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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 ofmercy.

After everything Pestilencehas 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.

Pestilence watches me, his face solemn. For a moment, I think I see hope spark in his eyes.

He thinks I’m changing my mind.