Page 20 of Run Rabbit Run

"How much do you know," I ask her. "About Luke?"

"That he's an addict who traded one poison for another the second he got clean." She says it bluntly, no cruelty in it, just the plain truth we've both carried for years. "That he's been squirrelly since summer. That whatever he dragged in here this morning has you looking like you did the week after your grandfather died." Her jaw works. "That the man behind him made the hair on my arms stand up from across a room, and I don't scare easily, and you know I don't."

"No. You don't."

So, I tell her.

Not the way Vane told me, wrapped in that awful stillness.

I’m blunt, the way she always is with everything.

I tell her the number and the man and the game, and I watch it settle on her face in stages.

Disbelief giving way to horror and then to a slow-burning fury, the same road my own face took out in that parking lot, and it steadies me a little to watch someone I love travel it too.

When I get to the part about the hunt, she stops me.

"No." She's shaking her head before I've finished. "No. Wren, that's not a debt collection, that's a—there's a word for what that is, and it's not a word you get to say yes to. We go to the police. Today. Right now, we get in the truck and we drive to the county sheriff and we⁠—"

"And we tell them what?" My voice comes out gentler than I feel. "That a man made me an offer in a parking lot? He didn't touch me. He didn't threaten me, not in any way you could write on a form. He offered me a game and told me I'm free to say no."

"You are free to say no."

"Am I?" I look at her, and I need her to understand this the way I already do, because if she doesn't she's going to spend the next ten days trying to save me in ways that'll only make it worse.

"He owns the paper on Luke. He owns it clean and legal, every dollar. If I say no, he calls it in. Luke doesn't have it. He'll never have it, so they take everything he's got and it doesn't come close, and then—" I stop. "Rue, men like that don't send a bill to collections. You saw him. You felt it from across the room. What do you think happens to Luke if I say no?"

She doesn't answer. She doesn't have to.

"So it's not really a no I've got," I say. "It never was. He was really careful about that. He built me a choice that looks like a choice from the outside and isn't one from where I'm sitting. He’s meticulous, making it so clean that if I walk into that sheriff's office, all I've got to report is a rich man being generous with a struggling family."

Rue's eyes have gone bright and wet, and she blinks it back hard, because we were both raised by a man who taught us crying is fine but you do it after the work's done, not during.

"Then we run for real," she says. "Not his game. Actual running. I've got the truck, I've got a little saved, we drive tonight, we don't stop, we⁠—"

"He'll find me." I say it, and I know it's true the same way I know which way a spooked deer will break. "The account. The one that's watched everything. That's him. I knew it the second I saw his face, don't ask me how, I only did. He's been watching me for a year, maybe longer. A man who does that doesn't lose you because you got a head start on the interstate. He finds you, and then there's no game, no dawn, no way out for Luke. There's only whatever he decides."

Saying it out loud makes it real in a way it wasn't a minute ago.

He's been watching me for a year.

Every video. Every dawn on this river.

The bad ones I meant to delete and the good ones I was proud of, all of it pouring into some dark room where a man sat and learned me by heart and waited, and I smiled down the lens the whole time and never once felt the weight of his eyes, and a cold crawls up the back of my neck now, standing here, thinking about it.

Not the fear of what's coming. The fact that it's already been happening, for months, and I felt safe the entire time.

I've spent my entire life reading a room for the threat in it.

And the worst threat I ever drew never once set off a single alarm, because he never came into the room.

He just watched it through my own camera, and I aimed it at myself for him, and I called it a goddamn career.

"Wren." Rue's got my hand now, both of hers around it, and her grip is fierce. "Look at me. Whatever you're deciding in there, don't decide it alone. That's what you do, that's what you've always done, you go quiet and you shoulder it all by yourself and you don't let anybody carry the other end. Not this time. You hear me?"

And here it is.

The moment I could tell her everything.