Classified: Unstable
INTRODUCTION
aka the part where I smile at you with blood in my teeth
You came here for something, didn’t you?
Maybe it was the promise of pain dressed in poetry.
Maybe it was a man with a gun and a woman who laughed when he pointed it.
Maybe it was to see what happens when love doesn’t save you. It just shoves you deeper into the fire and says, stay warm, sweetheart.
Either way—You’re here.
So let me welcome you the only way I know how.
With open arms.
With a crooked grin.
With the warning I never got: If you see me smile, you’re already too close.
⚠️ CONTENT WARNING
This story contains mature, graphic, and potentially triggering content.
Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Sweet Thing, Run Faster is a dark slow-burn romance featuring morally grey characters, psychological trauma, and explicit content.
It is intended for adult readers only (21+) and does not offer safe, conventional portrayals of relationships, mental health, or recovery.
This book contains the following themes and elements, which may be disturbing or triggering to some readers:
💀 MENTAL HEALTH & PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA
Depictions of untreated mental illness
PTSD, dissociation, insomnia, and self-destructive behavior
Unreliable narration due to trauma-induced perception shifts
Unethical psychiatric practices and hospital malpractice
Gaslighting by medical professionals
Patient abuse (verbal, emotional, and physical)
🔪 PHYSICAL VIOLENCE & GORE
Graphic depictions of torture
Blood, wounds, surgical trauma
Knife and gun violence
Detailed fight scenes and injury descriptions
Scenes involving restrained characters and physical coercion
Physical punishment (consensual and non-consensual contexts are separated clearly in-story)
🖤 SEXUAL CONTENT & KINK
Explicit sexual content with no fade to black
BDSM including consensual knife play, bondage, breath play, and pain/pleasure dynamics
CNC (consensual non-consent)
Touch her and die” obsession and possessiveness
Public danger scenes involving sexual tension or acts in unsafe environments
Dubious morality in seduction and manipulation
🕵️♂️ OTHER DARK THEMES
This book is not intended to educate, moralize, or provide therapeutic resolutions. The characters are not role models.
Their relationship is intense, dangerous, and unhealthy.
If any of the above content is distressing to you, please step away. Your mental health comes first.
RORY
They used to call me fragile. It’s a cute word. It makes you think of fine crystal stemware, the kind that shatters if you toast too hard. It makes you think of a baby bird fallen from the nest. Handle with extreme care. The kind of girl who bursts into tears if someone raises their voice.
What those corporate suits didn’t understand about structural integrity is this. When the foundation cracks and the glass shatters against the floor, the resulting fragments don’t lose their bite. They turn into daggers. They cut straight to the bone.
Before my life went up in spectacular flames, I was a licensed psychologist. Technically, the state called me a forensic behavioral specialist. That was just a fancy bureaucratic way of saying my entire job was to sit across from actual psychopaths, poke around in their twisted little brains, and smile when they flinched. I was the one they called when things got messy. Court-ordered therapy for syndicate informants and scarred military operatives who had long ago stopped giving a shit about whether they lived or died.
I was good at it. Sharp. Completely contained.
Then Patient 19 sat in my chair.
No real name. No medical history. Just a police file written in red ink and the kind of lopsided grin that makes the skin on the back of your neck pull tight. He had that textbook serial-killer charm. Eyes too still. The absolute certainty that he kept his last victim’s heart in a jar somewhere.
“You’re a lot prettier than my last doctor.”
He laughed. A low, broken sound. I shouldn’t have liked that laugh. My professional alarms should have been blaring.
I liked it.
Because beneath the degrees and the icy exterior, I’m just a stupid girl with a skyscraper-sized savior complex and a fatal weakness for monsters.
I leaned in. Way too close. I crossed the invisible line between my chair and his bolted-down table. I thought I saw the man buried beneath the madness.
Spoiler alert. There was nothing underneath. Just an abyss.
When he looked at me and swore he loved me? I believed him. When he leaned in close and whispered they would kill him if he stayed? I believed that, too.
I helped him escape. A red flag so massive it could cover a football stadium. Gold medalist in the Stupid Bitch Olympics. I even smiled while I forged his transfer signatures and disabled the security cameras, thinking I was the star of some tragic, beautiful little romance.
Maybe I was.
The fantasy lasted exactly until I woke up strapped to a metal gurney. The scenery was the punchline. It was the exact same Sector 9 facility where I used to work. The same gray linoleum hallways. The exact same sterile observation rooms.
Different rules.
Turns out, the government wasn’t just treating the dangerous patients they pulled off the streets. They were building them. Illegal clinical trials. Designer mind-control cocktails. Trauma served à la carte. And guess who they picked for the next round of destructive experiments? Yours truly.
I suppose it’s poetic, if you’re into Shakespeare and slow deaths.
