Chapter Eight
Building Trust
"Kate, you're the best that I've ever trained, maybe the best I've ever seen. But you weren't having any fun before he came along."
Captain Roy Montgomery
Previously
"Lieutenant Castle, it's Kate Beckett." Kate whispered, feeling very small.
"Miss Beckett, are you okay? Is something wrong?" His voice overflowed with concern, worried she might be in danger.
"I...I'm sorry to bother you, Lieutenant...but I... I need to talk to somebody...and my dad...He loves me, but he,doesn't understand." She rambled, not knowing why she found it so easy to trust him. But the way he had related to his daughter the day they'd come to the cabin, and when she had gone to theirs had given her hope.
"Of course, Miss Beckett." He responded, "it's no bother at all." She could tell he was confused, but willing to reach out to her in a way that warmed her heart and made her feel a little safer.
"Please...call me Kate." She said, before inviting him to her home.
When the two solid knocks sounded on her door, Kate thought she was going to have a panic attack, they were so loud... at least to her. They echoed off the walls of her apartment from the solid reinforced steel door, a holdover from the industrial building her apartment complex had once been.
She had remembered being somewhat paranoid after Scott Dunn had fire-bombed her last apartment. The heavy steel door with the solid deadbolts and hinges set into a heavy steel frame had been a major selling point when she'd first been shown the building.
That the owner had been willing to permit her to have her own locksmith replace and modernize all the lock cylinders and have a full security system installed, neither of which he would have access to, was another. (the money she could throw around as a best-selling author held certain advantages).
The windows were more secure, too, especially the ones on the fire escape. Her place was a fortress when she'd moved in two years ago, it was even more so now since the security expert Black Pawn had insisted upon had been through while she was at the family cabin.
She had not been sure whom she could trust at the NYPD at the time, so the system had been set to alert a man at the FBI NY field office that Shaw had personally vouched for. She was considering having it changed to contact dispatch at the 12th Precinct now that she had reasonable assurances (and a few unreasonable ones) that the new Captain, Victoria Gates was indeed cleaning house with a very wide broom.
Her father had told her about Detective Ryan's apology, along with his assurances that he believed the younger man to be sincere. She would have Jordan check Kevin Ryan out before she would consider trusting him, though. After what had happened with his previous partner, she knew Javier Esposito was extremely selective in whom he placed his trust, though. Only time would tell. Until then she would verify before she took any chances.
When Kate Beckett opened the door, Richard Castle could tell that he had startled her.
He'd forgotten about, or perhaps his mind had blocked, how easily loud noises used to set him off in the early days of his recuperation, when his PTSD had been at its worst. His mother had given him the first floor bedroom and en-suite so he could navigate easily in the wheelchair and he wouldn't have to navigate the stairs while his femur healed once he'd graduated to crutches and then a cane. But every noise in the house had seemed amplified in his mind... until he found ways to cope.
Though part of him believed his mother liked the idea of descending the stairs when company came over... (something that happened very rarely during his recovery back then, she'd mother-henned him almost the whole time) so she could make an entrance.
Kate Beckett was looking at him with that very same expression on her face that Alexis had whenever she had stood at his open bedroom door, having found her way down the stairs in the middle of the night after a nightmare had brought her from her bedroom to his, needing to see Daddy with her own eyes.
More than once after he and Alexis had moved to New York from California, he had found Alexis in tears at his bedroom door in the middle of the night wanting to crawl in bed with him. He knew why even if she no longer did. She'd witnessed him getting grazed by a bullet during that damned bank robbery.
She must have stood on a desk or a chair to look outside... looking for him, he was sure. He'd looked up into the day care center's window after returning fire to see the expression of horror on her little face before the attendant pulled her away from the window. Alexis never once spoke of it and he could never bring himself to push her.
The daycare center's child psychologist had insisted that she didn't remember it - that she'd blocked it out, (and he believed her) but she'd had nightmares periodically for years, long after they could possibly be attributed to night-terrors.
Especially on those nights a case would keep him out late and he couldn't there to sweep her room for monsters before her bedtime. Even now, at seventeen, she occasionally still asked him - though she tried to pass if off as making him feel better about her growing up.
He did it too, every single time she asked, without judgment and without hesitation. Methodically performed the full sweep of her bedroom just like the Marines had taught him to clear a room in an urban warfare environment. If it was what she needed to feel safe and secure at night, he would do it until the day he died.
He had thrown himself headlong into his own emotional recovery after that so he could be there for his little girl. She had needed him to get better, so he made himself be better, because he was all she had. He had snapped to and soldiered on because Alexis needed him to. Slowly but surely though, he began to get better as well... began to see in the mirror the man his daughter saw...the one Kyra had seen in him over twenty years ago. The man he thought had died with her that day in a hospital tent Iraq.
He could no more abandon Kate to her fear now than he could his daughter back then and still call himself a man. Not if he wanted to earn the second chance the universe had given him when that tiny person had been placed in his arms in a pink blanket. The Corps had taught him to never leave anyone behind. He had survived Iraq because of that code of honor and now it was his turn to pay it forward.
