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I look at his face, his angelic face with those sad, solemn eyes. He really could be an angel—maybe heisan angel, if such things exist. I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything, except that joy is a strange thing, and I feel it now with him just as I have felt a hundred times before in a hundred different little moments between us.

I reach up and wrap a hand around his wrist. “If you are no longer Pestilence the Conqueror, then what would you like me to call you?” I ask, leaning a little into his touch.

He gives me a shy, vulnerable smile. “‘Love’ had a nice ring to it.”

“Alright, love,” I say, noticing his whisper of a smile at the endearment, “what minutes I have left—they are yours.Iam yours.”

There is a moment where it doesn’t compute. My horseman’s eyes are still haunted, and he looks like hope utterly abandoned him somewhere back in Washington. But then itdoesregister, and his whole face transforms.

First his gaze brightens, his eyebrows hiking up, and then a smile that could outpace the sun spreads across his face.

He leans down and takes my lips, and the kiss is an end and a beginning all at once.

Chapter 54

I’d like tosay that everything from that minute on was some beautiful, breathtaking fairytale. I’d like to say that I didn’t drag Pestilence’s inhuman ass back to my bedroom and sully the shit out of my sheets like the dirty freak I am.

I’d like to say a thousand things to airbrush the crap out of the night, but then, that’s some other broad’s story.

The kiss has only barely begun when it goes from sweet to wild and desperate. He’s my oxygen and I haven’t been able to breathe formonths.

My fingers moves to the buttons of his flannel shirt, but my hands shake so badly from need and want and allthisgoddamnadrenaline that I can’t seem to undo a single one.

Pestilence pushes me up against the wall, his pelvis grinding into mine.

“Missed you so much,” he says between kisses. “Love isunendurablewhen it spoils.”

But, miracle of miracles, this lovedidn’tspoil. It might’ve carved us up from the inside out, but in the end it didn’t twist us into monsters. It stopped Pestilence from killing the world, and it made me strong enough to walk away from him when he wasn’t worthy.

And, in the end, it brought him back to me.

I go at Pestilence’s buttons again while the horseman peels my shirt off. The rest of our clothes quickly follow as I lead Pestilence to my bedroom.

Only a faint oil lamp flickers in the darkness here—well, itandmy horseman’s strange markings, the latter which haven’t dimmed in the least.

I touch them reverently as he lays me down on the bed. “They’re still here,” I say.

He trails kisses from my mouth, up my cheek, to my ear. “Of course they are, Sara. They can’t just walk off of me.”

I turn and laugh into his lips. “Earth has given you a smart mouth.”

“Earth has given me a smart woman andshehas given me a smart mouth.”

His hand goes to my breast, and I gasp at his touch as it kneads the soft flesh.

Pestilence was right to call loveunendurable. I can’t fathom how I managed to go this long without him touching me.

I wrap my legs around him, wanting more—needingmore.

“It’s been so long,” I whisper, and my eyes prick.

Oh God, I’m going to cry. We’re about to bone, and I’m going to cry.

But then Pestilence is there, his lips pressing first to the corner of one eye, then the corner of the other.

“Far too long,” he agrees. “But that’s all over now. There’s no need for sadness anymore, Sara. Your people are safe, and you are in my arms.”

His mouth moves lower, now too busy tasting my flesh to tell me all sorts of pretty things. Which is probably for the best because my core is throbbing something fierce.