Author's Notes: Thank you to everyone who read and enjoyed Welcome to the Dark Side. This is the sequel. I hope you enjoy this one just as much. For reference, this first chapter volleys back and forth between two different scenes that are happening at the same time. To distinguish them, I have put the Paul/Trish parts in bold italics and the Randy/Stacy/Miz parts in regular print. Enjoy!

"That was a complete waste of our time. Why did we take this meeting again?"

"Because, Trish, even a waste of our time gives us intel, and the intel we got from this is that there are still people in our business who don't realize that there is a price to my patriotism, and that price is very high."

Paul opened the town car's door and Trish slid in, scooting over to the far window. She began speaking before her partner was even inside. "Are we passing this one on to the Secret Service like all of the others?"

He grunted as he dropped his considerable girth down into the car and closed the door. To the driver he said, "Back to the airport." He waited for the car to move before turning to Trish. "Oh yeah. These people will find somebody willing to take the job for that price. They won't be as good as us, but they might get lucky."

Trish groaned as the car moved slowly through the streets. "I swear, we deserve a finder's fee for passing these idiots along, and we should get one hell of a tax break for passing the information on."

"They leave us alone, girlie," Paul said as he pulled out his phone. "Office," he said into the speaker, then to Trish he said, "There's more than one reason we don't take jobs to take out the President of the United States." He winked at her and said, "Why do you think the fee is so high?"

"Yeah, but we did take the job for the Senator," Trish pointed out to him.

"The Senator was different," he told her. "The Senator was an asshole. Besides, I don't care what they say. You'll never convince me that wasn't a government contract." He paused as the other line picked up. "Stacy! Good, you're there. He there yet? Okay, you two talk to him. We're on our way back now."

The eyes on him were uncomfortable. The space between his shoulder blades itched, and he had to fight against the urge to scratch. Randy turned his head to the side and sneered. He didn't know the guy who recoiled from his look, and at the moment, he didn't care to know him. He didn't really give too much of a damn to know any of the new people in the installation. He wasn't all that sure he'd be around that long, anyway.

The only thing Randy could be sure of was that they weren't going to kill him. Paul would have never let him out of the dungeon if he weren't meant to live. Randy woke that morning to find a suit hanging behind his door, a slip of paper in the pocket of the jacket. The paper told him two things. One, the code to get back up to the main floor. Two, that he needed to get his ass up to Heyman's office as soon as his eyes were open.

Randy showered and dressed. The suit wasn't too ill-fitting. The pants were loose around the waist, but he was able to belt them into place. The shirt and jacket hung on his frame, his body smaller and more lean than it had been when he was last in the Alpha home base. He recognized the suit. Trish had bought it for him on one of their missions, a last minute black replacement for the navy suit that had been torn when he dodged a car that had come barreling toward him in the street. As a joke, she had inked "Watch where you're going" on the jacket lining.

Stepping into the hallway had been easy. Walking to the elevator, not so much. He had been tempted to go down to the torture rooms, to look inside and see if there was anything left of Summer Rae. He knew there wouldn't have been. He had watched Trish walk out, her white suit covered in blood. An hour later, he watched the clean-up crew go in. He hadn't bothered watching for when they left. He knew that the room would be spotless again, hosed down and disinfected, waiting for the next person who needed to be decommissioned.

He'd always wondered if there was something off about him, about all of them, that they did the things they did, and reacted to them the way they did. The things that excited him probably shouldn't have brought such a thrill, and the things that riled up his emotions, more than likely, should have scared him. Trish didn't look at him as she made her way back to the elevator, but he had looked at her. He had stared at the bright red against the stark white, and the love for her fought its way to the top again. It wasn't necessarily the blood, itself, as much as the fact that the blood was there at all. She had killed for him, for his loss in her life.

She still loves you, you fucking idiot.

Randy had, in a way, brainwashed himself. He had to convince himself that there was no love there, that there was only hatred and betrayal. That made it easier for him to accept that they had been apart the last three years because of him. If he let himself believe he was wrong, he had to face the fact that he could have been with her, that they could have been figuring this out together.

