To say that Captain Montgomery was furious was an understatement. But, surprisingly, it wasn't his wrath was that the low point of Detective Kate Beckett's evening. It wasn't watching Castle walk away. It wasn't knowing that she could have stopped Giselle and didn't. No, the worst part of Beckett's evening was facing Martha Rodgers and Alexis Castle. In fact, she didn't even speak to them. She took one look at them trough the doorway leading into the break room, and her eyes immediately fogged up in tears and she took the elevator to the morgue downstairs. She knew that even though Ryan, Esposito and Lanie would internally think that she was an idiot and that she should have done something, they wouldn't say anything to her. Nothing about what had happened, anyway. They'd leave it alone – because they were her friends, and they knew that this would be what she needed.

"Beckett," Ryan said, girnning as she walked into the morgue. "How's it -"

Esposito saw the look on her face. "What's wrong?" he asked. "Where's Castle?"

"Gone," she said. She'd gotten rid of all the tears in the elevator, and she hadn't walked through the doors to the morgue until she was certain her face was dry. Sure, it was obvious that she'd been crying, but she wasn't crying now. She looked almost like an empty shell now, walking silently across the room and taking a seat on an empty examination table.

"What do you mean, gone?" Ryan asked, but when Beckett didn't answer him, he turned to Esposito and Lanie. "Does she mean, like, dead?"

"Ryan, if Castle was dead, he'd be on my slab," Lanie whispered to him. "She means he's left."

"Why would he do that?"

"He's done it before. Remember, the Summer... the Hamptons."

"I can still hear you," Beckett murmured. Lanie had tried to be quiet about it, knowing that it was still a sore spot with her best friend.

"He wouldn't leave like that again – not after happened last week," Ryan said, attempting to get some sort of reaction out of his boss. Nothing.

"Where's he gone, honey?"

She shook herself. "He went with Chambers," she said. "She said that if he went with her, she'd leave us alone for the rest of our lives."

"He believed that?" Esposito asked, then looked between the other two detectives. "Hold on, what happened last week? What'd I miss?"

"Of course he didn't believe that," Ryan said. "Castle's not an idiot."

"He asked me to give him my handcuffs. I suppose he's planning on baiting her for us, I guess."

"Well then, why are you upset?"

"Because he's risking his life for me," she said. "He does it too much, and it's really, really stupid of him."

"Or chivalrous," Lanie shrugged.

"Or both," Ryan sniffed.

"Wait, so he just left with Chambers? Did he say where they were going?" Esposito asked, irritated that they'd been ignoring him.

"Probably off to get married or something," Kate said. "What am I going to do, guys? One second he was there, and then he was gone. And she isn't right for him."

"Of course not, because she's a psycho killer/kidnapper/stalker type. And she's not you."

She looked up to see Ryan, Esposito and Lanie all staring at her, yet all trying to avoid eye contact. "We're not dating. Ryan, say a word -"

"Ryan?" Esposito asked. "What do you know, and why haven't you told us?"

"Beckett and Castle... kissed. And before you get angry at me, I only found out earlier today!"

"It was a distraction," she said, closing her eyes so that she wouldn't see their faces. "We had to distract the guard somehow so that we could get into the building and get the two of you out. As soon as the guy turned away, I clocked him over the head."

"U-huh," Ryan smirked. "Sure it was. A distraction."

"Keep telling yourself that, Beckett," Esposito winked. "So, what are we going to do to get Castle back?"

"Nothing," she said. "He made his choice, and we have to respect that. Just like when he went to the Hamptons. He chose to go, and we had to let him."

Esposito sighed. "Beckett, you never got over Castle leaving to go to the Hamptons with Gina. We saw you, every single day, staring at his empty chair. You didn't drink any coffee at all. You died a little bit inside with every mention of him. You're not sitting here, telling us that you're okay with Castle leaving with that psychopath, and expecting us to believe it, are you?"

