Author's Note: Sorry for the length of time between posts; between my day job and working on the manuscript for my second novel, things have been a bit hairy of late. Enjoy!

Richard Castle Investigations…

No sooner did Richard Castle push through the front door of his newly-renovated private eye office - a business expense he would likely spend the next several years paying off, though it was so worth it - a redheaded whirlwind of questions came at him with a speed and ferocity he hadn't expected.

"Dad, what's going on?"

"Why are we looking into this Vikram guy?"

"Where's Beckett?"

"What happened?"

"Is everything okay?"

"Everything's not okay, is it?"

"Dad?"

"Dad!"

It wasn't until Castle got to his desk, fingers already a blur over the keyboard of his laptop, that his daughter's voice finally registered. He looked up to find her standing opposite him, her striking blue eyes wide with confusion and possibly a little bit of panic. He had purposefully kept Alexis in the dark since the previous night, though that was more for his own benefit than hers. Talking to someone, telling someone, about his wife walking out on him would make it all too real and bring emotions to the surface that were better left buried for the moment.

He couldn't figure out what the hell Kate Beckett was messed up in if he was too busy wallowing in his own self-pity or trying to play the part of the class clown.

But Alexis Castle was very much her father's daughter - all the way down to her insistence in figuring things out. She wasn't quite as stubborn about it as Castle, but then again, that innate curiosity hadn't netted her more than twenty bestsellers and the Poe's Pen Career Achievement Award.

Still, he knew there was no more side-stepping her. Not when she was standing in front of him.

"Dad," Alexis tried again. "What's going on?"

Castle's shoulders slumped with a sigh, and for the first time since leaving the loft at some ungodly morning hour, he felt the exhaustion. He hadn't slept in almost two days by this point, having run himself ragged to figure out where his wife had gone and why her bracelet had been found in a pool of her own blood. Everything from there had been a whirlwind worthy of one of his novels, and he had foolishly expected things to return to normal when he and Kate returned from the precinct the previous night.

Yeah, about that…

Scrubbing a hand over his face - a reminder that he also hadn't shaved in a couple days - Castle shook his head. "Beckett left last night."

The redhead's brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed and she shook her head. "What?"

"She packed a bag and left." Castle gave a one-shoulder shrug, hoping to try for nonchalance and confusion. The longer he told himself it was because of a case, the longer he could hold the hurt at bay. This wasn't the case of another woman in his life deciding he was no longer good enough for her; no, this was a mystery. Something he could investigate. Something he could solve.

"Why would Beckett do that?" Alexis asked, incredulous and maybe even a little bit angry. "Why would we bail on you the second you get her back?"

"We find out who Vikram Singh really is," he offered, "maybe we'll find out."

"You think this is some case?" Alexis asked, and Castle couldn't help but notice that his daughter's hands were now balled into fists. He had asked her not to get involved two days earlier when he was trying to figure out where Kate went, and his heart had soared when Alexis came back with Beckett's family.

He hoped beyond hope that was still the case. Assuming Kate ever came back.

"It has to be." He launched himself from his chair and pulled on a volume of Edgar Allen Poe sitting on the bookshelf. When the shelf opened to reveal a brightly-lit secret room, Castle head-nodded toward it before stepping across and waiting for his daughter. When Alexis joined him in that room, the passageway slid shut.

"Not twenty-four hours ago, my wife stood right out there and promised me no more secrets," he explained, barely keeping the emotion out of his voice. "Then she packs a bag and runs off to who knows where, tears in her eyes and a plea for forgiveness on her lips."

"Like she was off to work something she didn't want you involved in."

"Maybe." Castle shook his head. "But she could've just told me I couldn't be a part of it."

The redhead arched a brow. "And when has that ever stopped you?"

"Fair point." Castle brushed that off with a hand wave. "I've been tailing Beckett since last night. She met with Vikram in some abandoned warehouse, and just this morning, I overheard her on the phone with him, offering him a job as a video tech at the precinct."

"Well, he's unemployed now," Alexis offered. "Seeing as how his whole team got murdered."

