Page 69 of Run Rabbit Run

But I'm at the glass this gray afternoon out of old habit, forehead nearly touching the cold pane, and a flash of movement down where the private road breaks out of the trees catches the tracker in me before the rest of me can look away.

A truck.

Old, red, a dent in the passenger door I'd know anywhere because I was in the seat when she put it there, sixteen and screaming at her to slow down.

Rue.

Everything in me comes awake at once, a hard electric jolt that leaves me shaking.

My hands are flat on the glass before I know I've moved.

My breath fogs the pane. I swipe it clear and press closer, and it's her, it's really her, that battered truck climbing my mountain with my best friend behind the wheel, coming to find me the way I prayed every night she wouldn't and prayed every night she would.

She came. God, she came anyway.

The relief is so enormous it hurts, a physical wrench under my ribs, and right behind it comes the terror.

Because she's driving straight into the mouth of what ate me, and she has no idea, and I can't warn her, and every foot of road that brings her closer brings her closer to him.

The truck slows at the gate.

From up here in the east wing I can see all of it, the scene laid out small and clear as something under glass.

The tall iron gate.

The stone wall running off into the trees.

And Grady, stepping out of the little guardhouse to meet her, unhurried, a big calm man with his hands loose at his sides.

I pound on the window.

I don't decide to.

It’s instinctive.

My fists hit the glass, once, twice, hard enough to hurt, and I'm screaming her name, screaming it with everything twelve days of silence left in my throat, Rue, Rue, I'm here, I'm up here, RUE⁠—

The glass doesn't even rattle.

It's old and thick and made for a house that keeps what it catches.

My voice bounces back at me off the cold pane and dies in the room.

Down at the gate a hundred yards and two stories below, my best friend doesn't so much as glance up.

She can't hear me.

She was never going to hear me.

He designed this room to make sure of it.

I scream anyway.

I scream until my throat tears, until I taste blood, until the words stop being words and go to raw animal sound.

I claw at the window sash that's painted shut, and I beat on the glass until my hands go numb.

None of it makes it through, and the scream keeps tearing up out of me anyway, raw and useless, scraping my throat bloody.