He Let Our Daughter Die, I Became A Tycoon's Bride novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Helicopter on the Roof

Cillian lands with six specialists and forty units of blood, Penelope agrees to marry him if Hattie lives and Neil pays, and Neil and a healthy-looking Kirsten step out of the elevator.

I didn't wait for the elevator.

I took the stairs to the roof on my one good leg, holding the rail with both hands.

The wind hit me at the top, and then I heard the helicopter.

It came down in a roar, and the side door slid open before the skids touched.

Six people in scrubs jumped out carrying steel coolers.

A seventh man stepped down last.

Cillian Draper had grown taller or I had forgotten how tall he was.

He wore a dark suit with no tie, and his gray eyes found me at once.

"The blood is in the white cases," he told the team. "Go."

They ran past me for the stairs.

Cillian stopped in front of me.

His eyes went to my leg and stayed there.

"You're bleeding through your jeans."

"Hattie first," I said.

"Hattie has six specialists and forty units of blood. You have nobody."

"I'm fine."

"You have a cut to the bone and you took the stairs." His voice stayed quiet. "Sit down, Penelope."

"No."

"Then the doctor with the black case stays here with you, and she waits for her turn."

I sat on the roof's concrete edge.

The doctor with the black case knelt and cut my jeans open with scissors.

I watched the stair door.

While she wrapped the bandage, I pulled my wedding ring off.

It came away easily, because my hands were cold and wet.

I put it in my pocket and did not look at it.

"Why did you come yourself?" I asked.

"You called," Cillian said.

That was all he said.

Inside, the emergency hall had changed.

Nurses stood against the walls as if somebody had told them to make room.

The ER doctor looked at Cillian and then at the coolers, and he went red in the face.

"The blood bank said there was none."

"There was none," Cillian said. "I brought my own."

The doctor didn't ask who I'd called.

A man in a gray suit hurried up, a hospital badge swinging on his chest.

"Outside physicians can't operate here without Mr. Garner's authorization," he said.

"Hattie Garner is my daughter," I said. "I'm her mother, and I authorize it."

The man opened his mouth.

"A parent's consent covers it," the ER doctor said before he could answer, and he took the clipboard out of the man's hands.

"Sign here, Mrs. Garner."

I signed with a hand that left a red smear on the page.

The man in the gray suit stepped back and said nothing else.

They rolled my daughter's bed out of a side room.

I saw her braids.

I saw the oxygen mask over her small face.

One of Cillian's specialists read the numbers off the monitor, and I heard him say, "She's going straight to the OR, we have the blood, move."

I caught his arm.

"Is she going to make it?"

"She's had a very bad hour," he said. "She has a chance, and now she has a team."

They took her through the doors.

The doors swung shut, and I was left standing in the hall with a bandage around my leg and my hands shaking.

Cillian stood beside me, not touching me.

He waited until the hall had emptied.

"I need you to say it to me again," he said.

"Say what?"

"What you want. Out loud, now, so that nobody can say later that I asked for it."

My throat closed.

I could still hear Neil in my head, telling me I was using my own child.

"I'll marry you," I said.

"You're married."

"Then I'll divorce him. I'll marry you. Hattie lives, and he pays for what he did to her."

Cillian looked at me for a long moment.

"All three," he said. "I give you my word."

"Why now?" I asked. "You could have said no on the phone. I called you a vulture the last time we spoke."

Something moved in his face and was gone.

"Your father asked me to keep the promise open."

"My father is dead."

"Yes," Cillian said. "He asked me anyway."

I opened my mouth to ask what he meant.

An elevator bell rang down the hall.

The doors slid apart.

Neil stepped out in his navy suit, checking his watch.

Kirsten Lowe held his arm.

She wore a soft cardigan and a faint smile, and there wasn't a trace of dizziness anywhere on her.

Her cheeks were pink.

"There she is," Neil said, loud enough for the whole hall to hear. "The administrator called me. A helicopter on the hospital roof, Penelope?"

"Whose is it?" he demanded.

He looked at the man standing beside me and stopped walking.

"And who the hell is this?"

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