“I did this because I love you,” he says fervently. There’s more fear in his eyes than before.

“Love doesn’t work like that.”

But of course, there are other things that go hand-in-hand with love—great, terrible things. Things that for the first time ever, Pestilence is beginning to feel.

You let him into the Garden of Eden, you let him taste forbidden fruit. You gave him the knowledge of good and evil and now you are both paying for it.

I take a step back, committing his face to memory.

Need to leave now, before I cave and return to him. I’d never forgive myself then.

My heart, however, feels like it’s being ripped in two at the prospect of leaving.

“Goodbye, Pestilence.”

Rotating around, I force myself to start down the steps leading away from the mansion.

I haven’t taken more than five paces before the horseman is on me. He scoops me up and carries me inside, kicking the front door closed as he goes.

“What are you doing?” I protest, squirming in his arms.

No response.

Now I truly begin to struggle. “Let me go.”

He puts me down in the foyer. The room spins a little once I’m on my feet.

So weak. Too weak.

Can’t stay here though.

I head back to the door, and again he picks me up and bodily moves me away.

Again, as soon as he sets me down I move towards the door.

He cuts me off. “Sara, I cannot let you leave.”

He’s begging me with his eyes, and I know he sees what I feel: I’m not strong enough, healed enough. All those weeks of traveling, all those wounds, even with the rest, my body isn’t ready for more. And still I drive it forward.

“Pestilence, don’t make this worse than it already is,” I practically plead. “I’m leaving, either with your blessing or against your will, but I won’t stay here any longer.”

The look on his face pulverizes the last of me. I can see his heart breaking in front of me. That raw grief lingers for just a moment, and then his features harden.

Without a word, he picks me up again.

“What are you doing?” I struggle in his arms. “Pestilence, put me down!”

Ignoring my demands, he moves me into the master bedroom and deposits me onto the bed.

By the time I scramble off of it—taking an extra few seconds to let the vertigo pass—he’s already made it to the door. With a parting look, he slips out, closing it behind him.

Rushing after him, I grab the doorknob. I twist it, but the door won’t open. The horseman must be holding it closed.

“Pestilence, let me go.” My voice rises with panic.

He doesn’t seriously mean to keep me here, does he?

“You will forgive me,” he says quietly from the other side of the door.

“Let me go!” I shout louder.

But he doesn’t.

Pestilence boards up the master bedroom windows and blockades all the doors leading out. Not before I rush outside a few times and he has to drag me back in, but eventually, he manages to bar all the exits, leaving me trapped inside.

And so I’m back to being his prisoner.

At least the horseman is smart enough to keep his distance. I only see him a few times throughout the rest of the day, when he drops off food and water, his eyes sad and haunted.

I think maybe whatever madness came over Pestilence will wear off. That he’ll eventually unbar the windows and open the door and beg for my forgiveness.

But it never happens. One day melts into the next, and he stays away, coming to me only so that he can feed me. Not even at night does he slip into my room to express his tortured feelings for me, or to fall asleep pressed against my back.

My body misses him, my heart misses him. The latter is dying away beneath my ribcage, hating his betrayals yet wanting him still.

I don’t try to escape. What’s the use? I can’t slip past Pestilence unnoticed.

I try not to think about all the millions of dead people that must be rotting right where they died. The T.V. stays off for that very reason. I can’t bear to watch the news and see all those bodies. Not when I played a role (albeit, unwittingly) in their deaths.

That leaves me to pilfer through the few books in the room or to recite poetry from memory.

Sometimes I can physically feel Pestilence’s presence nearby—listening to the sound of my voice, lingering outside my door. The air feels saturated with all the things left unspoken and unfinished between us. Things that have been left to decay alongside all those dead bodies.

Life goes on like this for days, and then a whole week.

Is this truly going to become our new normal? Pestilence keeping me like a caged bird, fated neither to die nor to fully live?

When the door opens on day eight, Pestilence looks beaten down. His blue eyes are dim, and his golden-blond hair doesn’t have its usual luster.

“I cannot do this anymore,” he admits. “I surrender.”

I freeze where I sit on the bed.

Pestilence the Conqueror, surrendering?

He removes his crown from his head and tosses it on the floor between us. “It’s yours,” he says bitterly. “I may have laid claim to the world, but I’ve lost you, the only thing I ever really wanted.”

My pulse gallops as I stare first at the discarded crown, then up at the man who wore it.

“You are free to leave,” he says. “I will not stop you.”

His eyes are bleak. Gone are the shadows in his eyes, but so is whatever spark of hope once laid in them. When they touch mine, he looks at me like he’s drowning.

I should feel exalted, vindicated in some small way, but it’s just one more pain to add to the rest.

For several seconds I don’t move.

“Damnit, Sara, if you want your freedom, leave before I come to my senses.”

I slide off the bed, grabbing my things one by one, keeping a wary eye on him. I half expect him to slam the door shut in my face at any moment. This must be some trick.

But it doesn’t appear to be.

I step past the threshold to the room, pausing to face him.

“Go, and join your doomed race,” he says, his gaze reluctantly meeting mine. How it now blisters! He has pain to match my own. “But don’t expect me to kill you.”

Too late, it seems, he’s figured out the meaning of mercy.

After everything Pestilence has done, I don’t expect my leaving to hurt me so bad. I thought my heart had been abused enough to forget that it belongs to the horseman.

I was wrong.

I don’t look at Pestilence when I leave him at the house’s entrance. Walking away from him pains me enough. Seeing whatever emotion fills his face might make me waver. The horseman no longer wears his crown. It still lays, forgotten, in the bedroom.

I head for the street, each step cutting me deeper and deeper. I’ve lost everything else—family, friends, neighbors. Leaving Pestilence is going to bleed out the last parts of me.

Where should I go? How many kilometers will I have to walk to get to the living? Will I die before then? I know Pestilence won’t allow me to succumb to plague, but there are other ways to die. I could starve, I could perish from the elements.

And if I don’t die, what then?

One step at a time, Burns.

It’s only once I reach the road that I turn back around. The mansion we’ve been staying in perches on a small rise. Standing like a sentinel at its threshold is the horseman.