Page 53 of Run Rabbit Run

"Why," I say, and my voice cracks on the one word, and I hate that too.

"Because you needed to try." He climbs the first step toward me, unhurried. "You needed to run it all the way to the bottom and find me here, because you'd never believe there was no door if I only told you. You had to feel it. Now you've felt it." Another step. "There's no door, Wren. There was never a door. There's only how long it takes you to stop looking for one."

I want to swing the sharpened knife at him.

I can feel it in my fist, the poor, stupid point I ground against the stone, and I want to drive it into that face of his until the calm comes off it.

I don't.

Not because I'm afraid.

Because I understand, standing on his stairs with my chest heaving and my few seconds of freedom already dead behind me, that swinging is what he wants.

Violence and brutality are a language he speaks fluently, and I'm exhausted, that the knife is one more door left unlatched for me to run at.

So, I open my hand and I let it fall.

It rings on the stone, small and useless, and the sound of it is the sound of the seventh day ending.

"Good girl," he says softly.

Two words hit like a slap and a caress at once.

God help me.

Some starved animal part of me, a full week without a kind word, leans toward the warmth in them before the rest of me recoils in horror.

He sees it. Of course he sees it.

Nothing about me is hidden from him and it never has been.

"Come," he says, and holds out his hand, and I don't take it, but I follow it, back up the stairs, back to the east wing, because there's nowhere else on this whole blind mountain to go, and we both know it and only one of us is still pretending otherwise.

At the top, Delia's in the corridor, wringing her apron, her lined face wet.

"I'm sorry," she whispers as I pass.

I don't know if she's saying it to me or to him, and then she catches my eyes for the first time since the woods and holds them.

She says it again, lower, meant only for me. "I'm sorry, girl. You're not the first he's run through this house. You won't be the⁠—"

"That's enough, Delia," Ezra says.

Not sharp. He's never sharp.

But she flinches like a struck dog and goes silent and hurries away down the corridor, and the door at the end closes behind her.

Not the first.

I stand in the middle of the warm bright room he built for me, and I turn the two words over.

For the first time in seven days I feel something other than fear, fury, or the horror of my own softening.

I feel the cold, clean click of a lead.

Not the first. Which means there were others.

Which means somewhere in this house or this hundred-year-old family there's a history, a record of every rabbit that ran before me.