Red After Dark (Blackwood Security #13) - Elise Noble Page 0,122

fuck him in my wedding dress.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want the last thing I ever saw to be Eric Ridley’s sneering face.

Then he howled, a blood-curdling sound more terrifying than the animals we heard at night. In Ridley’s own words, what the…?

My eyes sprang open to see Rune clinging to Ridley’s back. He let go of my throat to claw behind himself, and I shoved him to the side with everything I had left.

“Now we run,” Rune shouted.

She hauled me up, and I caught a glimpse of the syringes sticking out of Ridley’s shoulder as we darted into the forest. A few seconds passed, and then I heard him crashing through the trees after us.

We ran. I twisted my ankle and a branch smacked me in the face, but still we ran. Rune cried out in pain as she tripped over a rock, and we kept going. Oh, hell! The ground disappeared out from underneath us and we slid down a muddy slope, landing in a heap at the bottom. The relative silence as we untangled ourselves made me pause. I couldn’t hear Ridley anymore.

“Come on!” Rune said, tugging at me. “We can’t stop.”

“Shush a second. Where did he go?”

I had visions of him creeping up behind us, ambushing us when we least expected it.

“Perhaps he’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“I gave him insulin.”

What? I thought she’d just stuck him with a bunch of empty needles.

“How much?”

“Maybe all of it. I’m not sure how much went in.”

“All of it? Oh, hell. What about you? You’ll need insulin. And how many glucose tablets do you have left?”

I might not have known a huge amount about type 1 diabetes, but I’d been reading up on it, so I was aware that stress and bursts of strenuous exercise could cause a rise in blood glucose. Rune’s body didn’t make the insulin to regulate the sugar level the way it should. Later, in the hours following, that level could drop precipitously, and she’d need carbohydrates.

“Three, and I had to do it. You need to go back to Alaric. I’ve never seen him as happy as when he’s with you.”

Oh, that sweet, sweet girl.

“Rune, you’re the one who needs to go home.”

She shrugged and tried to pull me along. “We have to carry on.”

“What will the insulin do? If he just got a little?”

“It’ll lower his blood sugar. If he got an overdose, he’ll get dizzy and confused. His vision might blur, and he’ll be jittery. But if he realises what I gave him and eats something sweet, it could be enough to counteract the effects. Come on, can you walk?”

My ankle hurt more with every step, but I nodded anyway. We had no choice.

“Yes, but which direction? What if we end up going round in a circle?”

“It’ll be dark soon, so we can use the sun and the stars to keep us straight as long as it doesn’t cloud over. But I don’t know where we are. I don’t know which way to go.”

I heard the panic in her voice. Rune, I realised, liked to be in control. She liked order. There was an immense amount of knowledge locked up in her head, and a missing piece upset her.

“As long as we go in one direction, we have to hit civilisation eventually. A road, a trail, something like that. I think it’s a tiny bit warmer here than in Richmond, don’t you?”

Rune nodded.

“So Ridley probably drove us south. Which means we want to head north to go home.”

I had no idea whether my logic would pan out, but Rune seemed happier now that we had a plan.

“Okay.” She pointed at the dense wall of green. “We have to go this way.”

Now we were in a race, not only against Ridley if he was still out there, but against time. Would we make it to safety before Rune got sick?

CHAPTER 48 - ALARIC

ALARIC PACED THE hotel room. Emmy was doing the same, and they’d had to synchronise to avoid bumping into each other. She’d apologised a hundred times for Beth and Rune being snatched, and Alaric had never seen her so stressed.

“It should have been me who got taken.”

“It shouldn’t have been any of you.”

“It was Blackwood who went after Kyla Devane.”

“And it was Sirius who led everyone to Kentucky in the first place.”

Alaric and Beth had befriended Harriet, and Alaric had wanted to see justice for Piper Simms as much as anyone. They’d all underestimated how unhinged Ridley would turn out to be. It just so