Page 64 of Run Rabbit Run

"Turn it off."

"No." Gentle. Absolute. "I want you to watch her. I want you to see what you're grieving, so you stop pretending you're not grieving it."

The feed goes quiet after this.

That's the part that reaches me even through the grief, the part that goes through me cold and sharp.

When the videos stop, Rue's the one who'll notice first, Rue who runs the calendar, Rue who'll count the empty days and feel the story I built start to rot from the inside.

She'll call.

She'll call and call, and get my dead voicemail, and somewhere in her a worry I planted with my own lying mouth will finally slip its leash.

I gave her a story to keep her home and safe, and the story has an expiration date, and I'm watching it tick down in the corner of a phone screen while a man strokes my grinning dead face with his thumb.

Stay home, Rue.

I press the thought at her like a hand on a door.

Stay annoyed.

Stay a hundred miles south and furious with me and alive.

Please don't come looking. Please don't make me the reason.

And God help me, he's right, that's the worst of it, he's always right.

I am grieving her.

The woman on the screen with the loose hair and the easy laugh is dead, and I'm the one who has to keep living in what's left, and watching her draw that bow is like standing at my own graveside while somebody describes how alive I used to be.

The tears come before I can stop them.

Not sobbing. Worse than sobbing. They spill over and run down my face while I sit rigid and silent, because I've lost even the fight to hold them back, because there's no holding anything back from a man who queued my own dead voice up to break me and knew exactly how well it would work.

He sets the phone down, screen up, my ghost still moving and talking on it, still laughing in the background while he turns to me.

"There she is," he says, and for one sick moment I don't know if he means the woman on the screen or the woman crying in front of him. "Don't hide from her. Let her go. She's not coming back, Wren. She was never coming back the moment you walked onto my land. The sooner you stop reaching for her, the sooner the reaching stops hurting."

That woman is a ghost.

Ezra's shadow falls over me, blotting out the light.

He's broad, a wall of stillness.

Those pale blue eyes look at me like I'm a specimen pinned to a board.

His hand moves, slow and deliberate, finding the curve of my throat. Pressure builds, steady and firm, cutting off the air just enough to make the world blur.

The woman on the screen laughs again, a sound of pure, unadulterated freedom.

I can't find the exit in my mind this time.

Usually, I can drift, floating above my body like a hawk watching a dying rabbit.

But today, the tether is too short.

I'm here.