They claimed my judgment was compromised. They documented my need for corrective conditioning. What they really meant was simple. Strap her down. Pump her veins full of experimental chemicals. Let’s see what happens when you snap a human mind like a glow stick and shake it in the dark.
Spoiler alert. I glowed.
I screamed until my vocal cords bled. I sang lullabies at three in the morning while the heart monitors flatlined. I bit a chunk out of a nurse’s arm and spat the blood on her pristine uniform, letting her know she tasted like repressed lesbianism and Catholic guilt. They didn’t appreciate the humor.
They took more. They doubled the voltage. They stripped my name. They tore my identity into tiny little pieces and labeled it progress in their secured files.
The funny part? I survived.
Worse, I remember every single second of it. Every hand that touched me without consent. Every fake, condescending smile from those bastard doctors. They looked at me like a broken toy instead of a human being with a PhD and a razor-sharp jawline.
So I left.
I didn’t ask for permission. I certainly didn’t sneak out wrapped in regret. I left screaming, with the blood of the guards under my fingernails and a supervisor’s security badge shoved down my bra.
Now? I’m loose. I’m heavily armed.
I live in shitty, run-down motels. I stir my morning coffee with stolen hunting knives. I shoplift cheap lip gloss from gas stations just to write the names of the dead on dirty mirrors in red ink. Sometimes I still hear the hum of the machines they strapped me to.
I just laugh louder. They hate that. The laughter is resistance.
I know they’re coming for me. They have to. I know too much. I am too much.
They’ll send someone clean. Special forces, probably. An ex-mercenary with perfect training and less morals than muscle memory. He’ll track me. He’ll think I’m fragile. He’ll think I’m prey.
The thing is. I’m not the girl running for her life anymore.
I’m the reason they run.
And this sweet little thing they’re sending? He better run faster.
KAI
The mission file hits the metal table with a heavy thud. I let a thick cloud of cigarette smoke drift over the attached photograph.
OPERATIVE ASSIGNED: LORAN, KAI.
TARGET: MIRAN, RORY ELISE.
THREAT LEVEL: CRITICAL.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE: UNCOOPERATIVE, UNSTABLE, POSSIBLY UNHINGED.
OBJECTIVE: CONTAIN / NEUTRALIZE.
My lips stretch into a slow, lazy grin. The scar pulling at the corner of my mouth aches with the movement. The flickering overhead light casts long shadows across the abandoned safe house, but my attention is locked dead on the woman staring back at me from the textured paper.
“Unstable? Possibly unhinged?”
A rough laugh tears from my throat, bouncing off the peeling wallpaper. The bureaucrats back at Sector 9 really don’t have a single drop of humor in their veins.
I reach out, tracing the sharp line of Rory Elise Miran’s jaw in the black-and-white photo. The report details the glorious trail of absolute destruction this former shrink left in her wake. A nurse missing part of an ear. Shattered security codes. Three armed guards breathing through tubes in the ICU with crushed windpipes. This isn’t the erratic flailing of a terrified victim. This is the masterpiece of someone who finally found the switch to the madness inside her head and flipped it on with a smile.
I have always been fascinated by broken toys. Mostly because I’m a collection of poorly glued pieces and gears that spin backward myself. Any other operative in my unit would look at this assignment with the boring, detached efficiency of a butcher walking into a slaughterhouse. Locate the target. Clean up the bloody mess.
Not me.
I look at this file and see a formal invitation to a gala in the middle of a minefield.
“They say you’re damaged goods, Blackrabbit.”
I let a hot speck of ash fall dead center onto the official seal of the paperwork.
“They say your mind is fractured and you’re a massive liability to the project. But I think you’ve finally gotten interesting.”
I push back from the table. The leather holster bites into my ribs as I adjust the straps beneath my dark jacket. My muscle memory knows the exact weight of every weapon I carry. I know the precise click of the firing pin sliding into place. I know the exact distance between drawing a breath and ending a life in close-quarters combat. Yet, for the first time in months, the dull, gray apathy of government work is completely gone. My pulse is beating out a lively, erratic rhythm. It feels like a celebration.
I step out into the dark alley. Cold rain washes the city grime off my combat boots.
She’s out there. Hiding in the neon-lit gutters of the suburbs. Surviving in motels that reek of bleach and desperation. Stirring her coffee with stolen knives and waiting for the hammer to drop. The suits back at the agency think I’m going to drag her back in a body bag or chained to a wheelchair.
Delusional idiots.
I tilt my head back, letting the freezing rain hit my face. My smile stretches wider, bordering on the grotesque under the dying amber glow of the streetlights.
“Enjoy the head start while you can, little bird.”
The shadows swallow the sound of my voice.
“Run as fast as those pretty legs will carry you. I absolutely love it when the prey bites back.”
