PROLOGUE
RUN, LITTLE RABBIT
POV: Elodie Fray
Location:The North Woods, Perimeter of Hallowed Halls
Track:Run Boy Run– Woodkid (Slowed & Reverb)
Sensory:Freezing mud, taste of copper, the roar of thunder.
Mood:Primal Fear.
The mud sucks at my bare ankles like a graveyard mouth, hungry and relentless.
I don’t look back. Ican’tlook back.
If I turn my head, I’ll see the clinical white lights of the main building cutting through the storm like the eyes of a deep-sea predator. I’ll see the shadows detaching themselves from the high stone walls. I’ll seehim.
My lungs burn as if I’ve swallowed battery acid. Every breath is a jagged knife twisting in my chest, hot and wet, but I force my legs to pump harder, faster. The thin, translucent silk of my nightgown—hisgift,hischoice,hismockery—clings to my skin, soaked through with freezing rain and the cold sweat of pure terror. It offers no protection against the brambles tearing at my arms, leaving little trails of stinging pain that I barely register.
Pain is just information,Alaric told me once.
I can still feel the ghost of his gloved fingers tracing my spine as he said it. His voice was a velvet caress, a low baritone that vibrated through my bones while he stitched a wound I didn’t remember getting.It tells you you’re still alive, Elodie. It tells you that you belong to the physical world. My world.
Right now, the pain tells me I’m running out of time.
Thunder cracks overhead, a sound like a God snapping a whip, shaking the ground beneath my feet. I stumble, my knee slamming into a hidden root gnarled deep in the earth. A scream tears from my throat, raw and animalistic, but the storm swallows it whole. I scramble up, my hands coated in black sludge, fingernails broken, dignity forgotten.
I am not Elodie Fray, the prodigy pianist. I am not the girl who played Rachmaninoff at the Royal Hall to a standing ovation. I am Patient Seven. And tonight, I am escaping hell.
The iron gates loom ahead, towering monstrosities of black metal topped with spikes that look like medieval spearheads. They are the teeth of this beast, designed to keep the world out and the secrets in. They are beautiful, gothic, and absolutely terrifying.
But I have the key card.
I spent three weeks pretending to be sedated. Three weeks of letting my eyes glaze over while the nurses fed me soup. Three weeks of lettinghimtouch me—check my pulse, stroke my hair, listen to my heart with that cold stethoscope—just to get close enough to his coat pocket.
I reach the control panel box mounted on the brick pillar. My fingers shake so violently I almost drop the white plastic card into the mud.
Please. Please. God, if you’re listening, just this once.
I swipe it. The light on the panel blinks.
Red.
My heart stops. The silence in my head is suddenly louder than the rain. I swipe it again. Harder. Scratching the magnetic strip against the reader.
Red.Access Denied.
"No," I whisper, the sound broken, a whimper of a dying thing. I swipe it a third time, my movements frantic, clumsy. "No, no, no... it worked yesterday. I saw him use it. I saw the green light."
I slam my fist against the metal box. "Open! Damn you, open!"
"You didn't really think it would be that easy, did you,petite?"
The voice doesn't come from behind me. It comes from everywhere. Deep, calm, resonating through the rain like a bass note on a cello. It is a voice that belongs to luxury suites and sterile operating theaters, not a muddy forest in the middle of a storm.
I spin around, my back pressing against the cold iron bars of the gate. A figure steps out of the treeline, ten yards away.
