I think I forgot to update yesterday, so I'm posting two chapters tonight to make up for it.

0o0o0o0o0o0o

I threw my bag on the hotel bed. It had been a long flight from New York, but we had finally arrived in Costa Verde. Gabriel had said he had to see a girl named Claire Bennet, so I had checked us into the hotel.

All day, I'd had a bad feeling that I was unable to shake. I told myself that I was being crazy. My mother was the one who could see the future, but then, she'd always said that women had an intuition that men simply lacked.

I paced the room restlessly. Something was wrong, I knew it.

As though controlled by someone else, my hand went to the hotel room phone and began to dial my family's home number. Internally, I was screaming at myself not to do it. In my bones, I knew that if I placed the call, my life would never be the same.

"Hello?" My father's voice was shaking. My heart sank.

"Daddy? What's wrong?"

"Oh, God. Dorothy." I heard him take a deep, shaky breath. "It's your sister. There's been an accident. I…I…" My father's voice disintegrated into sobs. I heard someone else take the phone from him.

"Dorothy, it's Jerry Callahan." He was our town's deputy sheriff, a man I'd grown up with. In my heart, I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

"Rose is dead, isn't she," I whispered.

"I'm sorry, Dorothy. The paramedics did everything they could, but there was nothing they could do. I'm so sorry."

I collapsed into a chair. "How did she die," I heard myself ask.

"Maybe your father—"

I cut him off. "Tell me, Jerry."

There was a pause. "It looks like she was electrocuted, but there was a shotgun with spent rounds on the floor next to her. Whoever it was, she fought back fiercely."

I went cold. "Do you have any leads?"

Jerry sighed. "Not officially, no, but there were two people in town earlier asking about her, a man and a woman from a company called Pinehearst."

I frowned. Pinehearst wasn't the alias The Company used, but I was reeling inside and couldn't process it. It felt like my mind had shut down.

"Thank you, Jerry." I hesitated before speaking again. "It's not safe for me to come home. I need you to take care of my family for me."

"Always, Dorothy."

Numbly, I hung up the phone. I felt dizzy and disoriented and light-headed.

In a daze, I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower, not even bothering to get undressed as I stepped in.

My sister was dead.

Rose had been murdered.

My sister had been murdered because of the attention I'd brought to our family.

I was cold. Even as the hot water poured over my face and burned my skin, I couldn't stop shivering.

Images of Rose ran like a slideshow through my mind.

She and Momma teaching me how to cook.

Teaching me how to use make up.

Helping me get ready for my first date.

Holding her hand at Grandma's funeral.

Listening to her giggle as she told me about her first date with Adam.

Comforting me after I broke up with my first boyfriend.

The pride in her eyes when Tommy and Jack graduated from Marine bootcamp.

Being with her during her first pregnancy, and then Charlotte's birth.

Helping me pack for my move to New York.

The bathroom door opened and Gabriel entered and saw me sitting fully clothed under the spray of the water. "Dorothy? What's wrong? What happened?"

I just looked at him dumbly. Couldn't he tell that the world wasn't the same? Couldn't he feel it? "They killed Rose." He stood there as if he were frozen.

"I can't breathe. Gabriel, I can't…I can't breathe." My voice cracked and something inside me broke. I started sobbing. Wordlessly, Gabriel stepped into the shower and wrapped his arms around me, rocking me back and forth as I cried.

Eventually, the water went cold. He turned it off before picking me up and set me on the toilet, gently taking off my wet clothes and then his before carrying me to the bed and curling up behind me. I fell asleep in his arms, surrounded by his comforting and familiar scent.

0o0o0o0o0

I sat up in the bed, realizing that Gabriel was getting dressed. "Where are you going?"

"I'm going to raise a little hell over in Primatech." His voice was darkly amused, but he didn't face me.

My eyes narrowed, anger burning low in my stomach at the name. "Take me with you."

Not expecting my request, Gabriel turned to look at me. His eyes were dark, and I knew from the expression on his face that this was Sylar I was talking to. "I'm going to kill people, Dorothy."

I swung my legs out of the bed and stood, wrapping the sheet around me. "Think about it. You have the power to bust in, but I have access codes. With me, you get in without raising any alarms. You get your revenge, and I get access to their computers. I must find out who killed Rose. I owe it to her."

"You're going to…help me kill people," he said slowly, as if he couldn't wrap his mind around it.

"No," I corrected. "I'm going to get you into the facility where you are going to focus on the level 5 prisoners. Most of them will be put down anyway when they are of no more use to the company, and believe me when I say you're method is far kinder than what the company will do," I said bitterly. Images of tortured bodies I had been called in to heal flashed through my head, but I shoved them away.