"Randy!" He looked up at the familiar voice. Stacy looked down at him from Paul's office. Mike stood behind her, hovering, like he was waiting for an attack. "Up here!"

He groaned. Randy ran his thumb over the metal face of the dog tag tucked into his pants pocket. He remembered when he first gave them to her, the way her blonde head had dipped slightly toward him when she realized what he was doing, how her eyes sparkled when she looked at him.

Randy sighed and made his way to the steps, then up, taking the long trek up to Paul's office. Halfway up, he turned his head to look up at Stacy. "What are you doing here? Is Paul in there?"

She shook her head. "He and Trish had a meeting in New York," she told him. "They should be back tomorrow. Paul just called and said that they're heading to the airport, now."

"Then why am I coming to Paul's office?" Randy reached the top of the stairs and grunted as Mike moved closer to Stacy's back.

"Because we need to talk," she told him.

Stacy didn't move closer to her husband, but she didn't tell him to take a step back, either. His relationship with Trish wasn't the only one strained by his return from the dead. The four of them used to be thick as thieves. The top two women and the top two men, the couples that everybody looked up to, of course they had found themselves in each other's orbits. Once Randy and Mike had stopped grappling for first place and Mike conceded that he was always going to be a step behind Randy, they got along just fine.

But, he wasn't one step behind though, anymore, was he? Now Mike Mizanin was the top dog, the ace number one operative. He went out on the jobs that, three years ago, he would have only been given if Randy was already working another mission. Where Trish and Randy used to be second in line only to the man himself, now it was Stacy and Mike, second to the man and the woman. Despite their competitive streaks, Randy and Mike had once been the best of friends, and now, Mike was hovering at his wife's side, waiting for his former best friend to throw a punch or pull a weapon. My, how the mighty had fallen.

Traffic stopped.

"What's going on with you and the kid?"

Trish groaned. "Could we not, Paul? Please?"

"Or we could, because you've been avoiding being alone with me the past couple weeks."

"Because I knew you'd bring it up." She sighed and looked out the window. "He says he believes that we didn't try to kill him."

"And?"

"And nothing. And that's it. He still looks at me like I'm a fucking traitor. It doesn't matter how many people I decommissioned for him or the fact that he actually saw me fucking crying. He still looks at me like that." She paused and closed her eyes, her lashes soaking up the tears that were starting to fill her eyes. When she opened her eyes again, the view out the window was blurry. "But sometimes…"

"Sometimes, he looks at you like he loves you."

"Yeah."

Paul groaned. "I told you not to get involved with him, didn't I? I told you—"

"You told me to be careful, and I was. How the hell was I supposed to know—" Trish stopped as she caught movement out the corner of her eye. She turned her head in time to see the driver opening his door. "What the hell?"

The driver got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. A second later, the locks clicked. Trish reached for her door. Paul did the same. It didn't matter. Neither of them was going anywhere. The doors wouldn't open, wouldn't budge. Trish climbed over the seat, but there was no point. The engine was off and the keys were gone.

Trish whipped her head around. "Paul…"

"Somebody knew that we would take this meeting," he said.

"And that we wouldn't take the job. They low-balled us on purpose."

"Paul needs you back in the saddle, Randy," Stacy said as she took a seat. He had expected her to sit down in Paul's seat, behind the desk, or at least for Mike to take the seat. Everybody wanted that chair at some point, right? But neither of them sat in it. Stacy sat down in one of the guest seats on the opposite side of the desk. Mike stood behind her, his hand on her shoulder.

Stacy put her hand out, offering him the chair beside her and Randy shook his head. "No thanks, I'll stand." He looked over to Mike and grunted. "And you can chill the fuck out, man. I'm not about to slug her again."

Mike grunted, not saying another, but let his hand slide down. Randy was willing to bet he was still touching Stacy's back, that he had just moved his hand enough to give the illusion that he was backing off. Whatever, Randy didn't care.

He stood off to the side, his back against his wall. Randy looked to the side, out the windows of the office. "I'm not ready," he said.

"Are you afraid?" Stacy asked him.

