Page 76 of Rune’s Solace

I hated even more that I already knew which one I was going to make.

Because he had people watching. I believed it, God help me I believed every word, because I’d spent weeks feeling watched and being right, my life being right about exactly this, and if I ran to that clubhouse and I was wrong to, if there really was a man out there in the trees with eyes on that gate, then I would be signing Sawyer’s death myself. I couldn’t gamble the sweetest person I know on a hope that my father was bluffing about the one thing he’d never once bluffed about.

I got dressed in the dark.

And then I did the thing that’s going to live in me forever, if I get a forever. I sat down at the bottom of Rune’s bed with a pen and the back of an old seed catalog, and I started to write him a note.

I got as far as his name.

Rune—

That was it.

I sat there staring at those four letters, trying to figure out what came after them. I’m sorry wasn’t enough. Don’t come after me would make him come faster. I love you would be cruel if those were the last words I ever got to give him, and once that thought got into my head, I couldn’t breathe around it.

Then my father’s voice came back to me.

You leave a note...

And I understood why he’d said it. Rune would find it. Rune would know. Rune would come for me, because of course he would, and if anybody saw him coming, if anybody followed him, if I got one thing wrong, Sawyer was the one who paid for it.

So even this was gone.

I looked down at Rune’s name in my handwriting and felt something inside me fold up small, because I’d spent all this time learning how to go to him when I was scared, how to say his name and let him help, and now the one time I needed him more than I ever had, I couldn’t.

I tore the page off the catalog, folded it twice and shoved it deep into my pocket. I couldn’t leave so much as his name behind.

At the door, I stopped.

His bed was still unmade from that morning, the sheet twisted on his side and my pillow crooked against his, and for one stupid second all I wanted was to crawl back into it and wait for him to come home. He’d find me there. He’d know something was wrong before I said a word, because he always knew, and then I wouldn’t have to be brave anymore.

But Sawyer would still be out there.

So I opened the door and went out.

* * *

I know this compound. That’s the thing none of them ever really understood about me, not even Rune. I’ve been here a year, and in that year I’ve noticed every gate, every fence, every place a person could get in or out, because I’ve been checking exits since I was old enough to understand I might need one. I knew the fence dipped behind the old bike shed and that the wire had been pulled loose at one corner by some animal and nobody had gotten around to fixing it. I knew the camera on the back post hadn’t worked since the storm three weeks ago because I’d heard Gearhead mention it once, and things like that stick with me whether I want them to or not.

So I went out the back of Rune’s cabin and into the trees, keeping far enough from the yard that nobody would see me from the clubhouse. I knew where to put my feet without snapping branches or kicking through pine straw, and I hated how easily all those old habits came back when I needed them. I passed the bike shed, found the dip in the ground and dropped onto my stomach, ruining my good jacket as I worked my way beneath the loose wire.

The county road was a half mile through the trees. His address was a few miles past that.

I started walking toward my father.

And the worst thing, the thing I’ll never tell anybody, is that some small broken part of me, the oldest part, the part he made — it wasn’t even afraid. It knew this walk. It had always known I’d end up taking it. You get a head start, is all. You run, and you build a life, and you cut your hair and change your name and let yourself think you got out.

And then your phone rings, and you find out you never left that hallway at all.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

WE’D BEEN UP since early morning chasing a ghost, and somewhere around five in the morning the coffee ran out and the men started in on me instead, which is how I knew we’d hit the wall for the night.

That’s what happens when a hunt stalls. You work every thread until there’s nothing left to pull, stare at the same map until the roads stop meaning anything, and eventually a table full of tired men needs somewhere else to put its attention. Usually somebody gives them an opening.

Apparently I’d given them one.

It’s been a while since anybody at that table considered me worth fucking with. Contained, they call it. Cold, when they’re being honest. Either way, you don’t waste a good joke on a man who’s only going to stare at you until you regret making it.