Page 76 of Run Rabbit Run

Will make you reach for your dead grandfather and use his love as a leash on your own throat.

Will make you fit yourself into the curve of the monster's body in the dark because his body is warm and the cabin is cold and warmth is warmth even when it's the warmth of what caught you.

The woman on the riverbank is still in here.

But she's slowing, the way I slowed my heart, going still, pliant and enduring.

I understand tonight, with a clarity that wrings the last of my tears out of me, that I'm not fighting to keep her anymore.

I'm just watching her go under.

And the cabin is warm, and his heartbeat is steady under my ear, and the worst part, the part I'll carry down into whatever I'm becoming, is how much easier it was to stop fighting the current than it ever was to swim.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Ezra

She reached for the old man tonight.

I felt it happen, out in the cabin, the exact moment the fight went out of her and something older and deeper took its place.

I've broken enough people to know the stages by heart, the way a doctor knows the course of a fever.

First the fighting, loud and useless.

Then the fighting went quiet, gone cunning, the schemes and the counted seconds and the tries at the door.

Then the stillness that comes after the last try fails, the stillness of an animal that's finished testing the fence.

And then, if you've done it right, if you've been patient enough and precise enough, the turn.

The turn is what I wait for.

The turn is the reason for all of it, the mark that separates what I do from what my father did, from what any brute with a locked door can manage.

A brute breaks a person and ends up with a broken person, sullen and empty and no good to anyone.

I break a person and wait for them to reassemble, on my land, around me, into something that fits.

Wren turned tonight. I felt the exact instant.

Not surrender.

Surrender is a decision, and decisions can be unmade.

This was deeper than a decision.

This was her body and the trained survivor in her giving up the war and reaching, instead, for a way to live inside the peace I'm offering, and reaching for it with the deepest tool she had, which happened to be the dead man who taught her to survive.

I didn't plan that part.

I'll be honest, because I'm always honest with myself.

I knew her grandfather was the key to her the way I know the load-bearing wall in any structure I intend to bring down.

Everything she is runs back to him.

But I didn't know she'd reach for him herself, in my bed, and use his love to lie still for me.