Page 44 of Run Rabbit Run

The only way out of this hole is a man standing at the top of it, and the deal I made says that if he catches me, I'm his, forever, and he has caught me.

There’s no court, no witness, and no cavalry. Only his word and mine and a net that's already holding me for him.

I lost.

I don't cry.

I want to, feel it climbing hot behind my eyes, but I don't let it out, because the one thing I still own on this whole mountain is whether he gets to watch me break, and I decide, hanging in his net with dawn a square of light I can't reach, that he’s going to have to work for even that.

I make myself breathe.

Slow it down.

Gramps' voice, steady under the wreckage, the way it's been steady my whole life.

Panic is a separate animal. Don't feed it.

I count the breath down, get my face still, and get my spine straight even hanging sideways in a hole, because if this is the last free choice I've got, then the choice is this: he caught my body. He does not get my face. Not yet. Not free.

I don't scream either, because screaming is for people who think someone's coming to help, and no one is coming to help. No one on this entire mountain but the one man I don’t want to see.

Above me, at the lip of the pit, the light changes.

A shape leans into the square of gray.

Unhurried.

Blotting out a corner of the dawn I almost reached.

Ezra Vane looks down at me in the hole he dug for me, and his voice comes down soft and calm and without one note of surprise in it.

There was never going to be any surprise, because he’s known how this ended since before I knew his name.

"There she is," he says.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Wren

He doesn't gloat.

That's what undoes the last of my composure, the reaction I braced for and don't get.

I've spent the whole climb down into this pit building a wall against whatever he'll say when he finally has me, the victory speech, the cruelty dressed up as tenderness, and instead he just looks down at me hanging in his net with those pale eyes gone soft at the edges, like a man comes home to something he's missed.

"You did better than anyone ever has," he says. "I want you to know that. Before anything else, I want you to have it."

"Get me out of your hole." My voice comes out flat, scraped raw from six hours of cold air. "If you're going to do whatever this is, do it on the ground like a person."

Something moves through his face that might be approval, might be hunger, might be both wearing the same coat.

He crouches at the lip of the pit and reaches down, and I could refuse his hand.

We both know refusing it changes nothing, so I don't waste the strength.

I let him haul me up out of the dark by one wrist, the net peeling off me as I rise, and then I'm over the edge and on my knees in the wet fern with the gray dawn all around us and the gap I almost reached forty feet away, mocking, close enough to touch.

I don't run for it.