I winced as she shoved the gun harder into my back. “I want proof my daughter is okay.”
“After you call Sam to let him know you’re running into town.”
I dialed Sam’s number. He answered on the first ring. “Hey, Pixie.”
“I decided to run into town.”
Sam paused. “We have a meeting in forty minutes. Are you going to be back in time?”
“I’m not sure. I need to go get bobby pins.”
I wasn’t sure if Sam would pick up on the cue. The last time I was kidnapped, he’d walked me through getting my cuffs off with a bobby pin.
“Why don’t you send Tucker into town?” I could hear the worry in his voice.
“You know I’m very particular about them. I want the same ones I had in Fort Lauderdale. You never know when they are going to be needed again.”
Cara stood next to me with a gun pointed at my stomach. Nobody on my staff knew about the baby. I hadn’t even told Missy yet.
“Okay, I’ll make sure to let Brock know you won’t make the meeting,” Sam said.
The mention of Brock’s name brought a smile to my face. After the last kidnapping, I’d never complained about the tracking device in my arm. Brock was the only person who would know my location, and he could follow me.
Cara ripped my phone out of my hand and hung up. “Let’s go.” She nodded to an old black car parked in the back of the lot.
“My daughter.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “She’s fine. You were so gullible. One mention of your daughter being in trouble, and you did what I wanted. Now, move.” She shoved my back, and it caused me to stumble forward.
I reached out and braced my fall, but I felt a crack in my wrist as it hit the rock. I screamed in pain. Seconds later, a force hit the back of my head, and everything went black.
6
Sam
I glanced at the last résumé on my desk. In a short time, Wes had found three good candidates we could hire. I couldn’t help but smile as he walked into my office. “Did you stop and visit Kinley?”
He looked down at his shirt. “Yep. Your daughter upped her skills and built a paint bomb, but I wasn’t part of the destruction she caused. Missy was watching them earlier, and she was covered from head to toe in blue paint. On my way here, she stopped me in the hall to tell me the story. She thought you would need evidence, so she smacked her hand across my shirt.”
Wes looked out for Missy, but it was similar to how he regarded Patty—like a sister. He did have a long list of women he brought to the club. We’d opened the BDSM club in the palace on weekends for staff and vetted members. The last time we’d gone, I heard some women talking about how Wes would only sleep with them once.
“Are you bringing anyone to the club this weekend?” I asked. Patty and I planned an invitation just for our guests and a few close friends in Shialia.
Wes cocked his head. “I’m not sure. If Mike and Doug are going to be the dungeon monitors, I might. I’ll find out.”
“Maybe you could bring Missy to the club. I know she doesn’t go very often, but she might need to. And from the intel I have on her, she broke up with her boyfriend. He moved out this past weekend.”
“You had her under surveillance?” Wes asked.
“Yes. Brock ran surveillance remotely on all key staff.”
I wasn’t sure exactly how many people would come after Patty. We also had the issue of someone in our staff working against us, though no matter how deep I dug, I still couldn’t find out who that person was. Brock and Antonio hadn’t come just for the wedding. I needed the team to help flush out the person working against me. Wes gave off vibes every so often that made me think he might be working against me, but I didn’t really think it was him. It was someone else close to us, though—someone who didn’t like the changes Patty was making.
Until I figured out who was undermining her, Brock and Antonio couldn’t stay for an extended time. But it was time to get things entirely under control. Controlling the staff would be easier once the power shifted. King Beckett had promised everything would be ready on Saturday, the day before the wedding.
Wes walked across the room and sat in the office chair. “Do you have people watching me also?”
“Yes.” I sighed. “It’s more like trackers on the information. Missy’s ex was on her lease, and she had the name taken off. Changes like that get flagged by Brock’s software. I looked into it further to make sure she was okay. I’d do the same for you.”
Wes grunted. “Fine. Tucker said Patty planned to come to the meeting. I’m still not sure if I trust the local police on this.”
I didn’t trust them at all. There were too many reports of Carl spending time with the chief of police. Patty was also trying to push more funds to update the software and technology for the local police, but the pushback was over-the-top. They didn’t want body or in-car cameras or the latest forensic software. Chief Niles insisted they could do better with detective work.
The night before, when I’d had Patty in my arms, the stress went away. It had all returned when my email inbox was flooded with possible tips about a planned kidnapping in three days.
“You know, you’re about to marry one of the top hackers in the world,” Wes said.
Patty was amazing when it came to computers. It didn’t stop at what she could get into. Her ability to help develop software was unique. She’d sold her company to her longtime friend. I knew she missed writing code and figuring out puzzles. Lately she had a different type of puzzle to work on, but it wasn’t the same.
“That’s a little too Big Brother,” I said. “We need to come up with another way, or I’ll have Brock do it.”
Wes slapped the table and doubled over with laughter. “Dude, you just said Patty couldn’t hack the police, but in the same breath, you said you might have Brock do it.”
“It’s not the same when you have the queen of the country hacking the local police.”
“How much do you want to bet Carl is somehow going to show up in the meeting today?” Wes ground out.
