Page 45 of Run Rabbit Run

My legs won't hold a sprint and he's between me and the open ground and I've learned tonight, the hard way, all the way through, that running is what he wants most.

So I stay on my knees in the moss, get my breath, and I look up at him standing over me in the first light, and I let him see that I'm not broken, whatever else I am.

"On your feet," he says. Quiet. Not a shout, never a shout. "I won't take you on the ground like an animal, Wren. You're not an animal. You only ran like one because I asked you to."

I get up. Slow, everything screaming, but I get up on my own without his hand, because that much is still mine to choose.

The woods are silent around us.

Gramps' kind of woods, wet cedar and cold stone and the green smell of ten thousand growing things, the wilderness I've felt safe in my whole life, and he's going to do this here, in the one place that was ever mine.

I understand as I stand there swaying that he's chosen it on purpose.

That he knew what these woods are to me.

That taking me here, on this ground, is part of the game for him.

I look at the treeline going gold at the top as the sun climbs, and I think about all the mornings I stood in the forest like this with a bow in my hand and felt like the most dangerous animal in it.

That's who I was twelve hours ago.

That's who I was my whole life, right up until a man spent a year learning me off a screen and turned every mile of my own competence into the walls of a room.

The woods haven't changed.

The cedars are the same, the moss, the cold.

It's me that's changed, standing here understanding for the first time that a forest was never protection, it was only ever a place, and a place belongs to whoever's willing to own it hardest.

He owns it hardest. He always did.

"You planned this spot too," I say. "Didn't you? Not just the pit. Here. The trees. All of it."

"I plan everything." No apology, no relish, only fact.

He steps close, and the warmth of him hits me the way it did on the steps yesterday, and I hate that my body still knows the difference between his heat and the cold, hate that after everything it hasn't stopped being a body.

"I've thought about this ground for a year. What it would be to have you on it. Where the light would be." His hand comes up, slow, giving me every chance to flinch, and settles at the side of my throat, and I feel my own pulse leap up hard against his palm. "There. That. I've wondered for so long what your pulse would do under my hand, and now I know, and I'm never going to not know again."

His thumb rests over the jump of my pulse, not pressing, just there, a claim more than a threat.

My entire body has gone rigid, every hunted instinct lit up and screaming run, but there's nowhere to run, there was never anywhere to run, and that cruel fact is its own kind of paralysis.

"You're going to fight me," he says. It isn't a question. His voice has dropped, gone low and certain and almost gentle, which is worse than any snarl could be. "I'd think less of you if you didn't. Fight all you want, Wren. It doesn't change where we are. It only makes it ours."

"Don't."

"There's the word." Something kindles in his pale eyes. "You can say it as many times as you like. I told you once I'd stop if you asked, and that was a lie, the only one I've told you. I don't stop. Not tonight. Tonight you're mine, caught clean and fair by the rules you agreed to, and I'm going to take what I ran you all night to earn."

And he does.

I lunge first, one last instinctive refusal, my knee driving up toward him with everything six hours of running left in me.

He shifts and takes it on the thigh and absorbs it the way a tree takes wind, no stagger, no sound, and one hand closes around my braid and draws my head back until my throat is bared to the pale morning.

I fight him the whole way down into the moss.

I fight him with everything I've got left, and it isn't enough, was never going to be enough, and he takes the fighting the way he took the running, absorbing it, folding it into the act itself, until my struggling and his holding stop being two separate motions and become one.