Chapter 7: Other Man

Warning: Mentions of blood.

x~X~x

Daniel quickly walks down the halls of the castle, being mindful of my broken leg. The belt helps slow the blood flow, but not enough to stop it as it covers Daniels front as we walk down the halls.

Instead of knocking at the door of the infirmary, he kicks at the door until it opens. The door opens and the doctor looks at the scene in shock, the fourth prince is carrying a servant and is covered in blood.

"Your Highness, are you okay?" Daniel doesn't answer him as he pushes his way into the room to find a bed. Everyone else calls this room an infirmary, but all the equipment and size of the room could be considered a small hospital.

He lays me down on one of the beds, and the doctor taking the hint starts to examine where the blood is coming from. He stays quiet the whole time walking back and forth, retrieving the things that he needs to use to fix my leg. He holds up a pair of scissors and begins to cut the pant leg off, starting just above the belt then cuts up the side of my leg and slides the cloth off my leg. The whole time Daniel is silently waiting a ways away from me allowing the doctor to do what he needs to do.

After the examination, clean-up and the x-rays, the doctor is ready to set the bone in my leg again. Even though the area has been numbed and all, I can still feel some of the pain up my leg. I brace myself for the pain that is to come, I grip the sides of the beds making my knuckles turn white, I breathe in as he counts.

"One... Two..." pain shoots up my leg and I yelp, and Daniel, who was outside the room, enters looking like he's the one in pain.

"What the heck happened to three!" I just ignore Daniel at the moment while I glare at the doctor.

"You probably would have been in more pain because you knew that the pain would have happened after three, so I took it out and replaced it with me setting the bone."

I don't know why but what he says makes sense to me. I just lean my head back as he wraps up my leg in a cast, he must have added something into the IV he gave me because I'm getting pretty tired pretty fast. The sound of the door to the room opening is the last thing that I hear before I fall into a deep sleep.

x~X~x

I start to wake up, but my eyes are still super heavy so I can't open them yet but I can hear who's talking next to me.

"I am so stupid. Why did I bring you here? I knew that it was a bad idea, but I was lonely." silence, then more, "I was selfish, but now because I brought you here you got hurt. Maybe I should send you away." More silence, I think that it's Daniel talking, "No, I can't do that. Whoever is behind this now knows that you are special to me, I can not just leave you alone, and I do not think that I could handle every day without you anymore." I can't hear him talking anymore, but I can hear the sounds of footsteps as he draws near, then I can feel the warmth that he radiates as he leans over me. He just hovers there for a few seconds almost like he's thinking, then I feel a strange warmth on my forehead. It's enough of a shock that I can open my eyes and I only see the chin and neck of Daniel as he kisses my forehead. He begins to lean back so I take the small window to close my eyes again and act like I'm still sleeping.

The door opens and closes a few seconds later and I open my eyes again. I put a hand against my forehead, thinking. I lay here for a while trying to think of anything else that could explain what happened like maybe he was checking some of the equipment and I just imagined that he kissed my forehead. Yeah, that's it, he was just checking things. I try and fail, to convince myself that that's what happened.

After a few hours, there's a knock on the door and it opens, and in walks Amelia and Erik.

"Well, you saved his life, but you ended up in the infirmary." she walks closer and I can hear the sarcasm in her voice, "That's really sad man, what would you have done if they had decided to charge at the prince." Okay, so maybe there is some truth in her words, but I was pinned under a giant bookshelf, I couldn't do anything and I think that Daniel could fend for himself.

"I believe that Daniel could protect himself from a coward." I realize my mistake and fix it, "I mean the prince could protect himself if the need ever rose." but I'm too late, they both look at me.

"You can the prince by his first name? That's not allowed, if anyone finds out then you will be removed from the castle, maybe even the country." Erik seems a little mad, but he sighs and leans on the end of the bed.

"I don't want it to happen again." He seems to deflate.

"Have what happen again?"

He seems like he's going to explain, but instead, he leaves the room.

"Something like this has happened before with the fourth prince. At one point he did have a personal butler when he was about 16 years old, but then the man started to call him by his name because the prince didn't like being called 'Your Highness' all the time. Nobody minded it really, not even the King and Queen," she looks down to the ground, "but one day the prince was taken."

"I'd never heard of anything like that before, and I was about 19 then."

"That's because the whole thing was solved overnight, and the family didn't want to seem weak so it was kept a secret."

"Who had took him?"

"The butler did. Well, he let other people into the castle and worked with them. I was working at the castle then and I had ended up catching them cutting through the training yard. They had used a sleeping drug on the prince so he doesn't remember any of this, only that the man had left him in the night."

That would be hard on a young man that's been sheltered his whole life.

"And what would that have to do with Erik?"

"He was the one that was told to keep an eye on him while he trained him. That man was his responsibility."

I push myself up on the bed more. "What happen to that man?"

"We don't know."

x~X~x