“I’m sure he will be there, like the last three, when he insisted that nothing seemed out of the ordinary.” I threw my hands up in the air. “Like it’s an everyday occurrence for women and girls to go missing.”
Wes shifted in his seat as I studied him. “Who do you think is leaking information inside the palace?”
“Things only you and I talked about are leaked. We both know neither of us said anything. It would seem that our offices are bugged.”
“I was thinking the same thing, but I did another scan of both offices, and they’re clean,” he said.
Not only was the office clean, but I’d also added a machine that emitted a low-frequency buzz, making it hard to use any listening device.
I smiled as Patty’s name came across my screen. “Hey, Pixie.”
I pressed the speaker button on my phone as Patty started talking. When she mentioned running an errand instead of the meeting, I knew something was off. Wes’s brow furrowed as he listened to the call.
She was so calm and collected as she told me about going to pick up bobby pins. My heart stopped. The only reason she would say those words twice was that she wanted to make sure I picked up on her meaning. There was no doubt in my mind—someone had taken her.
My fingers flew across the computer screen as I pulled up every camera in the palace, starting with the one in Patty’s office. She’d grabbed her phone but not her purse. It was still sitting on her desk. There was no way she would have gone to the store without her wallet on her.
Wes was on his phone as Patty’s voice came through mine.
“I need to go.”
“I love you,” I said before the phone went dead. I turned to Wes. “I want to know who the fuck took Patty.” Wes didn’t even flinch but just nodded.
Every angle except the tunnels and the dungeon was under surveillance. I saw that Kinley was in the classroom with two guards. Wes was
right—my daughter had made a paint bomb. My little girl looked more Smurf-like than human. So did the two bodyguards, but neither seemed to mind the new shade of blue. They continued to sit on the floor and play with the kids.
“Make sure nobody goes in or out of Kinley’s room,” I growled. Losing Patty was hard enough. If I lost both of my girls, I wouldn’t know what to do.
Wes nodded. “Already taken care of. Both Missy and Tucker know something is going on. I also have two more guards heading to monitor the outside of the door. Missy is on her way now as well.”
Patty’s blond hair finally flashed across the screen in camera footage from the back of the castle. I rewatched the video as she looked directly into the camera and spoke to me, making sure to move the person next to her so I could see her face. Fuck. It was the nanny we’d fired, still in the same clothes from the other day.
While Patty talked, Cara had a gun pressed to her side. Red covered my vision as I watched the scene play out. When Cara yanked the phone from her hand, Patty mouthed “I love you” into the video feed. I grabbed the stapler off my desk and hurled it across the room, barely missing one of the men waiting for my orders. Not one person made a comment about my outburst.
Another camera picked up the continuation as Patty was pushed toward a small black car. When she was only five feet away, Cara shoved her in the back, and she fell to the ground. While she was down, a man stepped out of the car. He tilted his head so we couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was tall and broad. He took the gun from Cara’s hand and brought it down on Patty’s head. My pixie went limp as he shoved her into the trunk. The man made sure we didn’t see his face.
Luckily, Patty had never complained about the tracking device in her arm. I reached for my phone and called Brock. He picked up on the second ring. “I need you to track Patty and share the feed with me.”
“On it.”
Antonio’s voice came across the line. “What’s going on, Sam?”
“Our ex-nanny kidnapped Patty.”
Before long, the computer screen flashed black. Then a map of Shialia appeared, with a blue dot for Patty. The car was heading south along the highway.
“I also need the feed sent to my phone.” My feet were already moving toward the exit as the map showed on my phone. I didn’t need to look behind me to know Wes and my men would follow.
Brock’s voice came over the phone. “It looks like she’s heading south toward the banks. That’s where Cara’s stepfather has a cabin.”
“Can you pull up surveillance of the area and find out if her father is there now?” I pushed through the last door as I sprinted across the parking lot to my black SUV. “Do you have any information on her stepdad?”
The possibility that this woman had taken Patty because she’d been fired seemed a little extreme. I’d expected her to sue for money, not to kidnap Patty.
“Carl Hanes,” Brock ground out. “How did her stepdad not come up on the background check you ran? The one man making Patty’s life hell each day is the stepfather to our nanny.”
I hadn’t had Brock run the checks lately on the people working for the castle. I’d used Fredrick, one of the men who worked for me. He’d developed a few apps for the military. He was good and had seemed to have a clean background. But if he was fudging other people’s experiences, he could have done the same for himself.
“I need you to rerun Fedrick Harper’s background check.”
Fredrick Harper might have the knowledge to hack into my office and listen. Jesus. That seemed like a paranoid thought, but everything would make sense if it turned out to be true.
“Was Fredrick in the office today?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the road as I weaved between traffic.
“No, he called out sick,” Wes said pointedly.
I thought back to the video of the man who’d hit Patty over the head. He was the right height and weight to be Fredrick. He would also know where the cameras were. But he wouldn’t know about the tracker that had been planted in Patty years before. Only a few people close to us knew about the tracker, although a few more had learned about it since we started using it to follow her.