Gabriel still looked unconvinced, so I rushed on. "No one questions people in scrubs, so it's unlikely we'll be stopped if you're with me. Besides," I said dryly, "the company has a knack for finding me when you're not around anyway. Either way, I'll probably end up there."

His gaze was black and unblinking for a moment, the wheels turning in his head as I waited for his decision. "Get dressed."

I grinned and quickly threw on my scrubs, grateful that I'd had the foresight to pack a pair. I took just long enough to throw on makeup, knowing I'd need to look professional if I didn't want to be questioned. Five minutes later, Sylar and I strode out to the car.

We pulled up to the Primatech compound and climbed out of the car. "Stay a step behind me," I told him as we approached the building. I swiped my card through the door scanner, and the machine beeped once before the door swung open. Quickly, I led him to one of the elevators. One of the guards was staring at us, but I smiled sweetly at him. "How's your day going?"

"Fine," he said politely, relaxing as he evidently judged that we were supposed to be there. The elevator finally opened, and I stepped inside, keeping my relaxed smile on just until the doors slid closed.

"Lord the guards here are idiots," I murmured. Sylar simply eyed me darkly as I punched the button for the administrative level. At the very least, Primatech was fairly uniform in their building layouts. A minute later, the doors slid open and we strode down the hall.

We reached a common area where a secretary was obviously usually posted. She must be on her break or something. Quickly, I walked around the waist level wrap around desk and sat down in her chair. Her computer was password locked.

"I'll be back in a moment," Sylar said, staring down the hall with a dark smile. "I see an old friend is here."

I nodded distractedly, not really listening as I tried to guess the woman's password. "I'm a secretary who has to log in every time I access the computer," I murmured thoughtfully. Narrowing my eyes, I typed in the first thing that came to mind: PassW0rd.

The computer opened willingly to me, and I rolled my eyes. Security was iron tight in this building, alright. Quickly, I accessed the Primatech Database and searched for any information on Rose DuValier. I kept an eye on the elevator as I read, not wanting a certain secretary to catch me unawares.

There wasn't much on her, but there was plenty on me and Charlotte. All it said about Rose was that she had evidently walked in on the company trying to take Charlotte, and had been killed by Agent Elle Bishop in self-defense.

Hearing footsteps, I quickly exited the computer, careful to make sure everything was as it had been before, and stood. It was only Sylar returning. "Did you find anything?"

"Only that she was killed by Elle Bishop," I murmured as I fell in step beside him.

He looked at me sharply. "Elle Bishop?"

"You know her?"

"She was the one who…when you went missing, she deliberately brought me a man from Suresh's list," he said grimly as we entered the elevator. "She goaded me into my first kill."

"Classy woman." As with all Primatech facilities, the elevator panel only read 4 stories, all of them above ground. In order to get to the underground levels, you had to punch a sequence in. Sylar watched as I did so, and I knew he was memorizing it.

The elevator descended to level 5, and we stepped off. When I didn't get off the elevator, Sylar looked at me. "We part ways here," I explained. "I'm going to release the level 2 prisoners. They're just people who the company finds and kidnaps to research their powers. Most of them are children."

Sylar nodded and stepped off the elevator. Less than a minute later, I stepped off as well, three floors above him. I had barely made it to the first room when the lights flickered out, leaving me in total darkness. "I leave him alone for five seconds," I muttered to myself.

A few seconds later, the backup generator kicked in, and with it, the emergency lights and a screeching power-outage alarm that meant any holding cells were now open. "Well, this is less than ideal."

People began locking the doors from the inside, security protocol for power outages, in case escapees came to this level. I had to get out before the power was restored. When it was, security and company agents would be scouring the building in search of escapees, and anyone not where they were supposed to be would be shot on sight.

I booked it to the stairwell, knowing that I would need to outrun the prisoners trying to break out. In my blue scrubs, I looked like I worked for the company, which meant they would kill me in a heartbeat. "I'm going to kill that man when I see him. Less than five minutes alone and he knocks out the power. He is in so much trouble. Jesus, I'm out of shape."

There were voices behind me, and I pushed myself to move faster, already taking the stairs two at a time. I came to an emergency door and threw myself against it, only to bounce off with a curse. My only exit was locked. "Who the fuck locks an emergency door," I cried, panicking as the voices got closer. I was trapped.

And then the prisoners were upon me, and I was pressing myself against the wall as a large man raised his flaming hand to blast me. A hand whipped out and stopped him. "Leave her," said the Hispanic man. "She's just a nurse."

"No she's not," said a wiry black man. "She's a healer. I've seen her work. We might need her later. Grab her, but don't let her touch you."

Oh, Gabriel was in soooo much trouble.

"She'll come quietly or Flint will burn her," said a blond man with glasses and a German accent.

I threw up my hands in exasperation. "Why not? Everyone else has kidnapped me, why not you guys?"

