Page 34 of Run Rabbit Run

He wants me fed, warm, and calm, because he told me himself, on a set of steps an hour ago, that it's no pleasure if I don't believe I can win.

And there it is, the cold clean truth I've been running from since the diner, sitting in the middle of this beautiful room where I can finally see all of it.

He's not nervous. He's never once been nervous.

Everything he's done, the dead transmission I couldn't fix and couldn't outrun, the money that owns my brother.

The running start, the fair rules, and the training and this warm and lovely cell. All of it is a man arranging a night he already knows the end of.

I sink down onto the edge of the bed that isn't mine.

For one moment I let it in. All of it.

The gate, the lock, and the hundred miles, the lie in Rue's arms and the plain fact that I walked up this mountain on my own two feet because a man was patient enough to leave me no other road.

My eyes burn. My throat pulls tight and aches with it, and I press the heels of my hands hard against my closed lids and breathe once, ragged, the only one I'll allow myself.

Then I take my hands away, and I drag my wrist across my eyes before the sting can turn to anything he'd get to see, and I start to plan the way Gramps taught me, from the ground up.

Ezra's better on this land than I'll ever be.

The house is a trap, the woods are a trap, and the man who owns them both is worse than either.

But the sun sets tonight whether he owns it or not, and when it does, I'll be out there in his dark with a bow and every bit of information my grandfather ever taught me.

A hunted animal that's decided it has nothing left to lose is the one variable even a patient man can't fully plan around.

He wants me to believe I can win.

Fine.

I'll let him think that's the reason I fight.

CHAPTER TEN

Wren

They come for me an hour before sundown.

Not Ezra. The driver, and behind him a woman I haven't seen before, older, gray-haired, with the still competent hands of someone who's worked this house a long time and stopped asking what for.

She sets a tray on the table I haven't touched.

Bread, cold meat, a hard cheese, a flask of water.

Fuel, not a meal.

Whoever packed it knew exactly what a body needs before a long night moving, and the care in it sickens me worse than cruelty would.

"You'll want to eat that," she says, not unkind. "It's a long dark, and he won't make it short for mercy's sake."

It's the most anyone in this house has told me straight, and I look at her, and for half a breath I think about asking.

How many?

How many women have you fed before a night like this?

But her eyes go somewhere over my shoulder, carefully, and I understand she's already said more than she should, and that the price of it isn't mine to make her pay.