“Radio silence. I don’t want any communication going through the radios!” I said. It would be easy for Fredrick to listen to us as we made our way toward them. “Let’s put out a false broadcast that we are heading the other way. It’s a long shot, but it might work to make him think we don’t know where he is.”
The diversion would also let me gauge if we had any other corrupt men on our team.
“Watch out!” Wes shouted from the passenger seat.
Instead of slowing down, I pressed the pedal down and drove between two semis. One flipped us off and blew its horn, but I didn’t stop. I pushed the gas down harder as we flew down the road toward Patty. My only thought was getting to her to make sure she was okay.
Brock’s voice came through the speakers. “I was able to pull up thermal imaging of the house. Three people inside. Patty is in the back room. What are they planning to ask for a ransom? It’s not like they’re hiding her very well.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We’re missing the meeting,” I complained, sending a glare toward Wes.
“I don’t understand,” Brock said.
“We were supposed to have a meeting with the chief of police in five minutes,” Wes stated with a growl.
“Wouldn’t they wait to hold it until you get back?” Brock asked.
“Not unless someone decided to continue the meeting without us,” Wes said. “Carl has had his nose in the investigation from the beginning. He could use the opportunity to continue his agenda and make it look like I was okay with it.”
I clenched the steering wheel as we took the corner. “He could use his acting power to do as he pleases. Jesus, we need to change the power over to Patty.”
“I’ve studied the law. We don’t need the large celebration for the power shift to happen,” Wes muttered.
I wasn’t sure if I should worry about how much time he spent reading the laws of the country. I hadn’t spent time looking much into how the king would pass the power over to Patty.
I rolled down the street away from the house. “Call the chief, and cancel the meeting.”
Wes nodded and pulled out his phone and dialed.
Brock’s voice came through the line. “I’ll have everyone on a plane in a few hours. It’s time we come and help get things straightened out. We should’ve done this years ago.”
“Thanks,” I said, my voice cracking, and I hung up the phone.
Wes slipped his phone into his pocket. “The meeting is underway, and they refuse to stop it.”
There was nothing I could do. I needed to get Patty back. I came to a stop a few houses down and jumped out of the car. Wes followed me as I walked around the side of the house. The window to the living room was open. Fedrick was on his phone, pacing back and forth while he ran a hand through his hair.
I ducked under the window and walked to the front door. I twisted the door knob and stepped into the room. Fredrick glanced up and dropped the phone as he reached for his gun, but Wes was quicker and shot him in the arm. I didn’t look back as I heard the scuffle on the floor.
My main objective was to get to Patty. When I reached the end of the hall, I pushed the door open. Cara sat in the corner, sobbing. Patty was on the bed, still not moving. My heart stopped as I rushed to her side and pressed my fingers against her wrist. The steady beat of her heart made a little of the worry go away.
Not bothering with Cara, I pulled Patty into my arms. My hand behind her head felt wet, and my world tilted when I pulled it back to see blood. Carrying Patty, I rushed out of the room and through the house. Wes had Fredrick bound, and in the distance, I could hear an ambulance. My heart clenched every second that I waited.
Hysterical sobs drew my attention away as one of the royal guards escorted Cara out of the house, but my heart wasn’t breaking for her—it was breaking for Patty
. When the ambulance came to a stop, I rushed to the vehicle.
“Sir, you need to let us work on her.”
I climbed into the ambulance and placed Patty down on the gurney. “She’s pregnant.” My voice cracked. I squeezed her hand. She still hadn’t opened her eyes.
7
Patty
Sam’s whisper brought me out of my sleep. I didn’t remember going to bed. The last thing I remembered was walking...Fuck. Cara had placed a gun to my side.
I opened my eyes to see Sam staring at me. We were in our bedroom. He was sitting in a chair next to the bed. A medical monitor beeped.
“You came for me.” My voice cracked with each word.
He reached to the side table, pulled a small ice cube out of a glass, and placed it to my lips. The cold liquid felt good as it ran slowly down my throat. I glanced at the window and noticed it was dark outside. I didn’t remember anything that happened after Cara hit me on the back of the head.
“I’ll always come for you, my pixie, but I would prefer if you stopped getting yourself kidnapped.”
I held back a grimace as I moved to sit up in the bed. “It’s not like I was planning on it this time. I haven’t ditched the million guards who follow me when I leave this place. Never thought the person who took me could get into our home. I think she lost her mind. Nothing made sense.”
His deep-brown eyes stared at me for a minute before he leaned forward and placed a kiss on my lips. “Let’s not talk about that. I’m more worried about you.”
“Me?” My hand went to my stomach. “Is our baby okay?”
“You need to rest,” he said, avoiding the question.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as my stomach dropped, making me want to throw up.
“When I found you… God, Patty, you were bleeding.”
Sam’s face blurred as my mind went to a dark place. “Tell me, Sam.”
“The baby went into distress. The doctor thinks it was from the fall or the stress of having a gun pointed at you.”
Hacker Wedding Page 5
