Page 47 of Run Rabbit Run

He stands, and lifts me like I weigh nothing, and carries me down off the mountain toward the gray stone house.

I could make him drag me.

Some cold strategist in me weighs it, even now, even wrung out and hollow—make him work, make him haul my slack body and hate every step.

But I look at his face while he walks, the calm of it, the contentment, a man carrying home what he waited a year for, and I understand that my resistance would only feed him.

He'd carry me a hundred miles and call it tender. So I don't fight him on this. Instead, I save it for something else.

The woods slide past over his shoulder, my woods, going from black to green as the light comes up full, every tree I might have used, every creek that lied to me, every yard of the forest I was born to move through and lost in anyway.

I watch it go by, and I feel the door inside me stay shut, and I understand something about that door that scares me more than anything he did in the moss.

It was easy to close.

That's what scares me.

It shut soft and quick, like it had been oiled, like some part of me had been building it and greasing the hinges my entire life for this, the day I'd need a room to hide the real me in while the world took the rest.

Gramps built me strong. He built me to endure.

He never once thought about what endurance costs, or where all the things you endure go when you're too strong to break in front of anyone.

They go behind the door.

I've got a lifetime of them back there already, my mother, the debt, every one of Luke's disasters, and now this, filed away with the rest, and the door doesn't even strain to hold it.

I'm so good at surviving.

That's the trap he saw, I think, the one he's been building toward since the first video.

I'm so good at surviving that I'll survive this too, I'll adapt, I'll endure, I'll fold this horror in with all the others and keep functioning, and every day I survive him is a day I belong to him a little more, because surviving isn't the same as fighting, and I'm only built for one of them.

He carries me through the tree line and out onto the mowed lawn where the hunt began hours ago.

The house rises up gray and blind ahead of us, and I lie in the arms of the man who owns it now and I make myself a colder promise than the last one.

I won't just survive him.

Surviving is what he's counting on.

Surviving is the long, slow road to belonging to him, and I've walked enough of it tonight to see where it goes.

So I'll do the harder thing.

I'll stay awake in here, behind the door, all of me, the real me, watching and waiting and refusing to fold into the shape he's building for me no matter how easy folding would be.

He caught the rabbit.

He hasn't finished with her yet.

Neither have I.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ezra

Breaking a person isn’t violence.