A/N: Thank you very much to everyone reading, and especially to the ones leaving reviews and adding this to their favourites and alerts! And thank you for being patient with me too, I've been busy lately.

Thanks to lily moonlight for reading through, and poking me to update!


Mac leaned forwards over his desk, kneading his fists into his eyes. He had a headache that was getting worse as the day went on. It had begun sitting in a traffic queue right next to where a group of workmen were digging up a water main, where it could hardly have been any less painful if the pneumatic drill had been boring directly into his skull, instead of the paving slabs, and even Flack, who had been in the car with him, hadn't felt like making a joke about it.

Caffeine probably wasn't helping either, he thought, but he still gulped down the cold dregs from the coffee cup resting on the edge of his desk. Stella would roll her eyes if she saw him right now, and then probably leave his office abruptly, reappearing a few minutes later with a glass of water and a couple of painkillers, and a firm injunction to "just take the damn things", which he would have obeyed with a wry smile.

Today, though, was her day off.

He opened the next card file on his desk, a case solved earlier in the week, and began to go through it. The paperwork still towered mountainously before him, but he was steadily eroding it, working down through the dated layers. Years of practice had made this an almost automatic task at times, and he became absorbed in it, his aching head just another thing to store away at the back of his mind, along with the fact that he had a meeting with Sinclair the next day to discuss budgets, and that the sky outside his window was uniformly grey, the colour cardboard turned when it was left for days in alleyways.

His pen hovered over the next blank field, and he wrote that the body of the victim had been recovered from beneath a pile of cardboard boxes. The garbage collectors had found him. Mac remembered the red stain on the inner layers, diluted and diffused by the previous night's rain, a sunset seen through a cloud-bank.

He moved on to yesterday's case, the one that he had worked with Stella. One solved almost before it had been opened. Grey drizzle, and a red stain on the wet paving slabs, but no body. A rare case, but only too welcome. The final gaps completed that morning, when he and Flack had interviewed the victim, the woman now on the path to recovery, and passing on thanks to the man who had saved her. He filled the forms in steadily, leaving gaps for Stella to sign, and snatched occasional glances at the clock, the hands gliding round at their own pace, counting off numbers, counting away the time.

Time to leave. He stood up, lifting his jacket from where it had been draped over his chair back, and shuffled the piles of paperwork into alignment, replacing the lid on the pen he had been using as he dropped it into its pot. He cast a long, indecisive glance at the empty coffee cup standing neatly at the corner, and in the end left it where it was. He could deal with that tomorrow. On a whim, he picked up the case file that he had just been working on. He could drop it round at Stella's, use it as a pretext to see if she was busy or if she felt like going out for a meal. Lately he hadn't seen her as much outside work as he would have liked to. No one's fault, but he missed her company.

The door silently swung closed behind him as he left.

Fall had blown in suddenly during the last week, a warm Indian Summer quickly replaced with low, sullen skies and squalls of wind which assaulted Mac as he stepped out of the cab in front of Stella's building. Her third in as many years.

Distractedly, he paid the cab driver. The skies were heavy, forecasting more rain soon to come, and pedestrians were walking quickly, anxious to be getting home. They hurried along, not looking around, not paying him any notice. He sidestepped out of the path of a crying toddler being pushed in a buggy, and was gusted towards his destination.

Dead leaves had blown onto the front steps, and had begun to decay, leaving a layer of deceptively camouflaged slime. Buffeted by a treacherous twist of air he slipped, grabbed for the handrail, but managed at the last second to regain his balance before he fell. He reached the entrance safely, debating whether to ring Stella from his cell and warn her that he was coming.

All the way up in the elevator he was trying to think of what to say to her, feeling that he would owe her an apology for disturbing her with work on her day off, and wondering whether, after all, it was presumptuous of him to assume that she would be free to go out for dinner. She made him uncharacteristically uncertain, even when she wasn't there in person. So often, there was a sense of unreality which seemed to surround his dealings with her, the one thing in his ordered life which was outside his control. He glanced at the walls in her hallway, but they gave nothing to help him.

There was a button on the floor outside Stella's door.

He noticed. Out of habit. He bent and picked it up. Just an ordinary, rather large black button with black thread trailing from it, resting partly upright against the wood of the doorframe. It looked – and a frown wrote itself onto his face as he analysed it – it looked as if it had been ripped off as someone squeezed or shoved their way inside. It wasn't from Stella's coat.

