Hey everyone! I am SOOOO sorry about the long wait on this one. I had intentions of working on this over my Christmas break, and one thing kind of happened after another. Hopefully it was worth the wait to you, and be on the look out for another chapter very soon!

3:00-4:00PM

3:00 Chris took only a moment to process both the words that had been spoken to him and the person whose mouth was spitting them out.

"I'm going to make you pay for everything you've done to me. I'm going to make you so fucking miserable, you're going to wish you were dead." The words echoed slowly in his head as he began to feel the warm, familiar tingle of anger rise from deep in his gut. He began to clench his fists and his entire body tensed up.

"What I've done to you?" Chris's voice trembled as he tried to control the raging hate he felt for this man. "What I've done to you?!" He bellowed. "I fucking trusted you – that's what I did." Chris said, his voice taking on a threatening tone.

"Trusted me with what?" the man asked him. "Your terrible heartbreak with the divorce?" He scoffed. "You need to grow a set of balls, Chris." The man paused for a moment and smiled. "You trusted me with nothing more than a load of crap, Chris, and I'm actually surprised you even called to trust me with that much – especially since you fired me so unceremoniously a few years ago." Chris rolled his eyes and sighed exasperatedly.

"Oh, don't even give me that shit! You fucking quit! And, on top of that, it was Stephanie's call, not mine. I wasn't in charge of personnel and you know that!" Chris yelled at him.

"You can't possibly tell me that you didn't have any say in that portion of the company."

"I didn't. Personnel is Stephanie's turf. I never messed with that. I controlled the financial aspects of the business and that's about as far as it went. She might ask for a second opinion if she was really torn about the decision, but for the most part, she does it by herself. And, if I remember correctly, you and I were still on good terms." Chris said to him.

"Good terms?" the man asked in disbelief. "Oh, Chris, you are so naïve. I will never forgive and befriend the company that put mine out of business."

"So, let me get this straight, Paul." Chris said. Paul Heyman looked back at him, his smile turning into somewhat of a scowl. "You're orchestrating all of this because I used to own a company that was run by a man that put yours out of business? Am I thinking about this right?"

"No, no, no, Chris. I'm orchestrating this because I can. I'm orchestrating this because someone has finally shown me the error of your ways." He said. "Someone has told me how this company needs to be brought to its knees and needs to have a new leader emerge from the depths." Paul paused for a moment. "Vince was living my dream, Chris. I never got the chance to live that dream. Today marks the start of that dream." Chris chuckled and looked at each of the men who were still holding him up.

"Don't worry, Chris. In the grand scheme of things, today isn't even really about you. Today you are merely a pawn in my game – expendable, but still valuable to the overall victory." Paul told him.

"Well, you know Paul, that's all fine and dandy, but I don't own any part of that company anymore. And, if you were thinking about using me to get to Stephanie, you might as well forget it. It's a waste of time." Chris said to him. "She couldn't care less about me right now."

"I beg to differ." Paul told him. Chris studied his face for a moment, trying to decide to ignore the comment that was just made and then spoke again.

"So, if I'm so 'expendable' as you put it, then why am I even alive right now? Why not just kill me and save me the trouble of waiting?" Chris asked him.

"Oh, Chris… I know that right now you'd love nothing more than for me to kill you, seeing as you couldn't get the job done yourself." He said, pausing to look at Chris, who was glaring back up at him. "And right now, you are more valuable to me alive than dead." Paul told him.

"So why am I here, Paul?" Chris demanded, getting frustrated with the situation. "What is this place?" He asked, nodding his head towards the warehouse that was behind Paul. Paul took in a breath and clasped his hands together.

"All in good time, Chris. All in good time." He paused and started walking towards the warehouse before stopping and turning to speak once again. "Should I tell your ex-wife and your son hello when they get here?"

Upon first seeing Paul Heyman's face, the fuse that was Chris Irvine's temper ignited. But, when he heard that his ex-wife and his son were suddenly being dragged into this place for some revenge play, he exploded. Without warning, he lunged at Heyman, and came within inches of reaching him and tearing him to shreds. The two men who had been holding him in place tackled him to the ground just before he got there. He writhed and tried to wiggle free from them in the gravel, but only succeeded in knocking up a bunch of dust. Soon after, he stopped struggling and allowed himself to be pinned face down to the ground. He glared up at Heyman, who simply grinned down at him. Heyman turned to the other two men.

"Snitsky, Kennedy." He said. "Do what you want with him to calm him down, and then bring him inside." Chris shifted again and Heyman paused for a second. "Our other guests will be arriving soon. I need to make a phone call and see where they are."

