Alaskan Mountain Pursuit Elizabeth Goddard (best short novels .TXT) 📖

with tiredness in her mind. She should be the only one in her room...

As her eyes focused on the black mask in front of her, the man leaning over her bed inches from her face, she almost couldn’t breathe. Her nightmare there, in her room. While she slept.

She hadn’t even opened her mouth to scream before he put a gloved hand over it. The gloves weren’t rough, a detail her mind somehow noticed. They weren’t soft, either. They were...squishy. Almost like neoprene?

Summer took note of the detail, even though she didn’t know what difference it made. She wasn’t trained for what to notice in situations like this and wasn’t sure she’d make it out of it anyway.

No, that was no way to think. She refused to keep thinking like a victim, refused to be one. She’d spent too many years of her life living that way, as a self-inflicted victim of her own bad choices. She wasn’t going to be anyone’s victim now.

She bit down hard on the hand over her mouth, causing the intruder to cry out.

Rather than release her though, he gripped her arm with his other hand even tighter. Summer shivered, not just from his touch, and her eyes went to the window. Open.

At least she’d figured out how he’d gotten in the room.

The handle of her door moved.

Another intruder? The serial killer worked alone, didn’t he? Or could the person at her door be help? She fought a wave of dizziness after thinking of the man holding her as not just “her attacker” but “the serial killer.” She had been pinned down, and was now being hauled to the window by the hands of a man who had brutally murdered seven women.

“Are you okay in there?” Clay’s voice. He was the one at the door. She could have cried, if she could get herself to feel anything but terror in the deepest core of her being. All the other emotions seemed dormant. Yet his voice still reminded her to struggle, to make it as difficult as possible for the man trying to haul her away.

“Stop fighting me. This is for your own good.” Her captor moved her toward the window another step.

“I’m coming in, so if you aren’t decent, now would be a good time to grab a robe or something.” Clay’s voice was low and serious, heavy with fear that mirrored exactly how she felt. Had he heard the man when she bit him?

“Summer. Now. We have to leave before they stop us.” The killer was insistent.

And he knew her name. Summer shivered. It was something that made sense, but it eliminated any possibility that this could be random. And it might mean something to the investigators that he knew it, called her by it. Summer didn’t know, didn’t know much of anything anymore.

She swallowed hard, tears finally finding their way to her eyes and threatening to spill over. She blinked them back. No, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her as anything even approaching weak.

She shook her head and pulled against him. The pressure on her arm increased as he squeezed her. She fought back, twisted away, but he held tight.

The door slammed open.

“Freeze!” Clay yelled.

Summer fell to the ground instantly as the man released her. She took a deep breath. It was almost over.

But her attacker was through the window before Clay had even made it past the bed.

There was a shuffling in the hallway. Before Summer could look up from where she’d crumpled on the floor, Clay addressed him.

“Noah, he’s running.”

Then more footsteps as her brother took off, presumably out of the house to chase whoever was responsible. It wasn’t over yet. And if he could get this close and they still couldn’t catch him... A small sob escaped.

Clay bent down, sat on the floor beside her. “Are you okay?”

He asked it slowly, somehow the sound of his low voice putting her more at ease. She shook her head. Paused, then nodded. “I’m okay. Scared. But not injured. Not broken.”

She looked up from the floor, where she’d been staring, processing, trying to get ahold of herself now that adrenaline had faded and her hands had started shaking a bit.

“I can’t believe I just sat out there in the hallway while he was in here. That he got to you on my watch...” Clay shook his head, then took a deep breath that was long enough for Summer to tell he was having a hard time getting ahold of his emotions too. “I’m sorry, Summer.”

Hearing his voice say her name erased some of the tension in her shoulders. He was helping the whole experience lose its power, being here with her like this. She reached a hand over to him, knowing he wouldn’t misinterpret it as a romantic gesture, but just as her needing reassurance that someone was there. That she was okay.

He took her hand. Slowly ran his thumb across it and tightened his grip ever so slightly.

“You did the best you could,” she offered, wanting him to stop blaming himself.

“No. And I need to let you help.”

Leaving her hand in the warmth of his, she looked up at him. “What?”

“Sitting around waiting for him to attack is crazy. We have to do something.”

He was so closely echoing her own thoughts from earlier. Summer nodded. “I have an idea.”

Before she could tell him, Noah burst back into the room.

“Did you get him?”

“He’s gone.” Noah shook his head. “Vanished completely, as if he knew of some hidden trail even though I’ve lived here on this property my whole life. I looked for tracks and I’ve got Kate out there now, with one of my officers, looking in case I missed anything.”

Summer respected the fact that her brother wasn’t embarrassed to admit that Kate was the better tracker of the two of them. She was one of the best trackers in all of Alaska, which was saying something. Summer couldn’t read signs like she could, but she could find her way around