Page 58 of The Pale Rider

decided not to go straight for the cock option, even if I was a little mad about it. If I remembered right, I was twenty-six when I got kidnapped, and I slept a long time. I was too old to be shirking responsibility to get laid. I was too old to be having sex with Aeron because I was nervous about meeting with Leif. Plus, when Aeron and I took that step, I wanted it to be special.

As soon as we stepped out of the bathroom, someone showed up to take all our dirty clothes. Were they going to wash them for us? How sweet. Washing your clothes during the apocalypse was pretty complicated, and if you got rank while wearing them, sometimes they were still rank when you put them back on after washing them. I’m still not talking about the few pairs of panties I had.

Aeron grabbed my hand and walked me over to an elevator. There was no up button, just a pad. Aeron’s fingerprint was what opened the door. I wasn’t sure how I felt about getting into an elevator at the end of the world, but when I mentioned that to Aeron, he said it was the only way to the lab.

We went down instead of up. We went way down. Was this lab underground? When the doors opened, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. There was lab equipment, sure, but there was also satellite tracking, computers, and it looked like someone was diagraming something on the wall.

I couldn’t see anyone in the lab. Where was the mysterious Leif?

“Speedy!” I heard someone yell.

Someone came flying at me and practically tackled me with a hug. This had to be Leif. He was just as huge as Aeron with black hair and black eyes. He had a ring through his septum and another through his eyebrow. Leif spun me around and set me down.

I had no idea what he was doing when he fell on his knees in front of me. He grabbed my hand and kissed my knuckles.

“Milady, the Horseman of Pestilence is at your service.”

“Excuse me?”

Aeron smacked Leif on the back of the head.

“I haven’t told her about that yet. There’s still a lot she doesn’t remember.”

He didn’t need to tell me. I’d known this entire time, and I’d denied it to myself. The horses I kept painting, Meremoth’s behavior, the blackened corpses at the gate. I knew, and I kept denying it because I didn’t want it to be true.

I had been traveling with and had fallen in love with the Horseman of Death.