Page 78 of Run Rabbit Run

I could wake her.

I've thought about it, standing here.

I could cross the room and put my hand on her and watch her come up out of sleep.

I could see what her face does before her mind is awake enough to govern it.

I know what it would do. That's why I don't need to do it.

But I want to see it anyway, the involuntary thing, the tell before the guard goes up, and I've earned the right to want things, so I cross the room.

I sit on the edge of the bed and lay my hand against the side of her throat, over the pulse, where I always put it, and my hand is not quite as steady as it has been every other night, and I choose not to think about that either.

Her eyes open.

For one moment, before she's awake enough to remember to hate me, before the walls come back up, I watch her face in the firelight.

She doesn't flinch.

That's the first sign, and it's everything.

When she first came here, my hand at her throat in the dark would have jolted her awake with terror, every animal alarm screaming.

Tonight her eyes open and find me and there's no jolt, no terror, no scrambling away.

And then she does what I've waited for since the first frame of the first video, all of those days watching her videos, a lifetime ago.

She leans into my hand.

Barely. A fraction.

The smallest tilt of her head toward the warmth of my palm, half-asleep, before she's awake enough to know she's doing it, before she can stop herself.

She seeks me.

And something in my chest, something I keep chained the way other men keep dogs, lunges hard against the chain.

I've held still my entire life. Stillness is the discipline I built myself out of, the trait that makes me what I am and my father what he wasn't.

But her head turning toward my hand in the dark undoes four hundred and eleven days of held breath all at once, and for one unguarded second I'm not a patient man watching a result.

I'm seventeen again and starving. The hunger rises up so fast and so hard it frightens even me, who is not a man easily frightened.

I press my palm flatter to her throat, feel her pulse move under it, hers, mine now, and I have to close my eyes.

This is the closest I let myself come to prayer.

Not triumph. Triumph's too small a word, and too cold, and there's nothing cold in me in this one second, whatever I am the rest of the time.

She has no idea, sleeping, leaning into the hand of the man who caged her, that she's the only living thing that has ever made the stillness break.

She's mine. But it runs the other way too, and that's the part I'll never say aloud, not to her, not to Grady, not to the dark.

For so many days I watched her through a screen and told myself I was a hunter learning his prey.

A hunter doesn't watch the same thirty seconds of footage two hundred times.

A hunter doesn't learn the sound of a woman's laugh so well he hears it in rooms she's never been in.