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I sniff hard and shift the box in my arms.

Then something moves behind me.

Before I can turn, an arm hooks around my chest, pinning my elbows to my sides, dragging me back off balance.

I scream.

The sound barely escapes before something presses over my mouth and nose.

Fabric.

A hand.

A cloth, folded thick, damp against my lips.

Panic detonates through me.

No.

No, no, no—

I thrash. My shoulder slams backward into him, and the rabbit falls, tumbling onto the wet sidewalk, one ear in a puddle.

As I keep struggling, Dad’s box hits the pavement with a terrible crack.

I claw at the arm around me.

“Easy,” a man instructs, his deep voice ricocheting around my skull.

I scream again into the cloth. It eats every decibel of it, muffles it flat against my face like shouting into a pillow until all that comes out is a thin bleat he probably doesn’t even hear over his own breathing behind my ear.

There’s a smell—sweet and chemical. My brain knows it from movies before I can name it.

Chloroform.

Oh God.

I kick backward, a blind, desperate swing of my leg. My heel connects with something solid—a shin, maybe.

The man grunts, and the arm banded across my chest cinches tighter, crushing the air from my lungs.

“Shh,” he hushes, the sound a soft vibration against my neck.

I twist violently like a fish on a line, and my fingernails scrape uselessly against the rough weave of his jacket sleeve. He’s immovable, a wall of muscle and intent. Much too strong. My lungs burn as they try futilely to pull in oxygen through the damp cloth smothering my mouth. The world lurches, the streetlight above us stuttering in my vision.

“Stop fighting me.” The command is gritted out, strained.

I try to bite down, my teeth grinding into the wet fabric, but nothing gives. Raw terror, cold and sharp, floods every vein. The warehouse. The gunshot’s echo. The man standing beside Wade’s body.

They found me.

I knew it.

I knew somebody was watching.

My legs give out for a second, rubbery and weak, then snap straight again as a fresh wave of adrenaline floods through me. I reach backward blindly, my hand flailing, and my fingers catch on his sleeve. There’s something hard and unyielding beneath the fabric. A weapon? His arm? No, it’s too hard to be his arm, even if the shape matches up.

I can’t process it.