“Did you have a hangover?” I ask him. I sit outside my tent, busy fitting a glass arrowhead to a finished wooden shaft.

“A hangover?” He smiles a bit. “There was a brief flash of pain and some fleeting nausea, but I wouldn’t call that a hangover.”

Part of me is belatedly surprised that he knows what a hangover is, but he’s lived among soldiers for a year now. He was bound to learn about them eventually.

“Do you remember our talk?” I ask him. “From last night?”

His face changes, but I can’t say exactly what his expression is. Brooding? Curious? Right now it’s impossible to tell.

“Every last bit.”

Awesome.

He takes my hand. “Come, I want to have you alone to myself.”

I take his hand, even as my eyebrows furrow. “Where are we going?”

He whistles. “You’ll see.”

A minute later, Deimos comes galloping towards us, his deep red coat shining in the sun. He still has his saddle and bridle on from the morning raid.

The horse comes to a stop next to us.

“How do you get him to do that?” I ask. He doesn’t need to be stabled, and he comes at his master’s call. I haven’t met that many horses, but I don’t think this is normal.

War leans towards me. “He is no more a horse than I am a man.”

Point taken.

The horseman gestures for me to mount Deimos. For a moment, I hesitate, not sure that I want to spend more time with War than is absolutely necessary. But in the end, I get on.

War swings into the saddle behind me, so close his thighs encase mine, and his chest presses against my back. This isn’t the first time I’ve shared a saddle with the horseman, but it is the first time I’ve noticed him.

His hair tickles against the skin of my neck, and I can feel his breath against my cheek. An arm comes around my waist, pressing me deeper into him, and I should not be so affected by this.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, I’ve had the man’s dick in my mouth.

“Stay with me in my tent,” War says against me, his breath fanning across my ear.

“What will be left of me if I do?” I don’t mean to say it out loud, but the words come out anyway.

“Wife, I’m not going to eat you if you move in—well, I will eat you, but I know you enjoy that sort of thing.”

I feel my cheeks heat, remembering the feel of his mouth between my thighs.

I half turn my head to him. “Can you not say stuff like that?”

War’s hand tightens against my stomach. “Stay with me, Miriam.”

“No—unless you want to make another trade.”

The horseman is quiet. “You do realize I could simply make you stay with me.”

So he’s threatened before.

“Then do it,” I say, knowing he won’t.

It must be odd for him, a man of action, to make empty threats. He’s never had to before me. When you want the world dead, it’s easy to make real threats—or, more War’s style, simply kill without ever threatening someone at all.

“You will fall to me, wife, just as everyone and everything else has.”

That is exactly what I’m afraid of.

The horseman steers us south, into the desert. There’s nothing out here except rolling expanses of dry earth. It’s beautiful in a very austere sort of way.

We’ve only ridden for maybe five or ten minutes when War stops his horse.

“Where are we?” I ask, glancing around as I hop off Deimos.

“I don’t exactly know,” he says, dismounting, his kohl-lined gaze squinting at the sun.

I glance around. “So there’s no particular reason why you brought me here?” I ask.

“Oh, there’s a reason,” he says, “it just has nothing to do with our surroundings.”

I’ve taken a few steps away from him, but now I glance back. “What’s the reason?” I ask.

“I want to hear what you sound like when no one but me is listening.”

Chapter 34

When it comes to intimacy, War gives more than he takes. Which is a lot. It’s all a lot. He has the appetite of a deity, and I can barely keep up on either end.

He’s making me work for those aviaries.

I lay on a blanket with him, our clothes cast aside.

“I like it when you’re like this,” he says, trailing a finger over my bare abdomen.

I glance over at him. “I bet you do.”

“Not just in that way, wife,” he says, giving a low laugh. “You are more open with me in these moments.”

I am? Alarm bells are going off.

“And you like that?” I say.

“Of course I do.”

I study the horseman’s face. “Why?”

His gaze searches mine. The gold in his eyes glitters in the light.

He’s more than just enamored with you. Zara’s words ring in my ears.

Before War says anything, something moves in the distance, causing me to jolt in surprise. My entire body is exposed. I desperately gather my clothes to me, trying to cover myself.

“What is it?” War says, his voice sharp. His gaze follows mine.

It’s a person, one I’ve now doomed to death.

But when the horseman sees him, the tension in his body eases. “Relax, wife. He’s one of mine.”

“One of yours?” Does he mean one of his soldiers? Because I really wouldn’t want one of them seeing me naked.

“The re-animated dead,” War explains.

The hairs on my arm stand up. I’d almost forgotten about that ghoulish ability of his.

I take the distant figure in again. “What is it doing out here?”

“Miriam, my undead linger everywhere I am or have been. They patrol every piece of earth I’ve touched.”

I figured as much after encountering his zombies back in Ashdod.

“How long do they patrol a city?”

“Forever. Once I’ve claimed a territory, I do not give it up.”

Chills.

Every single place that War has been, his undead are there still, never sleeping, never ceasing, but always, always hunting.

Tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, I scoot away from the horseman, an action he notices. I keep letting myself forget about War’s true nature.

“You have seen me kill many times, Miriam, and yet this bothers you?”

“Of course it bothers me,” I say. “It makes me not want to touch you.”

War’s face … that violence is back in his eyes, but for a single instant—a single, brief instant—I see his hurt.

It’s almost preposterous to think a force of nature like War is even capable of feeling hurt. But maybe I’m not the only one who gets vulnerable when you strip them down.

“But you will keep touching me,” he says. “So long as you want your aviaries to remain intact, you will—and I don’t need to remind you how easily I can undo all of the progress you’ve bought your kind.”

“Bought,” I repeat. Now it’s me who feels hurt—hurt and used and dirty. Forget that this situation was my idea, or that that’s exactly what I did—I bought my fellow humans the barest possibility of survival—it still burns me raw to hear War talk about it like it’s some cold, emotionless transaction.