Page 49 of Run Rabbit Run

Because here's what she doesn't understand yet, what none of them understand until it's done: I don't want her to stop fighting all at once.

A woman who breaks all at once is broken, and broken things are dull.

I didn't wait a year for something dull.

I want her to fight and lose, fight and lose, a hundred small skirmishes, each one teaching her the same lesson in a different language, until the lesson is the only thing she knows.

The lesson is this. There is no outside anymore. There is only me. So I give her cold and then warmth.

I stay away for five days until the silence has worked on her, then I come with dinner myself, carried in my own hands.

I sit with her and I'm gentle, and I watch the confusion of it move through her, the way her body doesn't know whether to brace or ease.

That confusion is the finest tool I own.

A person can armor herself against cruelty.

Nobody can armor herself against a cruelty that keeps turning kind, because the kindness makes her doubt her own read of the danger.

A woman who doubts her own read is the woman coming apart at the seams I need.

I don't touch her those first nights after the woods.

That surprises her.

She braces for it every time I enter, and every time I don't, and the not-touching does more than touching could.

It teaches her that the touching comes on my schedule and not her fear's, that even her own dread is mine to set and reset as I please.

I let her wonder about Rue.

I never mention the name.

But I leave her phone where she can see it, dead, behind glass in a case on the far wall, close enough to want and too far to reach.

I let her look at it. I let her imagine the messages piling up unread, the friend growing worried.

I let her carry the weight of what her silence is doing to the one person she loves most, because I told her at the start what happens if she brings the friend into this, and every day she stays quiet to protect that woman is a day she does exactly what I want and calls it love.

That's the cruelest thread, and the finest.

I've turned her love for the friend into a leash, and she holds the other end herself.

She pulls it tight for me, and thanks the God she doesn't believe in that she's strong enough to keep pulling.

On the sixth day, I bring her breakfast.

She's at the window, wrapped in the blanket off the bed, watching the fog move through the trees.

She hears me come in, though she shouldn't, she's getting better at hearing me, and she turns.

And she doesn't glare.

That's all. It's nothing. A lesser man would miss it.

But I've studied this woman for longer than she can imagine; I know every set her face can take, and the glare that's met me at that door for six days straight isn't there this morning.

She's too tired, or too hungry for the sight of a human face, or some deep animal part of her has started to sort me under the man who brings the food instead of the man who took the woods.