Gene Snitsky wrestled Chris's arms behind his back as Ken Kennedy slowly shifted his weight off of Chris. Once Snitsky had a good hold of Chris, he dragged him up to his knees as Kennedy stalked slowly around them, much like a vulture eyeing its prey. True to form, Chris took his beating like a man, never once letting a sound of agony escape from his lips.

When they had finished with him, Chris was beaten to the proverbial pulp, and they were dragging his unconscious form into the warehouse.

3:24 "Where are we going?" Ash asked the man that was driving the car he was in.

"We're going to see your mom." The man answered him.

"Why did that other man hold a gun at me?" Ash asked the man, turning more to face him and whine.

"We did what we had to." He responded.

"But what about Shawn? Is he-?" Ash was cut off in mid-sentence as the man reached out his right hand and struck him across the face.

"Stop asking questions!" He bellowed at him. Ash reached a hand up to his face as the tears began to well up in his eyes. He recoiled into a ball and scooted as far away from the man as he could get in the passenger seat. He turned to peer out the window into one of the side mirrors of the vehicle, and noticed a car behind them. It captured his attention only for a moment, soon after he went back to looking out the window.

Kurt Angle, who was in the vehicle following Ash and this strange man, had seen enough of the encounter to know that something wasn't right. It boiled his blood to see what little of it he could. He was finally beginning to realize, however, just how difficult it was to actually follow a vehicle and remain unseen by the person. In everyday traffic, no one pays that much attention to the vehicles around them, not enough to know if someone is following them immediately, anyway. Following someone intentionally made Kurt paranoid of being seen and caught and that simply couldn't happen if he ever wanted to see his friends safe again.

3:32 "Are you in on this too?" Stephanie was nearly screaming, turned around, facing the backseat, which held a very withered, and worn looking Shawn Hickenbottom. "Are you in on this too?!"

"No, Stephanie, of course not!" He yelled back at her finally.

"Then why were you helping them?" She asked him. "Why did you lead me into this?"

"Stephanie, I'm asking you, please let it go for the moment. Accept the fact-" Shawn started to rationalize, when Stephanie cut him off.

"Let it go?!" Stephanie demanded. "Do you honestly think that I'm just going to let this go?"

"Accept the fact," Shawn continued. "That this happened, and that it is what it is right now. I promise to you that I will explain what is happening when we get out of this, but for the moment, you're going to have to trust me." He said. Stephanie scoffed at him before turning around.

"I trusted you this morning and look where it landed me." She muttered.

"All right, all right." Mark Calloway said, butting in on the conversation. "As much as I hate to interrupt the little love fest that is occurring right at this very moment, I'm tired of listening to it. So would ya please shut up?"

"Gladly." Stephanie said. Shawn snorted.

"Well now, that's a first." He muttered.

"What was that?" she asked him, turning back around, right as Mark's hand collided with her cheek with a resounding smack. She reeled backwards into the door and the passenger side window. Shawn made like he was going to lunge into the front seat and attack, but Mark whipped around and held a gun under his chin. With all of the bickering going on between him and Stephanie, he had completely failed to realize that they were no longer moving.

"Sit back in the seat, Shawn." Mark growled at him. "Sit back down, or next time, she'll get a bullet in her head."

Shawn kept his position for a few moments longer, leveling his gaze with Mark's, the barrel of his gun still pressed under Shawn's chin.

"Why don't you just pull the trigger right now?" Shawn asked him.

"Don't tempt me." Mark said.

"Shawn, what are you doing?" Stephanie asked him, leaning back against the passenger window, clutching her cheek. Her eyes were wide with disbelief. He turned to her.

"Stephanie, this is just stupid to keep getting jerked around like this." He said. "I'm sick of-"

The sound of a gunshot cut off Shawn's sentence midway. He flopped back against the seat and clutched his neck, moaning in pain. Stephanie screamed when the gun went off, and turned in disbelief to Mark, who simply shrugged.

"He said he was tired of it." He said, and then seeing the look on Stephanie's face, he added. "He'll be fine. I just grazed him." Mark looked back at Shawn.

"Are we all ready to keep moving now?" He asked.

3:43 When Chris came to, he was in a dimly lit room that was actually smaller than the living room in his apartment, which was comparable to a sardine can. His hands and feet were no longer bound, but judging by the way he felt, and the way he imagined he looked, he wasn't sure that he was even up to trying a resistance. Instead, he felt content to simply stare at the ceiling and remain motionless, thinking about the events of the day.

How had it come to this…again? How had he been put in this predicament for a third time? Was it sad that he really wasn't even fazed about it anymore? He sighed and closed his eyes. He wondered how his son would look when he saw him…wondered if he would know who Chris was. He had shaved his face earlier, but he had also gotten a severe haircut about a month ago. He knew that the two together would have made it difficult for Ash, but he figured that one change wouldn't be too hard to figure out.

