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Because I’m so sneaky at the moment.

Once my wrists are free, blood flows through my hands, the sensation agonizing. A low groan escapes my throat.

“If you want my pity, expect to be disappointed,” Pestilence says, backing up to the door.

Honestly, this guy is insufferable—even if he is annoyingly handsome. Actually, that might be what’s making it worse. He’s like the most aggressive form of my already most hated male combo: the hot asshole.

My eyes move over Pestilence as he folds his arms, content to just watch me, a look of mild repulsion on his face.

Feeling’s mutual.

“I’m not going to fall asleep with you just staring at me,” I say.

“Too bad.”

So that’s how it’s going to be.

I sit up and stiffly peel off my outer clothes, which are mostly rags at this point anyway. Tossing them aside, I slide under the sheets and try not to shudder at the fact that I’m lying in the guest bedroom of a woman Pestilence’s plague will soon kill.

This is all so epically twisted.

Beneath the covers, I rub my wrists, and I have to bite down on my lower lip when I realize it’s too excruciating to touch. Even the soft flannel sheets are agony against the raw skin.

Pestilence sits on the ground, leaning his back against the door, and his unspoken message is clear:I’m not going anywhere.

I flip over so that I might for five seconds pretend that he doesn’t exist and today doesn’t exist and that none of this exists.

I lay there for some time. Long enough to wonder if any of my teammates survived the Fever. Long enough to once again fret about my parents. I force myself to imagine them holed up in my grandfather’s rickety hunting lodge, playing poker by the fire like we used to when I was young.

They think I’m dead.

I remember my dad’s tears earlier this week. How shocking they were. He’d been so proud when I joined the fire department. He never wanted me to go to college; it didn’t matter that I’d been obsessed with English literature since I was little, that I went so far as dressing as Edgar Allan Poe for Halloween one year (yeah, I was what wet dreams were made of), or that I spent long weekends writing poems. Once the horseman arrived, college was a beautiful reverie and nothing more.

Too impractical, my Dad had told me.What are you going to use a degree for anyway?

I wonder what he’d say to that now …

“Horseman,” I call out.

Silence.

“I know you can hear me.”

He doesn’t respond.

I sigh. “Really? You’re just going to ignore me?”

He heaves out a breath.Yes.

I pick at a loose thread of my borrowed bedspread. “We drew lots,” I begin. “To decide who’d kill you.”

Pestilence is still quiet, but now I swear I can feel his eyes on my back.

“There were four of us left,” I continue. “Me, Luke, Briggs, and Felix. We worked together at the fire station, and for the last several days before you came we helped the Mounties warn residents that they needed to evacuate. We weren’t positive, of course, that you’d ride through our city. Whistler isn’t all that big, but it lays right on Highway 99, the same highway the news had previously spotted you on.

“By the time we drew lots, all the other firefighters had already left with their families. Those of us without families of our own, we stayed behind.” My father’s face floats through my mind.

You had a family, just like Felix and Briggs and Luke did. You just didn’t have a husband and kids. And in the end, that’s why you all took the final shift.