It couldn't have been more than a small handful of hours when Rick awoke startled to someone banging on the door to his suite. And then he heard her voice, an audible tinge of desperation curling around his name as she slammed her fist into the door, and Castle stumbled out of the bed, pulled on his boxers from the night before and scrambled to let her in before she alerted security.

"Kate, what-"

"No time," she stated as she strode inside, dressed extremely different from last night in a professional white button down and slimming black slacks. She surpassed him for the bedroom, where she went straight for his closet.

He followed her in confusion, saw her throwing all of his clothes on the bed and rolling his suitcase out.

"What's going on?" She ignored him, hauled his suitcase onto the bed and began stuffing his clothes inside. "Kate."

She stopped, but when she looked up at him, her eyes were frantic and her bottom lip was raw and trembling. Rick tentatively moved closer to stand in front of her, placed his hands on her shoulders and felt she was actually shaking.

He narrowed his eyes on her. "What's wrong?"

Her mouth moved and for a moment, nothing came out, but then she pulled his hands from her shoulders, clenched them painfully tight in her own.

"I can't go on lying to you," she whispered, dropping his hands and crossing her arms over her chest instead, digging her fingers into her biceps while he felt his stomach drop.

"I thought we were done lying to each other," he said, forcing his voice to remain even, but a nervous sweat was cumulating on his naked back. Obviously, there were still secrets. He had only known her for barely two full days, but lies were different. Lies were worse.

"This is different," she murmured, reaching for the clothes now strewn across his sheets and handing him a t-shirt. He slid it on, took the pair of jeans she offered next, but he caught her wrist when she attempted to continued stalling in the form of dressing him.

"Tell me."

She planted her hands on her hips and pursed her lips, squared her shoulders as if preparing herself for a fight before finally meeting his stare.

"Your wife…" Oh, oh. How did she know about that? He couldn't blame her if that was what she was upset about, sleeping with a married man, but- "She hired me to kill you."

He froze, felt his heart still before stumbling to resume beating.

That was the last thing he would have ever expected to come out of her mouth. And he found that he didn't believe it. He couldn't. Gina would never… would she?

"What - what are you talking about?"

Kate sighed, slipped her hand into her back pocket and produced a leather wallet, but when she held it up to him, let it flip open, he saw it was an ID with a badge. Credentials.

Holy shit.

"Who are you?" he breathed, taking an unsteady step back from her, and he noticed she had to stop herself from moving after him.

"Special Agent Kate Beckett, undercover operations," she confessed with downcast eyes, returning the credentials to her pocket, but still keeping her gaze to the floor. "Your wife contacted my fake agency, I met with her earlier this week and she instructed me to…"

"Kill me?" he finished for her in disbelief. "You're lying. You can't be-"

"I'm not," she insisted vehemently. "I have proof."

Her fingers hooked on the zipper of her bag, but he lifted his hands to stop her, placed them on his knees as he doubled over. "There's no way…"

Kate's hand hovered at his shoulder but he knocked it away, stood up straight and paced further away from her.

She sighed but made no attempt to touch him again. "I never intended to hurt you, Castle."

"Never intended to sleep with me either, right? Or is that part of the job too?" he growled, the angry bitterness surprising him, but it felt like betrayal and he was sick of every woman in his life betraying him, hurting him.

"No," she answered, her composure well and intact as his continued to crumble to pieces. "It was never supposed to go that far and I apologize for taking advantage of the situation."

"Well, I don't," he snapped, walking around her to snag a plaid over shirt from the small fabric pile and pushing his arms through the sleeves. "But I'm supposed to pretend I do for your benefit, or better yet, the sake of this so called operation, right?"

"Listen, I know you're angry, but we have to move, Rick. We have to-"

"You think I'm leaving here with you?"

"If you prefer to live, you really don't have a choice," she said pointedly, her patience with him slipping, but he only scowled at her.

"I always have a choice and it is definitely not you," he snapped, his voice shaking with the rising edge of rage.

He noticed her shrink back a fraction, a little wounded at that, but he was not exactly concerned with her feelings at the moment.

He watched her take in a deep breath before she looked at him again. "I am with the FBI, I am here to protect you – that's all. You don't even have to acknowledge me, Rick. Just let me prevent your murder."

He scoffed. The way she spoke to him, with such impersonal ease, infuriated him. How dare she treat him like - like he was just some assignment after everything that had happened within the last 48 hours, after everything she had done. No, she did not get to drag him into damn near falling in love with her and then talk to him, look at him, as if they were strangers.

"Just another job to you then?" he muttered with the bitterness sparking on his tongue and Kate rubbed a hand down her face in obvious exasperation. Their relationship - if he could even call it that - was the last thing he should be focusing on if what she had told him was in fact true, but he couldn't resist. Who knew when he would get the chance to ask her again, to learn a piece of the truth in her lies? For all he knew, she planned to disappear again as soon as she could and he was desperate for something real before she did. "Or do you do this with all of the men you're supposed to be protecting?"

She sent him a reproachful glare at that, a warning that he was pushing it, to tread lighter, but he didn't care and he wouldn't. Not anymore.

