Page 18 of Run Rabbit Run

I know the nights Wren doesn't sleep.

I know what lives in the dark she's afraid of, and it isn't the woods, it's never been the woods, and that's a lever I'll pull when the time is right and not one minute before.

The newest video plays, muted, the light of her washing up over my face in the dark of the car.

There she is on some river at dawn, warm and easy and certain, pulling a bow to the corner of that mouth, and she looks straight down the lens and tells the strangers who love her a truth I already owned, a lesson she taught me herself a year ago without ever knowing my name.

Stay off the skyline. When you're scared, your body wants the high ground, and the high ground's where they'll look for you first.

She's right. She's always right about the woods.

It's the one place her instincts don't lie to her, and it's precisely why the woods are where I'll take her, because there's a cruelty available to a man in the ruin of a person's competence that isn't available anywhere else.

Break a fool at what they're bad at and you've taught them nothing.

Break them at the one thing they were sure of, and you've taken the floor out from under the whole house.

I've thought about this more than a healthy man would.

Turned her over, more than I've let myself turn anything since I was seventeen years old, which is the age I stopped being a person the world happens to and started being a person who happens to the world.

I won't dress it up into a tragedy. People love a tragedy. They love to find the wound under the monster and press on it and tell themselves that if the wound had healed cleanly, the monster would have been a man.

It's a comfort, and it's a lie, and I’ve no use for either.

What happened when I was seventeen is simple and it isn't sad.

I watched the world take something I loved because I was too small, soft, and too slow to stop it. I stood in the wreckage afterward and I didn’t weep and I didn’t break.

I made a decision.

I decided the world would never again take anything of mine, because I’d never again let myself be weak enough to allow it.

I've kept that promise every day since. It’s cost the people around me a great deal. It’s cost people who never knew my name a great deal more.

I've watched families come apart over debts I engineered and men lose everything they built because I decided I wanted the ground they built it on, and I’ve gone home on every one of those nights and slept the clean, dreamless sleep of a man at peace with himself.

That's the part the tragedy-lovers can't forgive. Not that I was hurt. That I was hurt, and looked at it, and chose this on purpose, with my eyes open, and never once wished I'd chosen otherwise.

Wren Holloway is not going to be taken from me.

That's the beginning and the end of it. Not by her brother's stupidity, not by the friend with the sharp eyes, not by her own considerable will.

I've spent a year closing the doors one at a time, so gently she never felt the draft, and now there's a single door left and it opens onto my land, and I’m the only thing standing in it.

She'll run at it anyway. I'm counting on that. A woman who'd hand herself over in a diner booth by sundown to spare her brother is a woman with a spine, and a spine is the part that makes the breaking worth the patience.

I don't want the Wren who surrenders in the booth.

Any man with enough money could buy that.

I want the one who fights me through a whole night of my own woods, who uses every trick her grandfather ever taught her, who lets herself believe all the way to the last hour that she's going to make it.

And then I want to be the one who shows her she never could.

"You've got the Kesler closing at four," Grady says, pulling me back into the ordinary machinery of the day, the meetings and the holdings and the wide clean legal face I show the world. "And the sister called twice."

"I'll take the sister tonight."