“Do you want me to leave?” I say. I don’t even know why I ask it. I should just leave. Even though my knees are shaking with fatigue, I should.

War’s kohl-lined eyes find mine as he steps in the basin. “And miss your reaction, wife? Never.”

“So you do know it’s inappropriate to flash people?” I say, mustering up some righteous indignation.

The horseman lounges back in the basin. “It’s just nudity. It’s not supposed to be offensive.”

Somehow War, the asshole that’s killing everyone off, just managed to sound like the innocent one.

“It’s not offensive,” I say. “It’s just … not done.”

“Is it now?” he says. “So husbands don’t see their wives naked and wives don’t see their husbands naked? They somehow just enjoy each other fully clothed?”

I want to rake my hands through my hair. “We are not married.”

War gives me a look that states plainly, we are.

“I shouldn’t be staying in your tent anymore,” I say, backing up. I clearly hadn’t thought through the logistics of sleeping here, where War lives and bathes and sleeps.

“You should have always been staying in my tent with me. I have let you enjoy your own space because it pleased you, and I enjoy pleasing you and your ridiculous, human whims.”

My ridicu—?

“You want to please me?” I say, now officially peeved. “How about you stop killing people?”

War gives me a piercing look. “There’s another who I seek to please too, Miriam. And unfortunately for you, He wishes differently.”

I survived the bath ordeal.

Barely.

Now War is fully clothed and diligently healing my wounds. This time when he touches me, I’m very aware of his closeness. There’s a peculiar sort of intimacy to seeing the warlord with the kohl scrubbed from his eyes.

I want to reach out and touch him, and if I look too closely into his eyes, I’m sure I’ll see that he wants it too.

So I keep my eyes down.

Once he’s done with his ministrations, he … sticks around.

This is new.

I mean, I’m used to him being in the tent—it is his after all—but up until now, I was mostly passed out. I glance at him as he sharpens a blade and flips through some book that looks way less fun than my own romance novel.

This feels … domestic. Like War is getting that marriage that he keeps harping on about.

I need to get the fuck out of here, stat.

Seriously though, what am I going to do about this situation? I can’t stay here forever. And the longer I’m here, the more the two of us will get used to these accommodations.

That really can’t happen. War’s already too attractive for his own good, and now I know that he’s capable of being disarmingly kind. I have no resistance to any of it.

It doesn’t really matter, regardless. I’m not leaving tonight, when my bones feel like rickety stilts and my skin is still painful to the touch. I’ll stay here, I’ll endure this a little while longer, and then, when I’m physically ready to leave, I will.

Until then—

I grab my woodworking kit and a piece of wood and begin to whittle the branch down, shaving off the bark like the skin of an apple.

Got to make the time freaking pass somehow.

I work in silence, and eventually, my worries fall away and it becomes just me, the grain of the wood, and the steady scrape of my tools. Every so often I smooth my work over with sandpaper, rubbing the arrow shaft until the surface becomes relatively smooth.

“Where did you learn to do that?”

I glance up, only to realize that War’s steady gaze is on me—that his gaze might have been on me for some time. I’ve been so lost in my work I didn’t notice.

“It’s a long story,” I say.

“We’ve got time.”

Damn him and his deep voice. I can’t help but think about his mouth every time he speaks.

I might as well tell him the story. Anything to keep my mind from wandering down the path it wants to take.

I set the piece of wood aside. Around me, wood shavings lay scattered like confetti.

“My mother was a history professor at the Hebrew University,” I say. “One of the courses she taught was on ancient weaponry. She had a lot of books on old weapons and weapon-making.”

Before my mother and sister and I had tried to escape war-torn Israel, I’d already been flipping through those books, my naïve heart set on survival. I foolishly figured that if I could learn how to make weapons, then I could use them to hunt, like some modern day Amazonian.

It was a childish desire that drove an honest interest.

“It took a long time to even make sense of the books, and an even longer time to get just one thing right.” But eventually I did. Then one thing became two, and so on. Once I lost my mother and sister and returned to Jerusalem alone and without any sort of income to live off of, I threw myself into my work.

“I made wooden daggers first.” Even that was a process of trial and error. Wood can be rotted, it can be too soft, it can be too brittle. But once I understood a bit more about the nature of it and ways of tempering and fire-hardening, that’s when I was truly able to manipulate the material. “Then I moved onto other weapons.”

I made bows and arrows, testing out softer and harder wood. I learned when to apply heat, how much, and for how long. And I discovered I could repurpose broken glass into arrowheads and thin plastic into fletching. Houses and junkyards were full of these things, as well as string and glue and the odd tool.

My mother’s books had most of the answers, I just had to get creative in how I applied them.

“So you’re self-taught,” War says. He looks impressed, and I’m uncomfortable at how good that makes me feel.

I nod.

“And your fighting skills? Also self-taught?”

I shake my head. “There were some older soldiers who taught me a few basic skills.” Soldiers like my mother. It used to be that most Israelis joined the army for at least two years. But by the time I was of age, there was a new political regime, one that didn’t believe in training women for war. So I had to work with what my mother had taught me, and what a few other, older Israelis were willing to teach.

“They taught you how to shoot a bow?” War says, incredulous.

“Well, no. That was self-taught.” Before the Arrival, guns were the weapon of choice. It was only when firearms stopped working properly that bows and arrows, swords and daggers, maces and axes all came back into fashion. “Why do you want to know?” I ask, self-conscious.

“You are a curious creature, that is all.” He flashes me a sly smile. “A curious, dangerous creature.”

Chapter 20

By the third day, I’m moving up and about again. After another night of War’s warm hands on my skin, I feel nearly back to normal. There are still aches and pains—like if I twist my torso a certain way, my rib injuries flare to life—but if I tread carefully, I can pretend I’m healed.

Which is exactly what I do once I wake up and find War gone—undoubtedly off hacking away at more doomed people. I get up and move about the horseman’s tent, and I’m not going to lie, I snoop the shit out of the place.