Page 50 of Run Rabbit Run

It doesn't matter which, because the door only has to crack once for me to know it will open.

I set the tray down. I don't remark on it.

Remarking would teach her to guard it, and I want it undefended, want it to grow.

"Eat," I tell her, gently. "You'll want your strength."

She looks at the tray. She looks at me.

And for the space of one breath, before she catches herself and the glare snaps back into place, the tight line between her brows goes smooth at the sight of me.

There it is.

The first green shoot, breaking ground.

I've been patient for thirty-six years. I can afford to be gentle now.

The garden's taken. Everything after this is just weather and time.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Wren

Seven days in, I've learned the house the way I learned the woods.

Not because knowing it will save me.

I've given up believing anything will save me, and giving that up turned out to be its own kind of clarity, the way the cold stops hurting once you're numb enough.

I learn the house because learning is what I have instead of hope now.

A mind that stops working is a mind that starts belonging to him, and I felt the first pull of that yesterday morning when he brought the breakfast and my face softened.

The line between my brows went soft at the sight of him. I felt it happen.

I hated it more than I've hated anything, more than the pit, more than the net, more than his hand at my throat in the moss, because the pit and the net and the hand were things he did to me, and this was something I did to my fucking self.

So I learn the house, to keep the working part of me awake.

The east wing has three rooms and a corridor, and I know all of it now.

The bedroom with its painted-shut window and its warm useless fire.

A bathroom with a frosted pane too small to climb through and no lock on that door either.

A sitting room with shelves of books nobody's read in years, the spines stiff, the pages foxed at the edges.

The corridor runs forty feet to a door at the end, oak and iron, locked from the far side.

I've stood at it with my ear to the wood, learning the rhythm of the house beyond it, the footsteps that come and go, the ones that make sound and the one set that doesn't.

His don't. I never hear him until he's there.

Delia's do.

That's the housekeeper, the gray-haired woman who fed me before the hunt and won't meet my eyes now.

She comes twice a day with the trays, and her shoes scuff the stone.