Page 85 of Run Rabbit Run

That's how far it's come.

The most cautious man alive, the one who moves through his own house without a sound, sleeps with his arm heavy over me and his guard all the way down, because he knows, the way he's always known everything about me, that I'm not going anywhere.

He's right.

I'm not.

The door isn't even locked tonight.

I noticed it when he came in, the small dark absence of the sound I used to listen for, the click that isn't there.

He left it open.

A test, maybe, the last one, or maybe not a test at all anymore, maybe just a man who's finally certain.

I could get up.

The thought arrives soft and far away, something I observe rather than feel.

I could slide out from under his arm and cross the cold floor and open the unlocked door and walk down through the dark house and out into the woods I was born to disappear in.

I lie still.

I lie still and warm in the arms of the man who hunted me.

His heart beats against my spine, and I understand that the door has been unlocked for longer than tonight, that the last lock was never brass or iron, that he took it off the day I stopped trying to walk through it.

He didn't just catch the rabbit.

He taught her to stop running.

And the worst part, the part that would break the woman on the riverbank if she were awake to hear it, is that lying here in the warm dark, I can't for the life of me remember why I ever wanted to be anywhere else.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ezra

The hunt is over, and I find I miss it.

Not the way a man misses something he regrets losing.

I don't regret.

I've said that, and it's still true.

It will be true the day they put me in the ground beside my father and his father and every Vane who ever ran this mountain.

But there's a hollow where the hunting was, and I'm honest enough to talk about it.

For over a year she was a problem I was solving.

Every morning had a design to it because of her, an angle, a next move.

Which video to study, which door to close quietly enough that she'd never feel the draft of it shutting.

A year and more of my life bent toward one end, and now the end is reached, and the mornings have gone still in a way I didn't expect.

I have her. That was the point. I keep reminding myself that was the fucking point.