Page 33 of Run Rabbit Run

The lock is on the outside.

Aged brass, made to look like it's always been there, made so I wouldn't notice it first, and the sight of it turns everything in me to ice water, because a lock on the outside of a door has exactly one purpose, and it isn't to keep the world out.

It's to keep me in.

"I'll have food sent up," Ezra says from the doorway, watching me find it, watching me understand, and there's no cruelty in his face, which is somehow the worst part of all of it.

Only patience. A man watching something he owns arrive at the edges of the space he's allowed it. "Sundown, Wren. Be ready."

He pulls the door closed.

And in the beautiful, warm gold-lit room, standing on a rich man's rug in a house no one who loves me could find, I hear it.

The brass lock turning over from the other side.

The sound is small. A soft, oiled click, well-made, barely there. It should be nothing.

It's the loudest thing I've ever heard.

For a moment I don't move. I stand in the gold light with my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my fingertips, and every drill I ran on that mountain, every mile and every arrow and every night I told myself I was ready, drains out of me and leaves me hollow, because none of it prepared me for the plain animal fact of a door I can't open from my side.

Then the hard part of me, the part Gramps built on a cold riverbank before I was old enough to know he was arming me, takes the fear by the back of the neck and sets it down where it can't trip me.

Panic is a separate animal, Gramps said.

It'll drown you faster than the river.

So I don't panic. I work.

I cross to the window first, because a window's a window, and I get my fingers under the sash and I pull, slow at first and then hard.

It gives a bare quarter inch and stops, painted and set.

Fitted so tight it might as well be part of the wall.

I check the glass.

Old, thick, the wavy kind that's older than my grandmother, and beyond it a drop to a stone terrace two stories down that would break an ankle at best.

Last resort, then, and a poor one.

I move on.

The fireplace next. I crouch and look up the flue and see nothing but black and smell nothing but old smoke, too narrow for a person, and hot, and the wrong kind of stupid to try.

The door I already know.

I check it anyway, because you check everything twice, and there's no give in it, no gap, heavy old wood hung true in a frame that fits it clean.

I stand in the middle of the room, turn a slow circle, and make myself see it for what it is instead of how it looks.

The warmth is bait.

So is the gold light, and the soft bed, and the deep window seat with its pretty useless view.

It's a cage dressed up so lovely you'd walk into it smiling, built by a man patient enough to know that a comfortable prisoner fights slower than a cold one.

He wants me rested.