Page 16 of Run Rabbit Run

Luke breaks first. He always does.

"Wren, I'm so sorry, I never thought—I didn't know he'd—" The words come apart in his mouth, and he reaches for me. I step back before his hand can touch me, because if he touches me right now I don't know which of us I'll break.

"Don't."

"I'll do it." He's crying openly now, rain and tears run together down a face that used to charm bacon out of Marlene, and I feel the old useless tenderness rise and I shove it down under the water with everything else. "I'll go to him, I'll tell him to take it out on me, I'll⁠—"

"He doesn't want you." Every word comes out level and spaced, no rise, no heat, and I watch that scare him worse than screaming would. "You heard him. He never looked at you once, Luke. Not one time in that whole diner. You're not the collateral. You were never the collateral. You're just the invoice he mailed to my door."

He flinches like I hit him, and I wish I did, and I want to hold him too.

Both of those wants are twenty-two years old, and I'm so tired of carrying them I could lie down in this parking lot and let the rain have me.

But I don't get to lie down. I never have.

I think about the number he owes, the one with an area code.

About Rue in that booth right now, watching through the glass, checking her phone, thirteen minutes into the fifteen I gave her.

And about Gramps, four years in the ground, who pulled three drowning kids out of the same black water and taught us how to live, and what he'd say if he could see the deal his granddaughter is standing in.

He'd say what he always said. You can't out-argue the river, Wrennie. You can only be the better swimmer.

Ten days.

Ten days to become a better swimmer than a man who's already counted every stroke I've got.

"Go home, Luke," I tell him, and I turn away before he can answer, before I can watch him decide whether to be relieved. "Go home, and don't gamble, and don't call me. I'll handle it. I always handle it."

I walk back toward the diner through the rain, toward the warm yellow window and the girl behind it who'd burn the world down for me, and with every step across the wet gravel one thought sits heavier in me than the last.

He already thinks he's won.

Ten days to prove him wrong, in the only place I've ever been the most dangerous animal in the woods.

Or ten days until I belong to him.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ezra

Rain does good work on a town like this.

It empties the streets, slicks the glass, and turns every window into a mirror, so that the people inside stop looking out and start looking at themselves, and a man can move through the whole gray length of the place unwatched.

I sit in the back of the car and watch Wren Holloway grow small in the side mirror, standing in the lot with her ruined brother, not running for shelter, not bending against the wet.

Taking it on the chin the way she takes everything.

She didn't cry. I noted that.

I've seen every version of the moment I gave her today, played out across the faces of men and women who owed me things they couldn't pay, and they cry, or they beg, or they go the gray like an animal that's understood the trap.

She did none of it. She stood in my weather and asked me for the rules.

Grady pulls us out onto the county road, and the town lets go of us mile by mile, and I let myself have the memory of her face when she understood what was happening.

Not the fear. The fear was ordinary. Everyone gives me the fear.