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“People change, Sara, but horsemen don’t. It doesn’t matter what you think of me; I am and will always be Pestilence the Conqueror.”

He’s not going to bend. I can see it now. I should’ve seen it before, back when I could’ve protected my heart a little better.

“What happens now?” I ask. Immediately I regret the question, my stomach roiling with dread.

“The world ends.”

“And me?” I say, the desolation already creeping in.

“You will stay with me.”

He doesn’t ask it; he doesn’t even say it as a challenge. It’s spoken with complete authority.

I nod slowly.

Pestilence must sense something is wrong because he takes another step towards me.

“Don’t,” I say.

If he tries to make either of us feel better—I swear it will break the last of me.

And there’s so little left to break.

I glance around.

Can’t be in the same room as him. I’m suffocating on all this tragedy.

I turn on my heel, eager to get away from him.

“Sara,” he calls out before I can escape. His voice is so goddamn patient.

I pause. “You once told me that names don’t matter,” I say, my back to him, “that whatIcalledyoudoesn’t matter.”

I glance at Pestilence over my shoulder.

Love. I think we can both hear my earlier endearment in the air between us.

His expression is wary when he inclines his head. “I remember.”

“You’re wrong, you know,” I say. “They do matter.”

Pestilenceis the very worst of his nature. I glimpsed the very best of his, but that part of him, that future, is no more than a whisper of a possibility, like smoke dissipating into the wind.

I leave him at that.

Chapter 51

I walk awayfrom him long enough to grab my things—what little I have. It’s hardly more than the shirt on my back.

I stare at the master bedroom for a long time, feeling like my heart is unmaking itself one piece at a time.

Why couldn’t you have fallen in love with a normal boy, and then died a normal death alongside him? Why did you have to choose a horseman? Why did you have to insert yourself between him and the world?

All this time has been a deadly tug-of-war between love and loyalty. How I ever deluded myself that itwouldn’tcome to this, I don’t know.

I pull on my boots, grab my borrowed coat, and then head for the front door.

Pestilence is still where I left him, still standing guard by the television, still consumed with his own wrath.