Page 39 of Royal Hacker

Patty kicked Doug in the balls. He dropped the knife to grab himself, and right away Brock pulled Patty away from where Doug was standing.

I raised my gun to take a clear shot, but Doug came up with a gun at the same time. We both fired. My bullet hit him in the chest. His bullet went toward Patty.

“Get down!” I screamed. It was too late. Brock could not move Patty out of the way fast enough, and the bullet hit her in the side.

I ran to where Patty was and dropped to my knees. Patty was lying in Brock’s arms. Blood was pouring out, and she was losing so much blood. “Come on, Patty—stay with me.”

“I knew you would come… I… don’t… think I will make… love you.” On her last word, she lost consciousness.

“Where in the fuck are the paramedics?”

The paramedics shoved me out of the way while they worked on Patty. When they had the bleeding stopped and patched for transport, they carried her to the ambulance. I went to get in, and they wouldn’t let me.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to find Patty’s dad. “Come on, son, you can ride with me. My Patty is a fighter and will make it through this.” He handed me a handkerchief. I hadn’t even noticed the tears coming down my face.

We had been sitting in the waiting room for three hours, waiting for an update after they took Patty into surgery to repair the damage from the bullet.

I was so caught in a trance thinking about Patty that I missed what her father said. “Sorry, sir, what did you say?”

“Stop with that ‘sir’ shit. You can call me Dad now. I know you love my daughter. It is evident by the way you acted today. What I was saying when you apparently weren’t listening is that you will make a great king one day.” His eyes were twinkling with humor.

I clearly must still be in a fog because I think he told me I would be king one day.“Patty said she passed on the crown.”

The king laughed really hard. “You think you can just pass on the crown? Patty always says she will not take it, but she must. Now she has you. In a few years, I will need you both to move to Shialia and learn what you need. I also expect you to get married there within the year. Here, take this. You will need it.” I looked down at the box William handed me. When I opened the box with a crest on the top, it held a perfect four-carat pink diamond wedding ring.

“I don’t even know where to start. First, we both have lives here and run companies that need our attention.”

“Neal does an excellent job running Black Hat. Everything else can be done remotely, or she can have Bridget help take over. I’ve researched you. You’ve got a good team that can run things. You can remotely run your team from another country. I will have a lot of work for your team. As for your club, you can visit it when you guys come back. The castle you will live in also has an excellent dungeon already in place and everything you need when you are at Shialia.”

Before I had time to digest that this man had just changed the course of my whole life, Patty’s doctors came out.

“Beckett family?” a doctor in green scrubs asked.

I rushed to the physician, not caring that I wasn’t officially family. Patty’s dad was right with me, along with Jessica and Neal. “That’s us. How is she doing? Is she okay?” I asked the doctor before he could ask if I was family.

“It was touch and go for a while. The bullet ricocheted off a bone and punctured her left lung. We patched her lung and stopped the bleeding. With the blood loss, she will be out for a while. If you want, you can go back one at a time.” The doctor nodded toward the nurse who would take us back.

I wanted to see Patty more than anything, but I would wait my turn. Her father must have noticed my internal war, though.

“Son, why don’t you go see our Patty first, and then Jessica and I will go.”

I didn’t wait for him to change his mind. At the door to Patty’s room, the nurse told me Patty would still need help for the next few weeks while she healed.

When I walked into the room, my heart constricted. She looked so vulnerable. Her rainbow-colored hair was spread out over the white pillow. An intubation tube was down her throat to help her breathe, and an IV was in her right arm. Under an old tube TV on the wall, a few machines were making a low beeping noise. A light glow from the moon was shining into the room.

I sat in the white plastic chair next to the bed. I grasped her cold hand and rested my head against the side of the bed, praying she would wake soon.

21

Patty

“It’s been a month, Sam,” I whined while stomping my feet in front of him. I didn’t care if I was acting childish. The man had been withholding sex for the past month.

Sam picked up his phone. “Let me call the doctor and see if it’s okay.”

I’d been home from the hospital for three weeks, but Sam and Neal had forbidden me from going back to work. Sam was treating me like I was made of glass. He felt it was his fault I was shot, so he’d been working extra hard to show me how much he cared. There was no way he could have known Doug would have a gun or that he would be involved at all.

We’d gone around and around on that conversation. I was the type of person to say, “Let’s live in the future and not dwell on the past.”

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