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“Just let me walk around!”

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

“That wasweeksago.”

It feels even longer. Ineedto 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 yourfuckingsavior 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.

Hislove.

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.

The reporters don’t know what to make of me. They don’t know whether I am his prisoner or his lover (“C”, all of the above), or what happened to us. The whole thing appears terribly confusing for them—should they laud me or condemn me? They’ve settled on pity.

Pestilence comes into the master bedroom where I’m cooped up—still in fucking bed—his large frame filling the doorway. He removes his bow and quiver and sets them down next to the doorway. Then off goes his armor. He leaves his crown on his head, his hair beneath it windswept.

I know without asking that he’s been patrolling the grounds. Not that he needs to. Anyone who comes remotely close to this place will fall ill. I think he does it more because he’s restless. The need to move through all the lands of man and spread disease must eat away at him.