Author's Note: What's this?! An update that didn't take months? Craziness! Thank you for all your kind words and encouragement, I'm glad you're still sticking it out with me. I suck at responding to individual reviews, but know that I appreciate y'all taking the time to leave me a note, no matter how small. With that being said I'll stop yammering now and let you go on with the chapter (I like this one!) ...


"Gibbs …"

"No."

"I would …"

"Are you really going to make me repeat myself, David?"

She could practically feel the steel in his tone sliding over her; she had learned long ago that Gibbs was the master of disguising his commands as questions, and yet there was still that stubborn part of her that wanted to fight it. She wanted – she could almost bring herself to say needed – to be in that interrogation room when Khaled was questioned, but the silver fox would hear none of it. She was being relegated to the backseat, and she didn't like it.

She couldn't claim she didn't understand where he was coming from, though.

"I will promise not to kill him," She offered evenly.

"Taking you into that room with me puts you exactly where he wants you, Ziver. Use your head."

She was offended for only a few seconds, before the logical side of her brain kicked in and told her he was right. The man on the other side of the glass, sitting so casually in the interrogation room, had been playing with them from the very beginning; if she set foot in that room, she would be giving him an advantage, and that was the last thing they needed. Despite how it chafed at her to stay away, that was exactly what she had to do; this man had to be brought to justice, not only for the games he was playing with her team but, more importantly, for what he had done to Raquel Goodman.

"Boss," Tony and McGee started in unison. Gibbs held up a finger to silence them and shot a glare in their direction.

"Stay. Here."

His tone brooked no argument, and he swept out of the room before anyone could utter another word. His absence left the three of them standing in the observation room, Ziva closest to the glass and perfectly aware of the two men standing behind her – one perhaps a little closer than was strictly necessary. She could not guess the direction this interrogation was about to take, but she was certain that she would end up not liking it; she was even more certain that whatever Khaled had to say, she did not want her teammates – including Gibbs – to hear it. Those months in Somalia had made her unfailingly aware of the way the Jordanian operated, and she did not have a hard time recalling his love of employing psychological warfare. Whether through practice or inherent talent, Khaled was unfortunately gifted in the art; Ziva feared that whatever he had planned next was going to be decidedly worse than what he'd done so far, and that made her uneasy.

On the other side of the glass, Gibbs swept into the room with a manila folder tucked under one arm; his face was smooth as glass, the lines of his body straight and tense. He looked perfectly in control, but to eyes that knew him, he also looked ready for war.

Behind Ziva, Tony glanced fleetingly at Tim; he said nothing, but he could see his sentiment reflected perfectly on the younger man's face. Their boss was not going to waste time – the Jordanian was in for a tussle, and the only one who didn't know it was the Jordanian himself.

Khaled was smiling as Gibbs dropped himself into the chair opposite him and tossed the open folder on the table in front of him. He barely spared a glance at the photo of a dead Raquel before turning his attention back to the Gibbs; his brazen attitude and incessant leer made it wildly obvious that this was not their usual brand of suspect.

The photo of the deceased stared impassively up at the ceiling; the silence stretched long and pregnant as both men simply sat and watched one another, Gibbs' face still impassive, Khaled's twisted into a snide grin.

Tony almost wanted to smile when Khaled was the first to break the silence; there were few people in the world that could outlast a Gibbs stalemate, and it filled him with a righteous sense of pride that this man was not one of the few. The only acceptable alternative to Tony himself being part of the interrogation was knowing that the boss was handling it.

"She looks like Ziva, no?"

Tony bristled; he remembered making the same observation at the beginning of the case, and the way he'd mentally chastised himself seconds later when the comment had created a connection for Ziva that hadn't been there seconds before. He had a bad habit of speaking without thinking, he knew, but he'd wanted to kick his own ass then and there for opening his mouth. Now, hearing that same observation coming straight from the mouth of the murderer, made his stomach churn; he did not need to see her face to know that Ziva was going to internalize the young woman's death even more than she already had. Khaled had, without putting voice to it specifically, just confirmed a terrible truth: Raquel Goodman had been murdered simply because of her resemblance to a woman that she had never met.

"She did not have the same … what is it you Americans say? Fire? This woman begged for her life; little Ziva fought for hers … at first."

Tim had never heard the word "little" used in conjunction with Ziva before, and although he could not deny that she was, indeed, a petite woman (especially looking at her now, half engulfed in the shadow of Tony's body), there was something that seemed fundamentally wrong about calling her "little". Hearing her called little by anyone, but certainly by the man in the other room, made him want to squirm; Ziva was many things, but he had never considered her little – there was a strange intimacy attached to the word, almost as if he were referring to a child, and Tim suddenly found himself imagining a much younger Ziva locked in a windowless room with Khaled. The image made him want to vomit.

"Why?" It was the first word to leave Gibbs' lips since he'd entered the room.

"Why?" Khaled repeated, perplexed.

"Why did you kill her?"

The Jordanian made several tsk sounds and folded his arms as he leaned into the back of the chair.

"You assume I needed a reason. She was a means to an end; she reminded me of Ziva; that is reason enough. But why don't you ask what you really want to know, Gibbs?"

"And what is it you think I want to know?"

"Why I am here – what I am planning to do with your precious little Ziva."

"You already told me."