"Fuck no." He turned back to her, his eyes flashing. And Mike's hand crept back up over her shoulder. Randy took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Look, it's not like I'm scared somebody's gonna grab me again or something."

"Then what is it?"

There was something about Stacy that made him feel like it was okay to talk. She'd always been that way. It was the soft smile that she could put on, the look of innocence and pure caring that she emoted when she tried. Randy was well aware that Stacy Keibler (Mizanin) was one bad ass bitch. Hell, before Mike came up on them, she'd been giving Randy one hell of a fight. But, sometimes, she was just this sweet thing that didn't match the sharp throwing knives she kept in a sheath around her thigh when she wore dresses.

"I'm out of practice," Randy said with a sigh. "I didn't spend the last three years on an extended mission, Stace," he told her. "I spent it surviving. I wasn't looking for intel or staking out a mark. I was just surviving."

"You don't lose those kinds of instincts, Randy," Mike spoke up. Randy looked to Stacy's shoulder and saw that Mike's hand had moved back down her back. "So you lost a step. You won't get that step back unless you get out there and do a job."

"And maybe," Stacy said, "getting back out into the field will get you and Trish back on track somehow."

"And if you're going to talk about Trish, we stop this now," Randy said, pushing off of the wall. "I don't talk about it with her. I sure as hell won't be talking about it with the two of you."

His hands were on her arms, yanking her into the back. "Paul, what are you—" Trish stopped talking as she felt the heat on her legs. Her eyes flashed to the front of the car and she saw the sparks, the fire starting. The car shook, and the flames grew.

Bomb-proofing was a wonderful thing. It encased the two of them in extra sheets of hard, sturdy metal, protection against the blast, or what would have been the blast. In a way, it slowed it down, giving enough of a warning that the people inside would have been able to get out. The bomb had to have been placed beneath the front of the car, because that's where the fire started. Were it not for the thick, metal plates, the front of the car would have been ripped off. Instead, the first explosion only rocked the car, as if the front half of the car gave a hiccup that rose it off of the ground and started a spark.

Paul knew that there were people out to get him, out to get both of them. They used one nationwide service, a specialty service run by a former Navy SEAL. All of his cars were bomb-proof, and he only took the clients who were most likely to be blown up in one of his vehicles. He was going to have to thank Road Dogg for his life the next time he saw him. If he still had a life to thank him for, because it wasn't over yet.

They were trapped inside of the car, with the flames coming slowly toward them. Paul wrapped his arms around Trish and laid her down on the seat, pressing his body down on top of hers. He wasn't an idiot. Whoever had planted that bomb wouldn't have planted just one. They would have known that the car had bomb-proofing, and while one bomb definitely wouldn't be the end of them, a series of them could possibly do the trick. And well, if the bombs didn't kill them, it was entirely possible that the fire and smoke inside of a sealed vehicle with thick glass windows that were nigh unbreakable just might do the trick.

"Paul?" There were tears in her eyes, stinging and burning as the air grew hotter and the fire came closer to them. "Is this it?"

"Maybe, darlin'."

"This isn't supposed to be it, Paul. Not before—"

She stopped and he knew what she was going to say. "Before he could forgive you."

"You think he'll forgive me if we die in here?"

"I think he'll fuck up the world if we die in here, darlin'."

Kaitlyn burst into the room, Seth on her heels. Both of them were out of breath, their eyes wide with shock. Randy turned to them, glad to have his attention off of Stacy and Mike, glad to have something to talk about other than Trish.

"Knocking," Randy said with a grunt. "It's a lost art."

"Shush!" Kaitlyn put a hand up then shook his head. "We were monitoring frequencies in New York. Police radio bands, stuff like that."

Mike stepped up. "Trish and Paul are in New York."

"I have satellite footage," Seth said, "of the driver getting out of the car. He got out three minutes before…"

His words cut off and Randy waited for him to say more, waited for him to finish the sentence. He waited for anyone to finish the sentence, and when no one did, he stepped toward the two techs and shouted, "Before what, goddammit!"

Paul held Trish tightly and they whispered the words of a prayer together as two more bombs went off and the car flipped into the air, surrounded by flames.