"I don't need you to believe it," Beckett said controlling her breathing.

"You need you to believe it," Ryan said. Beckett, looking up at them, nodded slightly.


Castle took Giselle Chambers back to his apartment and told her his conditions. Then, he cooked the two of them dinner, and they went to bed; separately, as per Castle's conditions. He had stipulated that, for at least the first few nights of their arrangement, she would stay in the guest room. It had nothing at all to do with organising his room like he had told her, and it had everything to do with him planning out his baiting.

"You're the one sacrificing here," Giselle had told him when he laid out his conditions. "I make the rules, not you."

"That's all very well and good," Castle had replied, "but remember that I can easily leave you and go back to Detective Beckett. So you have to give me what I want, or you don't have me."

Giselle seemed unable to refute that logic. And, now, resignedly, let Castle lead her to the guest room. As soon as he was confident that she would be comfortable, he shut the door on her and locked it from the outside. As an extra precaution, he also handcuffed the door to the wall-mounted light so that she couldn't get out. Then, making sure the key to the handcuffs were in his pocket, he wandered to his study.

Here, though he pulled out his computer, he never intended to write. He pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and typed in Beckett's number. His thumb lingered over the call button for near on a minute before he pressed the button that would lock the phone. Instead, he dialled his daughter's number.

She picked up on the first ring.

"Dad," she said, worried. "Where are you? We saw Beckett come back, but you weren't with her. We thought you'd been shot or something."

"If I had been shot, Beckett would have told you," Castle said, trying to keep calm. "I'm fine, Alexis. You're still at the precinct?"

"Yeah," Alexis said. "Do you want to talk to Beckett?"

"No," he said. "No, I can't do that. Alexis, promise me that you and my mother will do whatever Captain Montgomery asks you to do."

Alexis, worried, creased her eyebrows together. "Of course," she said. She could tell when her dad was being serious and when he wasn't. And now, he was being the exact definition of serious. "Dad, what's going on?"

"What did Beckett tell you?"

"What do you – she hasn't told us anything, neither has Montgomery. She just sort of looked at us through the window and left. Dad -"

"It's just the case that we're working on," he said, glancing at the study door as though he expected Giselle to walk through it at any moment, despite the handcuffs on the handle of her room. "I'll talk to you soon, okay?"

"Dad!" she shouted into the receiver, but he'd already hung up.


"Beckett," Esposito said the next morning, nudging her awake. They'd gone up to the gym when Lanie had closed the morgue for the night, and Beckett had somehow nodded off. Though Esposito and Ryan would never say it, they'd heard her crying herself to sleep.

"Hmm?" Beckett asked, yawning as she lifted herself up from her make-shift bed. "What's up?"

"We've got a case," he said. "Ninth and Broadway."

She nodded and grabbed a spare change of clothes that she'd been allowed to grab from her apartment last night. As she walked to the bathroom, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and pressed the speed dial number for Castle. Just as she was about to call him, however, she remembered the deal. Pausing in the hallway, she cancelled it and put her phone back into her pocket.

She walked back into the gym to find Esposito and Ryan waiting for her. "Guys, I'm sorry," she said, looking between them. "I can't do it." The event of the previous day had finally hit her, and she sat down on her bed and started shaking.

"If you need us, don't be afraid to call," Esposito said.

Beckett smiled at him in gratitude. Esposito had always been the more caring and perceptive one of her teammates, and she was glad that he was still there for her. Ryan, though still having her best interests at heart, was a little more insensitive than his partner. She smiled after them as she watched them leave, and then looked around the room, not really seeing anything.

After looking around blankly for about five minutes, she decided that being at the station reminded her too much of Castle, and she decided to go home. Montgomery wasn't in yet, so it was rather easy to leave. She still hadn't spoken to Martha and Alexis about what had happened the previous night, so rather than encountering them, she took the long way down to the ground floor.

"What are you doing?" Lanie asked Beckett as she breezed past her on the pavement outside. "You're not supposed to leave the precinct."