Semper Fi.
"Come on, Kate, " Rick said finally, "as secure as this place might be, it isn't what you need. Hiding here isn't the answer."
Rodgers Loft
Kate hadn't been sure what to expect when Lt. Castle told her to grab her coat and put on her shoes. But when she stepped out of his car and looked up at the impressive building on Broome Street she was confused. She didn't understand how he could live here of all places.
"How can you afford to live here on a cop's salary?" she asked, "Even a lieutenant's pay grade isn't this good."
She began to worry. Nothing Jordan had dug up showed he was dirty.
"I can't," Castle replied, "but my mother can."
"Your mother?" She asked, confused.
"Come now, Kate, I'm sure you've at least heard of Martha Rodgers," he said.
"Oh," Kate replied. She had really only skimmed that part of his file. Jordan was a profiler by trade and as such tended to gather every shred of information she could find. It was necessary in her profession she supposed. She had stuck to more recent information, but to be honest it made her feel better that his family was wealthy than the alternative.
"Eduardo, this is Miss Beckett." Rick announced, "Unless she is with someone you don't recognize, you are to let her up to my floor immediately."
Eduardo nodded. Though it was generally accepted that he worked for the building manager and it was his mother's name on the lease, the doorman knew that she had long ago ceded security arrangements to her son the cop. All of the building's people knew who he and Alexis were. They'd watched her grow up and she'd played with their knew whom Eduardo actually worked for and if Richard Webb had anything to say about it, it would stay that way.
There was a reason the con man Martha Rodgers had been engaged to had never come back. Little did anyone know that his new residence was six feet below the foundation of a parking garage in New Jersey with a double tap to the head. Eduardo had helped Webb re-pour the fresh concrete himself.
He rarely got this hands-on with a covert protection detail, (sanctions were not exactly in his wheelhouse either) nor would he exactly characterize his relationship with Richard Webb, or Jackson Hunt, or whatever alias he was using this week as friendly, but for once in his career (which he knew was winding down, this sort of thing was a young man's game really) he was guarding people who were genuinely worth giving a damn about. It made him want to go the extra mile. Even if he got a little dirty in the process.
He subconsciously added the nervous looking woman with the chestnut hair and haunted green eyes to a list in his head of people under his responsibility, at least until somebody higher up the food chain ordered otherwise.
Alexis was surprised when her father walked in the door with none other than Katherine Beckett in tow. She was delighted to see her favorite author again, but surprised at her sudden appearance. Her grandmother stood just inside the doorway, Rick rarely brought women home anymore, until Alexis poked her gently in the side with an elbow.
"Gram...manners!" She stage whispered, and Martha Rodgers personality instantly brightened from hesitant apprehension to full stage mother mode. Hurricane Martha was in full evidence.
"Welcome to our humble home, Katherine Beckett! I am so pleased to make your acquaintance, you are all Alexis has been able to talk about since she and Richard came home from their Labor Day trip."
Before Kate could frame a proper response or put her own public persona in place, Martha opened the door wide, took her by both hands and lead her inside, Castle smiled in spite of himself. His mother may be an acquired taste, but she certainly knew how to make somebody feel welcome. In spite of how awkward this must be for both of them.
"Please..." Kate stammered, "call me Kate."
"Nonsense dear one," Martha replied, "you look more like a Katherine to me, did I mention that I worked with Katherine Hepburn once?"
Martha's voice trailed off as she gave Kate the grand tour of the loft and Alexis looked up at her father.
"You sure she can handle this much of Grams all at once?" she asked.
"Kate needs the distraction, she was wallowing in her demons and they were dragging her under. If anyone remembers what that's like, it's your grandmother. I wasn't much better once upon a time."
"Are you okay dad?" Alexis asked, her eyes watering at the notion that her father had ever been that wounded.
"I will be, Pumpkin," he whispered, drawing her into a hug and kissing the top of her head.
He would let Kate have tonight and tomorrow to find her equilibrium and then they would have a conversation about what she was hiding from him. He hadn't wanted to do that in front of Ryan the other day. The man was just starting to see her as more than the woman his partner hated, and Esposito was just starting to get his shit together where she was concerned. But he'd found a package on his desk at the precinct that morning with photos of Alexis at school and on her date with Ashley.
The time for Kate keeping her cards close to the vest was over. Whomever she was afraid of had made a not so subtle threat to his family. Whomever thought that was a good tactic to take with him had underestimated him badly.
They have sown the wind, and now they were going to reap the whirlwind.
Now it was his fight every bit as much as hers.
**Author's Note** Moving this story toward 25K I'll try to post right up to the deadline if I can. To the "guest" reviewer who is concerned about some of my earlier unfinished works, don't worry, I haven't forgotten about or abandoned them, or at least not for long. I have every intention of getting back into them. Sometimes when I hit a wall I take the path of least resistance and write the story that comes to me til I can write the story I left off on. The creative process does not always work in a straight line.