Behind his lurid expression, Ziva could tell that Gibbs' absolute refusal to be baited was getting to Khaled. He was inspecting the older man's armor, looking for that weak spot he could exploit in order to get a rise out of him; he was fishing, and Gibbs simply refused to bite. She could see the way the challenge both infuriated and excited the Jordanian, and although she did not doubt that Gibbs could see it as well, she still felt a pressing urge to warn him.

"I'll tell you what you can do, Khaled," Gibbs started, grabbing a pen from his jacket pocket and tossing it across the table. "You can write out your confession. I'd hate to delay your vacation to one of our finest American prisons anymore than I already have."

Gibbs had just started to gather his feet to stand when the man across from him chuckled and shook his head in a way that told the older man that something else was coming. Khaled dutifully took up the pen and uncapped it, his grin aimed not at Gibbs but at the blank sheet of paper he had pulled out of the manila folder.

"You are not at all what I expected, Gibbs." Khaled's tone was jovial, as if he were having a conversation with a close friend; deep within Gibbs' steely façade, the familiarity was beginning to get to him. "Did you know that little Ziva talks in her sleep?"

This time Khaled made direct eye contact with him, and the few warning bells that had begun to sound in his head moments ago multiplied rapidly.

"She even called out, once or twice; most people do not know it, but the bottoms of the feet are particularly susceptible to wood and steel."

Without his permission Gibbs' memory replayed the moment his agents had rounded the corner of that sorry building in Somalia, Tim and Tony each supporting one arm as they half dragged Ziva out of there. She had been nearly incapable of standing on her own, and even when she had attempted to move she had only been able to accomplish something more akin to unsteady shuffling. The connection was immediate: those men – this man – had flayed the bottom of her feet to the point that she would have been unable to escape, even if she had tried.

" … You cannot escape when the first layers of flesh have been torn away," Khaled was saying, his tone technical, as though he were giving instructions. "Not that little Ziva tried to escape."

"Agent David." Gibbs corrected him through a slowly clenching jaw, but the other man ignored him.

"She was ready to die, Gibbs – and that is why we kept her alive. Do you know what it is to accept death, to wish for it, to be tortured to within an inch of it – only to be denied? That is a torture of its own, Gibbs, a torture that your little Ziva knows well."

In the opposite room, the tension in the air was so thick that Ziva could barely catch her breath. Her focus was torn between the solid waves of rage she could feel radiating so clearly from Tony, who had slowly inched closer to her until he now stood with his chest pressed deceptively gently into her back, and the slightly less potent disgust she could feel emanating from McGee. Both of these things, however, were quickly being relegated to the back of her mind as she took in the subtle changes she could see in her boss from this side of the glass. Gibbs had lost control only a handful of times in their years together, but the explosions were always of such magnitude that they remained imprinted in her memory; she could see the signs now, as the bomb built ever quicker within him. Whether he knew it or not, Khaled was succeeding.

The Jordanian was still talking, even as his pen scratched rhythmically across the paper in front of him.

"… And still she would not talk. Can you understand such loyalty, Gibbs? Such a rare thing to find these days."

"You've come all this way to get revenge, Khaled, and yet you don't even know who's responsible for the death you're so keen to avenge." Gibbs' voice had started to rise, and he found himself leaning across the edge of the table.

"On the contrary, Gibbs. As I told you before, there is better punishment than death; death is, in fact, too easy. Well, your death, anyway. But hers? I think you'll find that a different subject entirely."

"Tony." Ziva said his name in the same moment that he began to pull away, her voice full of warning. Tim, too, seemed to sense the impending explosion, because he had started to step toward the door.

Gibbs had gotten to his feet behind the table.

"Is she like a daughter to you, Gibbs? Did you ever wonder whose clothes she was wearing when you found her? Do you know what happens to daughters in a camp full of men who …"

Gibbs lunged for the Jordanian. One iron fist clenched around the collar of his shirt as he ripped him forcefully from the chair, the table skidding sideways as Gibbs pulled the younger man to him. Khaled was laughing; he held his broken wrist up in front of his face in a sign of submission, but stopped laughing seconds later when Gibbs grabbed that same wrist and twisted.

The door to the interrogation room crashed open; Tony materialized in front of him, simultaneously telling him to let go of Khaled and grabbing the same man to drag him across the room, out of Gibbs' reach. Gibbs was aware of Tim saying something, but the words were indistinct, and then Ziva was in front of him, her dark eyes locking immediately with his.

"He is lying, Gibbs," She said softly, calmly. "The clothes were not mine, that is true, but the other part …"

"Ziver."

"I endured many things, Gibbs, but not that."

He believed her; he could see the truth of her words in her eyes, in the lines of her face, but it did not quench his bloodlust. He wanted to snap Khaled's neck and be done with it – damn the justice system, damn the trial, damn everything. The Jordanian deserved to die, and at that moment Gibbs would have been more than happy to oblige.

Ziva stepped away to retrieve the paper that lay abandoned on the table, understanding without asking that her boss needed a minute to collect himself. She pulled the table back to its original position and then scooped up the folder, glancing over the slanting writing of what she had thought was a confession.

It wasn't.

Instead of a confession, Khaled had written the same things over and over again: her license plate number, and the exact address of her apartment. The only words were at the bottom of the page, the same sentence written in both English and Arabic: Her life is forfeit.