War (The Four Horsemen, #2)(50)

“I’m okay,” I say.

Today, I feel like our roles have utterly reversed. Zara seems to be in good spirits, and I’m the remote one.

“That night,” Zara says, “I heard so many screams. To think one of them was yours …” she shakes her head. “I thought they belonged to the other people, the ones who had killed …” she shakes her head.

She listened to those screams and she thought it was some sort of perverse justice.

Zara picks at her food. “I didn’t find out it was you until word got around that a woman had been harmed, one the horseman was fond of. I put two and two together … “Her eyes meet mine. “I’m sorry I didn’t come.”

“It was your first night. I wouldn’t have.” Not to mention that she didn’t live anywhere close to my tent.

We’re quiet for a few minutes, and I pick at the food Zara brought over.

“What’s that?” she asks out of the blue, nodding to the carving knife and the piece of wood I was working on.

I pick it up and inspect it. “The beginnings of an arrow.”

“You’re making one?” I’m not sure if it’s judgment or awe in her voice. She takes the piece of wood from me and looks at it. “I never learned how to shoot a bow,” she admits. “I’m okay with short blades, but that skill doesn’t much help me here since I don’t actually own a blade.”

“You don’t have a weapon?” I ask, shocked. But of course she doesn’t. Zara was stripped of her weapons when she arrived, and she won’t be offered another one until the next battle.

If the same men who attacked me had chosen Zara’s tent instead, she would have been utterly defenseless.

The thought sickens me.

“Wait right here.” I get up and go into War’s tent, which is still standing. The horseman isn’t inside at the moment, which is probably for the best.

Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

I grab one of the sheathed daggers War has scattered about, then leave his tent, returning to Zara. Several nearby phobos riders track my every movement.

“What’s that?” my friend asks when I extend the weapon to her.

“Put it on.”

“It’s not going to fit,” she says, unwinding the leather belt that’s wrapped around the sheath; it was clearly made to fit a much larger waist. She loops the belt around her, doing the best she can to make it fit.

Zara stares down at it. “Is War going to kill me for this?” she asks, glancing warily at the phobos riders who watch the two of us. They’re undoubtedly going to report that I’ve lifted a dagger from the horseman’s collection.

“I’ll talk to him. It’ll be fine.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You’re going to talk to him?” She says skeptically. “And that’ll work?”

“It has so far.”

She huffs out a laugh. “What sort of talking will you two be doing? The horizontal kind?”

I make a face even as I laugh a little. “No. The normal kind of talking.”

She shakes her head. “Either you’re the world’s most convincing woman, Miriam, or these favors are going to eventually cost you.”

You are my wife, you will surrender to me, and you will be mine in every sense of the word before I’ve destroyed the last of this world.

Zara’s right. Nothing these days comes without a price, favors especially. And War has done me many favors.

At some point, he’s going to make me pay.





Chapter 22


I’ve broken Rule Three.

Avoid notice.

To be fair, War seems to have always taken notice of me. It’s now the rest of camp who is very, very aware of who I am.

I feel their stares as I mount Lady Godiva, a new horse that is way less interested in kicking me than Thunder was. The camp’s collective gaze makes my skin itch. It’s impossible to blend in, and I hate it.

Just like the horseman promised, today the army packed up. Ashdod has been eradicated, as has all the satellite communities that surround it. There’s nothing left for War to kill, so it’s time for us to go.

Like before, War and I ride at the head of the horde, putting enough distance between us that I can forget for a time that there’s a murderous army following in our wake.

The horseman drives us south along Highway 4. The land is too flat for me to see the ocean from here, but I swear I can smell it. It’s mere kilometers from the road. And by the conversations I overheard back at camp, we’ll be sticking close to the coastline over the next couple of days.

I try to keep my thoughts preoccupied on the journey itself, but inevitably they swing back to my travel companion, just as they have ever since we left camp.

For absolutely no logical reason whatsoever, today I’m unable to ignore him. Or maybe there is a reason; maybe War’s barbaric justice earlier today broke something in me.

Whatever the reason, now I can’t help but notice the sharp cut of his jaw; his dark, almost black hair; and those curving lips. I take in his red leather armor and his powerful thighs.

I’m having thigh fantasies. About my enemy.

I’m a fucking moron.

Naturally, of course, that doesn’t stop me from continuing to glance at War, and the longer I look, the more certain I am that I want to run my fingers over his strange, glowing markings and smear the kohl that lines his eyes. I want to taste those lips again.