Page 79 of Run Rabbit Run

Whatever this is, it caught me a long time before I caught her, and I’ve spent a year, a fortune, and every patient hour I own making certain the one creature who could do this to me can never leave.

Call it love if you need a word for it. I don't.

Love is what soft men feel and then fail to protect.

What I feel is harder than that, and it comes with a deed and a locked door, and it is never, ever letting go.

Then the rest of her wakes.

I watch it happen, watch consciousness come up behind her eyes, watch her feel where her head is leaning and understand what she's done, and watch the horror of it flood her face, and watch her go rigid and pull back, too late, always too late, because I've already seen it, and she knows I've already seen it, and there's no unseeing it for either of us now.

"Don't," she whispers, and I'm not sure if she's talking to me or to herself.

"I know," I say gently, and I take my hand from her throat, because the point's been made and there's an art to when you withhold. "Go back to sleep, Wren."

I stand. I leave her the fire.

I let myself out and lock the door behind me, soft, and I stand in the cold corridor a moment in the dark.

I feel nothing a better man would feel.

No guilt, no pause, nothing at all asking whether I've done a terrible thing to a woman who never chose this.

I made my peace with that voice decades ago, put it down like a tool I'd outgrown, and I've never once missed it.

What I feel instead is patience, rewarded.

I've been a patient man for a long time.

Longer than she knows. Longer than anyone living knows.

And tonight, in a warm room I built for her, a woman who ran through my woods all night and nearly beat me leaned her head into my hand in her sleep and sought me out.

She's almost mine now. Not just caught. Mine.

A few more nights. A few more turns of the same slow wheel.

And then the running will be over for good, and she'll stop grieving the woman on the riverbank, and she'll wake one morning and reach for me before she remembers to hate herself for it, and forget, by evening, that she ever reached for anything else.

I go down through my dark and silent house, the house that keeps what it catches, and I don't smile, because I'm not a man who smiles.

But something close to it moves through me, cold and complete, all the way down.

I have all the time in the world.

And I've finally, finally got her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Wren

The days stopped having numbers a while ago, and I've stopped minding that they don't.

That's the marker, if anyone were keeping them anymore.

Not the locked door.

Not the hand at my throat in the dark.