Page 60 of Run Rabbit Run

And my heart lifts.

For one sick, unforgivable second, before I understand what my own body is doing, my heart lifts at the sound of footsteps outside my door, hoping, hoping it's him coming back.

I press both hands over my mouth in the dark so no sound gets out.

Because I finally understand what he's building, and how far it's already come, and that I've been helping him build it since the moment I stopped being able to lie about my own pulse.

He doesn't have to break down my door anymore.

He's teaching me to listen for it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ezra

The dead woman posts a new video on a Tuesday.

I watch it in my study with the fire low, the way I've watched all of them, except tonight it sits differently in me, and only I can savor why.

The others I watched as a hunter studies tracks, learning the animal from the sign it leaves.

This one I watch as an owner surveys his property.

Because the woman on the screen belongs to me now, upstairs, behind a locked door, and the woman on the screen doesn't know it yet.

Neither do the four hundred thousand strangers watching with me.

There she is.

Some clear cold morning on a mountain I'll never bother to learn the name of, months ago, a lifetime ago, bow in hand and that easy grin turned to the lens.

She's teaching them how to read a blood trail, how to move through the woods so it never knows you passed, all the small hard skills a dead man drilled into her on a riverbank.

The comments roll up beneath her in a bright river, thousands of them, and every one is addressed to a woman who stopped existing the morning I pulled her out of my pit.

queen behavior, says one.

she could kidnap me any day, says another, and I permit myself a smile at that, because they have no idea, none of them, how close the joke sits to the bone.

They think they're watching a free woman.

They're watching a ghost I keep alive at my own pleasure, and the pleasure is finer than I expected.

I've taken people before.

I've made them disappear the way you'd expect, quietly and completely, a debt closed and a hole filled.

But I've never kept one running like this, out in the daylight, smiling and capable and beloved, while the real one learns her new life in my east wing.

It's a doubling I didn't plan and can't stop turning over.

Two Wrens.

The one the world gets, frozen at the moment before I closed my hand.

And the one I get, thawing slowly in the dark into something that turns toward my voice without meaning to.

I want to be honest about what that does to me, because I've never lied to myself, and I won't start now.