He thought about Stephanie. About where she fit into all of this. About how she had taken over her father's business. About the conversation that they had had through their lawyers about the fate of the business. She had offered to let him continue to work for the WWE, to even keep the same job that he had, and he had tried it for a while. Eventually, as the divorce dragged on, things got worse. He stopped showing up to work because every time he saw her and…Shawn…he could hardly control the rage inside of him. He was still an active member of the roster, and in his last match he had seriously injured one of the other talents while trying to vent his anger on the matter.

From there, he destroyed the things in their house. The house that he later wound up giving to her in the settlement. He had burned their mattress on the front lawn when she was supposed to have come by to have some of the paperwork signed. She wound up getting just about everything that they had ever owned. He had visitation rights with Ash for a while, but when he had started drinking, Stephanie didn't want him around Ash in that frame of mind, and he couldn't say that he blamed her.

After that, everything else in his life just fell apart. He lost touch with friends. He started to withdraw into himself. He had spoken to Paul Heyman about the whole situation a few months after everything went to hell, since he had called Chris on a business matter, and Chris had to confide to him why he was no longer involved in the business process.

Then his thoughts ventured to the place that he had not allowed them to go since the event had happened. He felt a lump rise in his throat as the images and emotions came back to him. He remembered researching the right model, the right place, the right ammunition…everything. He had thought about doing it countless times before, and before he had always been able to talk himself out of it. There was always that one reason that would finally break him and he would walk away from the store thinking that he was stupid for even bringing it up in the first place.

But not this night.

The final divorce papers were lying out on the coffee table in the apartment before him, awaiting only his signature to make the document legal and binding. With his signature, the bond between him and Stephanie would be broken forever…legally, at least. He couldn't remember how many times he had picked that pen up and tried to sign it. Each time he lowered the pen to the paper, he found that his arm was impossible to move. Eventually he talked himself into walking down the block to the store to finally buy it.

It didn't seem real. Not the purchase, not the walk back, not the memory of him loading it…all of that seemed like a dream to him. The instant that it finally became real was when he picked up that pen and signed it with such force that it put a small hole in the paper. He could still see the pen sitting on the table where he had dropped it after signing the paper. He could still remember how his eyes had started to tear up at that moment. His arm seemed to be working on autopilot. He didn't remember thinking much of anything until the barrel of the gun nuzzled its way next to his temple.

In that instant, he saw everything. He saw his heartbreak with Stephanie. He saw the car wreck that had both separated them the first time. He saw everything that had ever made him feel horrible, and his finger squeezed the trigger. But, right on the tail of all of the things in his life that were wrong, he thought of all of the things that had made him happy. He thought of their wedding. He thought of Ash's birth, his first steps, and his first words. He opened his eyes and he found himself staring at the picture that Stephanie had taken of he and Ash together on the beach the summer right after he had learned to walk. After seeing the picture, he couldn't stop the thought.

"What would Ash think of his father if he killed himself?"

And it was that thought that broke him out of his trance. He threw the gun across the room as hard as he could and began to sob.

3:56 "Yo!Sleeping beauty, you hear what I said?" Kennedy was yelling at him, bringing him back to the world of the present.

"No, captain, I did not." Chris said, remaining motionless. Kennedy walked across the room and stood over Chris, so that he appeared to be upside down.

"I said that there's someone here Paul wants you to see, so I suggest you get your ass up and into these-" he said, jiggling a pair of handcuffs "So that we can get moving." Chris sighed and stood up. Kennedy slapped the handcuffs on him, pinning his arms behind his back. "Good." He said. "Now let's go."

Chris allowed himself to be marched around through various hallways and rooms until he was brought to a larger room that seemed to look much like an old barn. Paul was standing right in front of him, which prevented him from making a visual "sweep" of the room.

"Nice to see you so soon again, Paul." Chris said, his voice sounding a little raw. Paul smirked and nodded.

"Likewise, Chris." He said, and shifted his eyes around him a little bit before sighing. "Don't say that I never did anything for you." He said.

"Never did anything for me…?" Chris started to ask and trailed off, when Paul stepped out of the way.

"Keep an eye on him, Kennedy." Paul said, "I have to keep him occupied for a few minutes." Kennedy nodded as Paul waddled off. Chris simply stood there in shock.

Standing about ten feet in front of him was his son, Ash, in the flesh and blood. Ash was staring at him.

"Daddy?" he asked. Chris felt the lump in his throat return and he choked back tears of joy as he ran to his son, who wrapped his small arms around him. "Daddy!" he nearly screamed.

4:00 Chris fell to his knees in front of his son, right as Ash tackled him with a hug. He thought that his heart would burst with joy. He wished that his hands were free to wrap his arms around his son and attempt to shield him from everything that had happened and everything that was going to happen.