Common sense told him that he was being paranoid, but instinct, honed from police work, whispered something else. That he needed to take notice of the single plain fact of its existence. It wasn't Stella's. But it could be from anyone. She could have received a delivery, and it could have been ripped from the coat of the delivery man as he carried it in. She could have bought a new coat, that he hadn't seen.

There could be any number of ordinary reasons to account for its presence.

He knocked on the door.

There was no answer, and he knocked again, firmly. Then once more, not a hello-are-you-in sort of knock, but a please-open-this-door-right-now one.

"Stella?" he called. He knew that there was no particular reason why she should be at home right now, but the button, and what it could possibly suggest, and the fact that he hadn't heard from her all day, were conspiring to make him feel uneasy. He pulled his bunch of keys from his pocket, selected the one to her door. If he was worrying about nothing he could apologise later. She would find it funny. He pictured her rolling her eyes and sighing despairingly, but trying to keep from laughing at the same time.

The key turned, and the lock gave a resonant click. He pulled out the key.

The door opened inwards before he had time to reach the handle.

A man he had never seen before stood just inside, staring at him suspiciously. His hair was the dark brown of decaying wood above his just-too-pale, expansive face, and there was a cruel twist to his mouth. Most of his weight seemed to be supported on his right leg. "Yes?" he asked.

"Who are you?" Mac asked bluntly.

The man frowned at him. Blank puzzlement. "I'm Stella's boyfriend. Who are you?"

"Her work partner. I didn't know that she had a boyfriend." He was on the defensive, wary.

"Oh? Well, I guess she didn't tell you then, Mr…?"

"Detective Taylor. Where is she?" He was aware that his tone was aggressive, but didn't really care.

The man was managing to lounge slightly, a pale hand braced casually against the wall, comfortable in his surroundings. More comfortable than Mac currently was, and he knew it. His face had changed emotion instantly, as if he had swapped a mask. From puzzlement to open friendliness. "She's in the shower right now." The water was running in the background. It must have been all the time, although he hadn't noticed it. "Do you want to come in, wait for her? I'll tell her that you're here."

Feeling like a fool for banging on the door, but still with worry biting at him, Mac stepped inside and closed the door behind him as the man moved down the entrance hall, limping slightly with his left leg, disappearing in the direction of the bathroom. He found that his free hand was unconsciously clenched into a fist, the edge of the card folder digging into the other. He hadn't considered that Stella might have a boyfriend. He felt hurt, and then felt ashamed of the feeling, but he had always assumed that she would tell him if she started dating again. And this man was not the sort of person that he would have expected her to pick.

The man was back, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. "She says she'll be right out. You aren't on a parking meter, are you? She'll probably be a while. You know, women, right?" He winked conspiratorially, but awkwardly, the gesture failing to suit him.

Mac forced a polite smile onto his face. He couldn't hold it for more than a second. "No, I took a cab." He echoed the man's words back. "Mr…?"

"Sean." He seemed to be daring Mac to ask for a surname, still righteously patient in the face of questioning. The effect on Mac was to make him feel like an intruder, and from the slight smile on Sean's face, he was sure that it was deliberate. And the same thoughts were running through his head. I don't trust this man. Do I believe that Stella does?

He took a couple of steps towards the open kitchen door, not really sure why, perhaps from some subconscious desire to show that he belonged here and knew his way around, but stopped short. Because peeking out from beneath a small rug that he was sure usually resided in Stella's bedroom, was a dark stain. He'd been around it far too often not to recognise it instantly.

Blood.

Stella's words from months ago, words he should have recalled immediately, tolled in his ears. No men in my place. Stella would never bend those rules for a man like this.

He turned sharply. Back towards Sean.

Not quickly enough. Sean was already moving towards him, hands out of his pockets, a hypodermic needle glinting in one of them. Mac tried to move but he was too late – Sean's forearm connected with his head, slamming it against the wall. An explosion of pain and his legs buckled, and a sharp stabbing pain in his neck, and he fought to keep his eyes open, but they were unfocused and the world slid erratically, shapes bleeding into one another, spinning dizzily, and he thought Stella

And then –

There was nothing.