"That's assuming his story of working with Agent McCord on the AG team is legit," Castle countered. "I'm not sure I buy that."

"Dad, this isn't the time for one of your crazy theories."

"Isn't it?" Castle shrugged. "It seems awful convenient that he would just show up one day and know how to get a hold of Beckett like that. He wasn't on the team when she was there."

Alexis shrugged. "Protocol."

"Maybe." Castle shook his head and began pacing back and forth. "Or maybe he's involved in whatever it is Beckett doesn't want me in on, and he's getting close to her for a reason."

"Do you think she's a target?"

"I'd be surprised if she wasn't." Castle sat down in one of the lounge chairs, raking his fingers through his hair. "This thing that had her on the run before… it killed five federal agents, and then it killed Senator Bracken."

"Not to mention shooting up the precinct," Alexis added, sitting next to her father. "You really think this is all connected?"

Castle shook his head. "It's the only thing that makes sense."

Alexis studied her father for a quiet moment, noting not just the way his shoulders were hunched, but the bags under his eyes and the way his hair was out of sorts. He seldom left the loft looking like this, and she wondered just how long he had been running like this. Chasing after his wife, only to have her slip out of his grasp again not even a day after she came back… Alexis would be lying if she didn't admit to some anger toward her stepmother, but if things were as convoluted as Castle suggested… how mad could she honestly be?

"Are you okay?"

Castle sighed, opening his mouth only to have no words come out. He glanced at his daughter and faked a smile as best he could - though it looked more like a grimace - and he shook his head.

"I will be when I get my wife back."

The Twelfth…

As it turned out, the murder victim Ryan and Esposito were investigating wasn't an escaped inmate but a college student. Kate Beckett had to admit her curiosity was threatening to get the best of her, and it was practically her nature to dive into the investigation and her hands dirty. That was going to be one of the hardest habits for her to break now that she was captain - far too much paperwork, far too many meetings at One Police Plaza, not enough actual police work.

For a brief moment, she wondered why she decided to become captain. For that matter, she wondered if she was making any of the right decisions lately. The boys weren't talking to her outside of case updates, where they spoke to her in overly formal, clipped tones, and when she tried to get an update on the corpse from Lanie, she was met with one of those stares and another threat of girl, Imma smack you.

Lanie sounded serious this time, too.

Every part of Kate's brain was screaming for her to bury her nose in this new case, figure out why a college student was dressed up like an inmate and what he had been doing on the run in the woods. But she was at her desk, an ignored cup of tea - she had given up on trying coffee - to her left and everything she had on Vulcan Simmons splayed out in front of her.

She felt guilty pulling strings with Narcotics to get this information, and she felt even worse for leading them to believe this was for an active case. Vulcan Simmons was dead - hard to forget a murder when one was falsely accused of committing it - yet his drug empire had to still be in operation, and maybe that was the key to tracking down LokSat.

But it wouldn't be that easy, would it?

Whatever this was got five federal agents killed and offed a disgraced Senator who had been holed up in a maximum security prison. The ease with which they had killed Bracken was what unnerved Kate the most, and was what had her most convinced that the less everyone knew - her husband included - the better.

You're a big girl. Dive down the rabbit hole if you must. But think twice about who you bring with you. Because unlike McCord and her team, anybody who dies now? That blood is on you.

She disagreed with Rita - who, now that she thought about it, had been conspicuously absent since that late-night warning. McCord's blood was on Kate's hands. As was Hendrix's. As was everyone else she used to call colleague and friend from her brief time in Washington, D.C. She couldn't stand the thought of having anyone else's blood on her hands: not her friends, not her family… certainly not her husband.

Let him hate her if he must. Just so long as he was alive to make that choice.

When she wasn't burying her nose in minutia and evidence that she had already studied to the point where her eyes crossed and a dull throb formed in her temples, Kate had been mentally replaying the last two days. The abrupt phone call, the shootout at the theater, being on the run… stitching up her own gunshot wound.

Just what she needed: another scar.

