickening—and yet I quake at his words.

The horseman closes his eyes, leaning his forehead against mine. When he opens them, they’re pained. “This saving and dying business is becoming a disturbing pattern between us.”

“It is.” But I don’t want to dwell on that. I move my hand so that I can stroke his pretty lips. “Say it again,” I whisper.

His brows pull together. “Say what?”

“Tell me how you feel about me.”

His face seems to come alive with realization, his lips curling into a rakish grin before he becomes solemn once more.

“I love you,” he says. “Before I even understood the term, I loved you. I love your laughter and your bawdy humor. I love your compassion and your vivacity, your fierceness and your loyalty.

“I meant to make you suffer, and look at me now—desperate to keep you in this land.”

The soft look on his face makes my stomach flip.

A gust of blustery wind tears through my clothes, forcing a shiver out of me, and that’s enough to break the spell.

“Let’s get you inside,” Pestilence says.

“Only if you continue to tell me everything you feel,” I say, greedy to hear it all.

“Gladly, dear Sara. There are many, many things I have yet to share. I wish for you to know them all.”

He begins to slide his arms under my body, clearly meaning to carry me.

I put a hand on his chest. “I can stand,” I insist.

Pestilence appears dubious, but backs off.

Gingerly, I swing my legs out over the side of the cart, hissing a little as I do so. Black spots dance at the edge of my vision.

Push through it, Burns.

I force myself to my feet, my body screaming in protest, those black spots spreading.

Wasn’t this bad at the hospital.

Pestilence stands in front of me, all his earlier tenderness gone, a disapproving frown growing on his face.

I take a step towards him and collapse in his arms.

Trying to walk was a mistake. I see that in hindsight.

Pestilence keeps me bedridden in the (evacuated) mansion while he plays nursemaid. At first I assume the whole situation is a temporary one. But then one day turns into two, then three, then four, then five—six—seven—nine—thirteen … ?

The days tick by as my wound heals, and time begins to bleed together until I can’t remember how long we’ve been here. Long enough for me to discover that Pestilence can be bossy and overprotective, particularly when I try to do anything that remotely resembles living.

“I don’t remember you being like this when you came close to killing me,” I say testily, throwing back my covers on day fifteen? sixteen? Twenty?

“Am I to be punished for caring too much?” Pestilence asks from where he stands next to the bed. “Is that what you’re suggesting?”

Damn him for twisting my words.

“I am not staying in this shitty bed another hour.” It’s really not a shitty bed. Pain and idleness have just made me testy, that’s all.

“By God you are, and if I have to hold you down in it, so help me, Sara, I will.”

Pushy horsemen also make me testy.

“I’m healed!”

“I fight infection off your body even now! You are not.”

“Just let me walk around!”

“So that you collapse on me again? I think not!”

“That was weeks ago.”

It feels even longer. I need to move around.

“You’re hardly better now than you were then! Your feeble body is still badly injured.”

Feeble body?

“You’re being a fucking bully!” I seethe.

“I’m your fucking savior at the moment.” Pestilence looks utterly done with me.

I don’t remember being this combustible with him before.

He’s scared of you dying, and you’re scared of letting him in the way you want to.

He runs a hand through his hair, then glances over his shoulder at the door.

His body seems to deflate. “I will not argue with you,” he says. Gone is the heat from his voice. He begins to back up, then turns on his heel, making a hasty retreat for the exit.

“Wait,” I call when he’s nearly to the door of the master suite.

I don’t want to fight.

The horseman pauses.

“I’m sorry, come back.”

And he does, his imposing frame sitting down on the mattress. All it takes is for me to show a tiny bit of vulnerability, and Pestilence caves, trading in his tirade for soft touches and even softer kisses. He won’t go further than that, but it doesn’t matter. Right now all I want to feel is the breath of his love.

His love.

He gives it to me freely, and it feels like the warmth of the sun on my skin.

Our days go on and on like that, spiced with our little dramas and soothed by whispered confessions and touches that never quite go far enough. At the back of my mind, I keep waiting for the home’s owners to return, but they never do, and so our stay goes on and on, falling into a pattern of sorts.

My bullet holes go from open wounds to raspberry colored scars, the skin cratered and shiny. I now look like a creature of the apocalypse, my body a map of old wounds. I will never be like Pestilence, whose perfect form has recovered from savage brutalities without so much as a scar. A petty part of me mourns the sweet smoothness of my skin, but the tougher part of me, the Sara-motherfucking-Burns who fought fires and shot a horseman from his steed to protect her town, is simply happy to have escaped death.

I shouldn’t have. Several times over I shouldn’t have. And now I’m honest enough with myself to admit that Pestilence has always been the reason why. He’s saved my life over and over again. And right now, his one reason for being here—to spread plague—has been put on hold.

All so that Pestilence can care for me.

Love has a funny way of rearranging priorities. It’s begun to rearrange mine.

And yet … I feel uneasy about this temporary respite. For as doting and infuriating and caring as Pestilence is, that hardness I first saw in the hospital still lingers in each one of his features.

We stay in that abandoned mansion for so long that the world thinks he’s gone. I happen to know this because, among other things, the house has a functioning television.

Even more shocking than news of the horseman’s “disappearance” is just how much reporters know about me. There are a couple blurry photos of me and the horseman, one from when I was still officially his captive, my wrists cuffed, and another later one taken while I sat astride his horse.