Page 1 of Run Rabbit Run

PROLOGUE

Ezra

Four hundred and eleven days ago, a woman I hadn't met yet taught me how she'd run.

She didn't know she was teaching me. I've turned that over more nights than I'll admit to, and it never stops being sweet.

She stood on a gravel bar in a river I could buy without noticing the withdrawal, thirty seconds of footage shot on a phone, and she looked into the lens and told a few hundred thousand strangers how a person moves through a terrain like that and lives.

Read the water, she said. Stay off the skyline. When you're scared, your body wants the high ground, and the high ground is where they'll look for you first.

She smiled when she said it. Easy. Certain. A woman handing out the map of her own head and calling it content.

I watched it through again that first night, more times than a sane man would.

Not because I needed to. I had it after the first. I watched it again because there's a pleasure in patience most men never learn. I've spent my life learning it, and she was going to be the finest exercise of it I'd ever undertaken.

Wren Holloway.

I say the name to the dark study and the dark study keeps it, the way it keeps everything I've decided is mine.

The screen is the only light in the room. Her face fills it, frozen mid-laugh, and I don't reach out to touch it. A screen is for men who'll never have a woman. I'm not going to have to make do with the picture, so I don't waste myself on it. I wait for the rest of her to arrive instead.

She thinks she's a survivalist. A brand. A girl who beat the odds she was born into and built something out of a dead man's woods.

She's a rabbit who's never once been hunted, and mistaken the quiet for safety.

One of those is not the other, and she'll learn it from me. I've studied her for over a year. I'll be thorough about the rest.

The account that watches her has no name and no face. It has never left a comment, never tapped a heart, never once broken the surface of her tidy little metrics except as a number so large it unsettles the person who edits her videos.

I've watched that woman notice me. Chew her lip over me. Decide I'm nothing.

They always decide it's nothing.

I close the laptop, and Wren's face goes with the light, and the study returns to the black it prefers.

Somewhere two towns over from her, a young man named Luke Holloway is sitting at a table he can't afford to sit at, losing money that was never his, and the money he's losing is mine.

He doesn't know that yet.

He thinks he borrowed from someone smaller.

Someone who'll break a finger and call it settled.

I let people think that. It's useful, the same way a snare is useful.

You don't stand over it and announce yourself.

You set it clean, and you walk away, and you let whatever's meant to be caught walk into it on legs that believe they're free.

I didn't lend the boy money because I wanted the boy.

I lent it because of who he calls when the water closes over his head.

Because there's exactly one person in this world Wren Holloway will trade herself to save, and I already own his debts, and a debt is only ever a rope with a person tied to each end.

She'll come to me. Not today. Not for a while yet. The best things are slow, and I’ve made slowness my whole religion.