Rita saving them from another shootout and certain death. Her decree that they had to disappear, to leave their lives for good in order to guarantee safety. Kate's outright refusal. I'm sure as hell not going to let someone chase me away from the life I've worked so hard to create.

Only she was doing just that.

But Rita has specifically mentioned Simmons and the drug money that had funneled into Bracken's SuperPAC. If what Rita had told them was true, if this mystery partner had used CIA resources to secure the product and protect both Bracken and Simmons from the blowback… this was like the mafia ransom scheme all over again, just on a bigger scale.

Johanna Beckett and three others died because they discovered intel they weren't supposed to have with regards to Raglan, McCallister, and Montgomery's scheme. Now, people were dead because Kate had poked around on a federal database and eventually triggered hit relating to LokSat.

The need for truth - for justice - kept getting people killed, and yet… Kate couldn't make herself stop.

Kate tossed her pen onto the desk and buried her face in her hands.

What would Roy think of all this?

We speak for the dead. That's the job. We are all they've got, once the wicked rob them of their voices. We owe them that. But we don't owe them our lives.

I've spent most of my life walking behind this badge and I can tell you this for a fact: there are no victories. There's only the battle. And the best that you can hope for is that you find someplace where you can make your stand.

Then again, Montgomery had blood on his hands, keeping quiet for so long about his own duplicity that by the time he finally came clean, everything had already gone sideways. And in his last-ditch efforts to keep Kate safe, Roy robbed a woman of her husband and two children of their father.

To say nothing of the fact that Montgomery had been far more of a mentor to Kate than anyone else in the NYPD. Even more so than Michael Royce, even more so than Victoria Gates.

Without Roy Montgomery, Kate probably never would've made it to Homicide. Now she sat in the chair he once occupied, dealing with the same bullshit he dealt with on a daily basis, and trying desperately to honor his wisdom without succumbing to the same mistakes. People died because of something Montgomery did years ago. Now people were dead because of something Kate did, and she needed to make sure the bodies stopped dropping.

If that meant falling down the proverbial rabbit hole, so be it.

Turning to the shelf situated behind her desk, Kate ran her fingers through her hair before trailing a finger along the trunk of one of the ceramic elephants. The memory of her slain mother never completely left her, but before this LokSat mess started, she had finally made peace with the residual pain - the fact that she would never be free of it, even after arresting the man who orchestrated the whole thing.

But being shot - again - and staring the man who ordered the hit in the eye - again - brought back feelings Kate thought long ago dealt with. For a brief moment, she considered giving Dr. Burke a call, but she couldn't adequately explain what she was feeling without divulging what was really going on, and doing that would endanger her therapist just as much as it would endanger her friends or her husband.

So Kate was alone in this. On a proverbial island. Vikram was her only outlet.

Behind all of the pictures and the mementos and the knick-knacks, there was a hand-crafted wooden armoire. Setting aside the elephants and a signed baseball her father had given her - Mets star David Wright's illegible scrawl between the red seams - Kate opened the doors of the armoire and paused.

Front and center was a head shot of Rachel McCord, and the back of the left door was scattered with random notes relating to the "car accident" that killed her and the other members of the team. Above those notes was a yellow Post-It with LokSat? written in permanent marker.

With a sigh, Kate returned to her desk, grabbing the New York Times story about Simmons' connection to Senator Bracken and taping it to the back of the armoire's right-side door. Then, she grabbed another Post-It and scribbled CIA mystery partner - protected both.

Then, after taking a moment to squeeze her eyes shut and stem the tide of emotion that had already burst through the dam a few times that day, she shut the armoire and secured it with her own personal padlock. Turning back to her desk, Kate cringed when her iPhone buzzed against the wooden surface.

Expecting it to be Castle, she cringed when instead the name Jim Beckett came up on the screen.

Swiping her thumb over Ignore, Kate swallowed the lump in her throat as she opened the messaging app to type out a quick text to her father instead. Can't talk now - in a meeting.

What was originally a lie changed when Kate's phone buzzed again.

Found something. Meet now.