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“Run, little rabbit,” he taunted as if playing with me.

Oh God.

“Go on. Make me chase you. I have been waiting two months for this,” he told me calmly, every word underlined with malice. With dark intent. As if he was done being patient and soft with me.

Twenty feet. Fifteen. I could see the shape of the doorway now, an old brick arch with moonlight on the other side. I could smell the cold air and grass, telling me that I was nearly there.

I’m going to make it. I’m actually going to…

An arm came around my waist in that moment and took me straight off my feet!

“AHH!” I screamed the second it happened.

Then he put me into the wall.

Not hard enough to hurt me, which actually surprised me at this point, as he sounded furious enough to have done it. Instead, he turned me, putting my back against the brick and shackling both wrists. He raised them up above my head and held them there in one large hand before my brain had even caught up with the fact that I’d been caught. Then he put himself against me, all of him, and there was nowhere left for me to go.

Yet I fought him anyway.

Or at least tried to. I twisted and I kicked and I got absolutely nowhere, and he let me do it. He stood there in the dark with me thrashing against him and I felt him laugh. I actually felt it, in his chest, against mine.

“I feel like we have been here before, little nurse,” he hummed down at me, and I gritted my teeth at that.

“Get off me!” I screamed furiously because I knew anger would serve me better than fear.

“Mm. You said that the last time as well,” he reminded me. Well, if he wanted to play that game, then I would give him another one to think about. So, I brought my knee up.

But fuck me, he was fast. Almost as if he had been waiting for it as he turned. A move done so casually that I got nothing but the outside of his thigh. Exactly the way it happened in that shower block, and I could have screamed with the unfairness of it.

He leaned down until his mouth was at my ear.

“I know every single one of your tricks,” he growled. “Do not forget that again.” His voice had turned threatening and I decided it was wise to take it seriously this time.

But then something changed in him.

Because his hand was still wrapped around both of my wrists up above my head, and my arms had started to shake in his hold. Not fighting him. I had stopped struggling against him about four seconds ago and for good reason. But mainly because my mind was no longer running the show.

My body was and it… it was shaking.

He went very still at this, as he could feel it. Every tremor. Every quake. Every labored breath I made. Which was why his hold eased. He didn’t let go, but the whole of his grip softened around my wrists. Then his other hand came off the wall and found my face in the dark and turned it up toward him.

“One candy bar,” he stated sternly, as if this knowledge was something he had just pulled from his memories.

“What?”

“Since lunch. One candy bar, and I put it in your hand myself.” My eyes widened at this recap, before I stammered,

“I... I…” I never finished as he hissed a foreign word,

“Blyat.”

It came out of him hard and bitten off, yet it wasn’t aimed at me. And I also didn’t need to speak the language to know exactly what it meant.

“You have been running on nothing for the last ten minutes,” he said. “I could hear it in the way you were walking before I ever put my hands on you.” I didn’t know what to say to this, needing a moment to process the concern in his voice. Because he had been hunting me through the pitch black with nothing to go on but the sound of my feet on gravel. Then somewhere in the middle of it he had worked out that my blood sugar was dropping.

“Let me go,” I forced out, my chest rising and falling, as I still tried to catch my breath.

“No.”