With strength that told of his power, the black man forced the door open and Flint pulled me out into the sunshine by my ponytail. I grimaced at the pain, but made no move to get away or stop him.

Quickly, the German waved his hand at a car and all the doors opened as it started. Flint shoved me into the back seat as they all crammed in. Suddenly, I was squished between Flint and the Hispanic man.

"You try anything funny and I'll show you what pain feels like," Flint growled.

It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. Yes, because the opportune moment of escape is plainly when I'm crammed like a sardine in a car of supercharged criminals going 80 down the highway. Clearly, I had been spoiled by Sylar's higher caliber villainy.

We drove for a few hours in relative silence, during which I tried to get a read on everyone. The black man, called Knox, was evidently more of the leader. His power seemed to be super strength. Flint was obviously the requisite idiot of the group. Well, every group had to have one. The German was evidently either electrical or magnetic, judging by the way he'd opened and started the car like that.

It was the Hispanic man, Jesse, that confused me. He'd tried to keep them from killing me, which was unusual in the world of Level 5 criminals.

Bowing my head to pretend to stare at my lap, I closed my eyes and reached out, a simple feat given that our legs were pressed together.

What I saw in Jesse surprised and confused me. His brain patterns were everywhere, something I'd never seen before. I didn't know what to attribute it to, but because of it, I couldn't get a read on what his power was. It was like static from picking up two channels at once.

Bewildered, I pulled out. Multiple personalities maybe? I'd never encountered one before, so I supposed it was possible. Or maybe he'd been tortured by the company and they'd messed up his brain, though I'd never seen anything to indicate the company had the power to do so.

"What?"

I started, realizing I had been frowning at him, trying to figure him out. "Sorry," I muttered, flustered, and returned my gaze to my lap.

It didn't really matter, I supposed. After all, Sylar was going to come for me, and these idiots had nothing on him.

0o0o0o0o0

We stopped at a gas station sometime after nightfall. Jesse went off to make a phone call as Flint dragged me out of the car. There was a middle aged couple gassing up their BMW SUV, but I paid them no attention, distracted by the fact that my eyeballs were floating.

"I'm going to use the restroom."

"The hell you are," Flint retorted.

"1, you will watch your language and speak to me like the lady I am. 2, unless you want me to pee on you, then yes, I am," I countered firmly, striding confidently into the gas station. You don't stand between a full bladder and the bathroom unless you have a loaded 12-gauge and an itchy trigger finger.

I was coming back out of the restroom when a flash of fire caught my eye, and I ran out to see Flint throwing a woman onto the ground and blasting her with fire as the German punched her husband. "No," I screamed as I ran to her, but Flint grabbed me by my ponytail and yanked me back.

"What are you doing," Jesse asked as he came up.

"Just having a little fun," the German commented as he walked past Jesse. With a flick of his hand, he opened and started the couple's SUV, and Flint shoved me inside next to the German before climbing in after me.

"You comin'," Knox asked Jesse as he climbed behind the wheel. "It's now or never."

"Do you understand now who you're dealin' with, sugar," Flint asked with a laugh.

I was shaking with fury. "I'm not yer sugar," I growled, anger making my accent thick.

"Wooohoo," Flint laughed. "Still feisty. Someone didn't show you to respect men. But I bet I can," he said as he grabbed my arm. Realizing a second too late what he was about to do, I struggled to get away, but only succeeded in landing across the German's lap. The man laughed and helped hold me down.

I screamed against the hand the German had clapped over my mouth as Flint pressed his palm onto my arm without tattoos, searing the thin skin. I thrashed instinctively to get away from the pain, shivers of agony running up my spine as my skin crawled. Dimly, I heard Jesse yelling at them to stop, but I could only focus on the pain. As his hand stayed on my skin, I vaguely realized I'd stopped screaming and was only groaning now.

After what seemed like hours but was probably only about a minute, the men released me with a laugh, but I could only lay panting and shaking on the German's lap.

The small, still functioning part of my brain told me that it was a 3rd degree burn as the brand itself didn't hurt. Sure, the nerves that hadn't died were screaming at the top of their lungs, drowning out everything else. Not for the first time, I wished I could heal myself, or at least turn off my own pain receptors.

Tears pricked my eyes, and oh, God, where are you, Gabriel? I need you. Why does this keep happening to me?

Because you are strong enough to take it, whispered a calm voice from the back of my mind, one that sounded like Rose. Gabriel will come for you, just as he always has. Now stop wallowing, pick yourself up, and don't let these rat bastards see you cry.

With renewed resolve, I picked myself up of the laughing German's lap and blinked the tears away. These assholes would have to do a lot better than that if they wanted to break me.

Jesse was watching me, silently asking with his eyes if I was ok, but I glared at him and raised my chin just a hint in challenge.