Page 55 of Run Rabbit Run

"Nothing about you is kind."

"No." He says it without offense. "But there are degrees, and you're choosing the hard ones. I don't think you even know why anymore."

He's right, and I hate that he's right, and I hate more that some worn-down part of me is glad he's here, glad of the voice, glad of a face after a day of gray fog and stone silence, and the gladness is the worst betrayal my own head has managed yet.

I stand up to get away from the nearness of him.

He catches my wrist. Not hard. Almost gentle.

But there's a whole year of study in how he does it, in where his fingers end up, and my pulse jumps under them the way it did in the moss, and he feels it, and something moves behind the pale eyes.

"There it is," he says softly. "That's not fear, Wren. I know your fear. I've watched it for a year. This is something else."

"Let go."

"Tell me it's fear and I'll let go."

I open my mouth to tell him. The lie won't come.

It won't come, because he'd hear it, because he knows the true reading of my pulse better than I do, and the not-being-able-to-lie to a man who's studied me down to the blood is a nakedness worse than any he's put me through yet.

He draws me back down onto the window seat by the wrist, slow enough that I could fight it.

I don't fight it, and the lack of fighting is a decision I feel myself make and can't explain.

I'll turn that decision over for the rest of my life trying to understand it.

"I'm going to touch you now," he says. "And your body's going to answer me, because I know it better than you do, because I spent a year learning exactly what it responds to before I ever laid a hand on it. And you're going to hate that it answers. That's all right. You can hate it. The hating doesn't stop how I make your body react. Nothing does. That's the lesson tonight."

I should fight.

Every night since the woods, I've promised myself I'd fight, that if he came I'd make him work for every inch, that I'd stay the woman on the stairs who let the knife fall rather than give him the pleasure of the swing.

But refusing to give a man violence isn’t the same as having any fight left at all.

Nine days of warmth, silence, and hope withheld have hollowed me out somewhere I can't see the bottom of, and when his hand comes up, I don't knock it away.

He notices. He notices everything.

"Good," he murmurs, like I've done something right, and the word slides into me somewhere I don't want it.

Cold air seeps through the glass, biting into my shoulder blades.

The fire crackles across the room, but it doesn't reach me here on the window seat.

Ezra moves without a sound, a predator who's already won the hunt.

His shadow swallows me before he even speaks.

"Nine days, Wren," he murmurs, his voice a flat, clinical drone.

He doesn't touch me yet, but I can feel the warmth of his broad frame.

My skin prickles, a survival instinct screaming at me to bolt, but there's nowhere to run in this locked room.

He reaches out, his fingers sliding under my chin to tilt my head back.

Those pale, flat blue eyes study me like I'm a specimen pinned to a board.