Page 73 of Rune’s Solace

“Amy — ”

“I built all of it.” My voice came out very small. “You know that? Everything he took just now with one sentence. I built it. Brick by brick. The school, the drive, all of it, I built it so I wouldn’t be the girl anymore, and I was doing it, Rune, I was almost there — ” I pressed the heel of my hand to my mouth. “And he doesn’t even have to touch me. He just has to stand across a parking lot and I lose all of it.”

Rune crossed the room, I let him put his arms around me and I stood there stiff inside them, not because I didn’t want them but because if I let go into them I was going to come apart, and I was so tired of coming apart.

“I know,” he said, into my hair. “I know what it costs you. I’d give anything for it to be different. But I need you behind this fence more than I need you to have your good life right now, because your good life doesn’t matter one damn bit if he gets his hands on you, and I am not — ” his arms tightened, and something in his voice went to a place I’d never heard it go — “I am not going to let that happen. Do you hear me? Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs. He doesn’t get you.”

I stood there in his arms, and let myself have that, at least, because it was true, I could feel how true it was, it came off him like heat.

But underneath it, sat something else. And it took me a while, standing there with my face in his chest, to work out what it even was, because it wasn’t anything he’d said.

It was what he hadn’t asked.

A man who loves you finds out your father is the one hunting you. A father. The word alone should raise a hundred questions in anybody who doesn’t already know the answers. What did he do to you. Why’d you run. How bad was it. What am I dealing with here. Rune hadn’t asked me one. Not one. He’d stood there and taken it’s my father like a man being handed a fact he already had, and he’d handled me, careful around the exact places I’m broken, never once near the wrong one, like somebody working from information he’d already been given.

He knew.

He knew what was done to me, the extent of it, the awful details, the things I have never said out loud for two years because saying them makes them real again. He knew, and I never told him, and there is exactly one person on this earth who could have.

Brenda.

The only one who has it. The only one I ever handed it to, on the worst night of my life, when she swore — she swore — that I would never have to say it again to anybody as long as I lived.

I felt it go up on the shelf, cold and enormous, next to all the others. And this one didn’t just not-fit. This one moved the shelf.

Because two nights ago this man stood in this cabin and told me every inch of everything had to be mine, mine to know, mine to choose, mine to give. And he was standing here right now with the worst thing that ever happened to me already in his hands, handed to him behind my back, and he wasn’t saying so.

I didn’t ask him about it. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’d only just gotten to be happy and I wasn’t ready to know how much it was already going to cost me. Maybe because I was afraid of the answer. Maybe because some part of me understood I wasn’t the only one in this room holding a thing too heavy to set down yet.

So I put my face in his chest, let him hold me and said nothing.

But I knew. And he didn’t know I knew. And we stood there in his cabin, the two of us, each holding a piece of the same terrible thing back from the other, and calling it love, and maybe it even was.

I fell asleep in his arms that night, safe as houses, locked behind a fence with a man who loved me and a man who wanted me both closing in at once from opposite directions.

And for the first time since I started coming down that path — I didn’t sleep all the way through.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

SAWYER SHOWED UP at the gate of a one-percenter motorcycle compound in a lavender polo shirt, boat shoes, and I have never in my life been so glad to see a person or so scared for their immediate physical safety.

I’d gone dark on him for days. Couldn’t help it. No school, phone half the time in a drawer because I couldn’t stand the questions I didn’t have answers for, and every text I started to him died in the box because what do you say. Hey, can’t come to campus anymore, my sick felon father’s hunting me, also I’m sleeping with a biker who is lying to me, miss your face. There’s no version of that text.

The last thing I’d actually sent him was a thumbs-up, days back, our shorthand for I did the brave thing, and then I’d vanished before I could tell him the brave thing had turned into my entire life. He’d texted back a dozen times wanting to know what it meant. Did you talk to him. What happened. Amy. AMY. I’d answered none of it. So as far as Sawyer knew, I’d worked up the nerve to say something to a man one time and then dropped clean off the face of the earth. He had no idea about any of the rest of it: the cabin, the nights, the two of us. Nothing.

So of course he came to find me. Of course he did. Sawyer has never once in his life let a thing alone, and days of silence from me was a thing he was constitutionally incapable of leaving.

I was helping Brenda run a mop over the clubhouse floor, the lockdown had me climbing the walls, and cleaning was something to do with my hands that wasn’t thinking, when I heard the commotion out front. A car at the gate, the prospect on the intercom, voices going up. He’d been out here once before, Sawyer had, months back, just long enough to drop me at the gate and get gawked at, so it wasn’t that nobody knew him. It was that nobody let anybody through that gate right now, known or not, and I heard the pitch of it climbing and set the mop against the wall and went to the window.

There was Sawyer’s little hatchback nosed up to the gate, and Sawyer himself half out of it, talking a mile a minute at a prospect named Cody who had one hand on the gate and the other very near his waistband and a look on his face like he’d been handed a problem in a language he didn’t speak.

I was out the door before I decided to be.

“He’s mine!” I was already yelling it across the yard. “He’s okay, he’s with me, don’t — Cody, he’s fine — ”

And Sawyer saw me and his face broke open and he said “AMY ROSE!” like it had been years and not days, and he came through that half-open gate past a two-hundred-fifty-pound prospect like the man was a turnstile, and he had me up off my feet in a hug before I got there, spinning me once, and I was laughing and crying at the same time in a way I hadn’t done in a week, because it was Sawyer, it was the outside world walking in wearing lavender, it was the last piece of the life I’d lost showing up in a Honda to find me.

“You went dark, you monster,” he said into my hair, setting me down, holding my face in both hands and looking at me like a mother checking for fever. “Three days. Three! I’ve been out of my mind. I finally just got in the car and drove out here because you weren’t answering and I remembered the way, and now there’s a lockdown thing happening, which, we are absolutely discussing — you look — okay, you look actually good, which is somehow more alarming, are you being held here, blink twice — ”