"I can't stay there," Beckett answered, though she didn't stop walking. Lanie, obviously concerned for her friend, turned around and followed her.

"And why not?" Lanie asked.

"It's like the summer all over again," Beckett said. "Lanie, I can't think straight when he's not there. I can't focus on anything! It's like he keeps me grounded."

"Beckett, you lived a good thirty years of your life without him there. Why do you think now would be any different?"

"Twenty," she said, pausing. "It was only twenty years."

"What are you talking about, girl?"

Beckett sighed. "I'll tell you when we get to my apartment. Come on."


"Okay, fess up, girlfriend," Lanie said as soon as Beckett shut the door. "What on earth did you mean by twenty years?"

"You remember how I spent three years on the force trying to solve my mother's murder?"

"Girl, of course I remember that!" Lanie snapped as Beckett grabbed a drink out of the fridge. "No thanks," she added as Beckett offered her one, too.

"Well, while I was busy doing that, to no avail, I did not open one box of my mother's possessions. The only thing that I could look at of hers was her wedding ring, which, as you know, I wear every single day. Before she died, mum had recommended a book to me, saying that it was one of the best things she'd read in a long time. I said no – I wasn't a big fan of the genre. And then, she was killed. Dad boxed up the stuff of hers that he couldn't keep. And he gave them to me. I let them rot in a corner, having no particular interest in them at all. Her book collection was in there. And in every single one of them, she'd written her name."

"Is this going anywhere? Because I'm supposed to be looking at Ryan and Esposito's stiff."

"Sorry. Anyway, after a particularly bad day at work, I came home and I saw the boxes. I decided to go through them, just to see if I could find something – anything – that would help me solve her murder. That's when I found this."

Beckett walked over to the bookcase and pulled out a book that looked as though it had been extremely well-read. The jacket on the cover was frayed and dirty, and the pages were crumpled and curling up at the edges. Lanie, confused, took the book in her hands and opened the front cover. There was the name 'Johanna Beckett' written there, just like Kate had said there would be. Then she looked at the cover of the book.

"That was the book that made me get help. I knew that I needed to stop digging into my mother's case, otherwise I'd never be able to let go of it. It was her favourite book. And I looked up the author, found out he'd written more books, so I looked them up. Whenever I was having a particularly bad day, I would pick up one of his books and read it until I fell asleep. He was there for me whenever I was feeling upset, or angry. Whenever I felt like just giving up. He helped me through a lot, Lanie."

"Does he know about this?"

"No," Beckett said. "And he's not going to know – ever."

Lanie looked seriously at her friend. "Is there anything else that I need to know?"

Beckett nodded and led Lanie to the murder board she'd made of her mother, now updated with the new information they'd gotten the previous week. "I made this when Castle went to the Hamptons over the Summer. I looked at it every day, hoping for some new fact to come jumping out at me. You know that I was a wreck without him here. What if I never see him again, Lanie? Am I going to go down that road again? The Hamptons was just for three months, and look what it did to me. I'm scared, Lanie."

Not knowing what to say, Lanie looked from the murder board to Beckett, who was looking down at her shoes and trying not to cry. And then, finally, she looked at the book that she still held in her hands. A name on the front cover stared her in the face as she looked at his first published work – Richard Castle.


Hey guys! Sorry for not updating in ages. Uni started, and you know I have that "I'm not posting another chapter until I finished one further down the track", and I only just finished one, so here's the next chapter. Juggling uni and work has been stressing me out for a while, and I got sick, and the doctor gave me yesterday, today and tomorrow off work and school. Though yesterday didn't really count as I'd already been to uni (and done a ten-minute test worth 15% of my unit mark) and I didn't have work to begin with.

Anyway, enough rambles from me. I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and I should have some more for you soon, seeing as how I'm home and I've got nothing else to do.
I was also thinking about working on a fanvid. What do you think?

Love, gabiellexx