"No, I do not," she answered through gritted teeth before raking her fingers through her hair and clasping them at the back of her neck, taking in another deep breath to collect herself, to stay calm, but he didn't want her calm. He wanted her as wrecked and wounded as he felt. "But Castle, you have to take into consideration that we barely know each other, you can't think I-"

"Are you kidding me?" It took everything he had not to shout at her, to unleash his building rage on her in the suddenly too small hotel room. "Do you know how hard it was to take my mind off of you, of what we did, after that night we met?" he demanded, voice rough, raw and exhausted from this disaster of a morning. "I don't believe in love at first sight, but there was something real there that I've never felt before, not with anyone else, not so fast, and I don't want to let it go again. Even after - even now." He held her gaze, daring her to dispute his statement, but she merely blinked in surprise at the admission. And then it was as though the shutters had been drawn, the walls that fortified her heart already rising up to keep him out.

"Love?" she parroted back, bafflement clouding her voice before resolution took over and she shook her head, shook off his words. "You don't love me. Don't say things like that."

"I could." He shrugged his shoulders, knowing he was most likely making her head spin, but his head had been spinning for days - years, really - over her.

"No," she rasped, her voice slowly building as she moved for his suitcase again, fixing her gaze on his clothes, folding them and arranging them neatly in the carryon. "You can't love me, Rick. You won't. No matter what this is, whatever happened last night or yesterday, or the night before, or even seven years ago - it isn't like that. No strings, no attachments, that's the deal," she instructed, more to herself than him it seemed, her eyes burning gold with determination as she stared at her hands, but he could see the leaks of resolve springing through. She could pretend she felt nothing for him, but he could tell she was struggling.

He growled, low in his throat, and watched her stiffen at the noise. "I never agreed to that deal."

"Too bad."

It was an odd sensation, to hate her for lying, for using him, yet to still want her just as intensely as he had before she'd revealed the truth of why she had shown any interest in him in the first place. But he refused to believe it was all a ruse, a job, especially after last night. How she had touched him… he could not be convinced she was that good of an actress.

He attempted to ignore the flares of aggravation still bubbling beneath the surface of his skin and pressed on.

"You know it doesn't work like that," he countered, moving in on her once more. She didn't back away, pretended not to acknowledge him. "I'm already attached."

"I won't love you back," she grounded out, slamming his suitcase closed but he caught her by the wrist, forced her to look at him and matched her fierce glare of indignation when she did.

"But I can love you?"

"Castle," she huffed, wrenching free of his hold. "We have to go, okay? I have to get you to a safe house in New York until the threat on your life is neutralized and we're wasting time here."

A safe house? Huh. This was kind of cool if he forgot about the fact that his wife wanted him dead and the woman he had serious feelings for hadn't just betrayed his trust. Bad, very bad, but still cool.

"Do you have her on conspiracy to commit murder?" he inquired out of curiosity and Kate visibly relaxed at the work related question, a question she could actually answer.

"We will, but she's currently on the run according to my people. I was supposed to keep an eye on you until they caught her, but then I screwed up and she got suspicious, dropped us for a different agency, a real agency."

She looked so disappointed with herself for apparently spooking Gina and he reached to touch her back before thinking better of it. He needed to stop that, stop viewing her as someone he could potentially care about, not when she probably didn't care for him at all. Maybe she really was that good, maybe she was just as heartless as the woman she was trying to protect him from.

"Why does Gina want me dead? I know our marriage is falling apart-"

"That's exactly why," she replied, stalking away from him and methodically working her way around his suite, retracting something from the back of the flat screen television, the lamp on the nightstand, the flowers in the living room – she had bugged his room?

"You've been spying on me?" he asked incredulously, and she paused for a moment, but then continued as if he hadn't even spoken.

"She claims that if you divorce, she has a lot to lose."

He groaned under his breath, pressed the heels of his palms into the sockets of his eyes until the pressure made his corneas throb. "Maybe I shouldn't have threatened to fire her the last time we had a fight. She's my publisher," he informed her when she glanced back at him in question.

"That would make sense," she agreed, making one last sweep of the room with her eyes. "No money, no steady income, lots of legal issues – decent motives. Are you ready to go?"

He glanced around his hotel suite without really seeing anything. His anger towards her was still present, but deflated, only disbelief remaining in its place. "Guess so."

He met her at the door, but hesitated.

"Kate," he murmured, so much crammed into the single syllable of her name and she turned to him with eyes that were soft in understanding. He wasn't a professional like her, knew his emotions were playing out across his face, knew that she could see he was scared.

"I won't let anything happen to you, Castle. We have a team on your daughter so-"

He jerked as if she had struck him.

Oh god, Alexis. His daughter.

He growled, balling his fists at his side as if he could fight the sudden threat on his family with his bare hands. "If anyone touches her-"

Kate's hand lifted to the side of his neck, fingers curved over his thundering pulse.

"No one will hurt her or anyone you love. I promise you, but I don't know what kind of time frame we have right now, how quickly your wife will have someone new on the hunt for you, so we can't risk it. The sooner we're in the air on the way to the safe house, the better."

He wanted to argue, wanted another way that did not involve leaving his daughter to hide like a coward, but he fought the urge to protest and nodded instead, took her hand when she ghosted her fingers along his knuckles, and allowed her to lead him out of the hotel room, down the hall to the elevator.

"She's not my wife," he muttered, clenching his fist around the handle of his suitcase as they stepped inside the lift.

Kate coasted her hand up to his shoulder and squeezed lightly, waited until the elevator had taken them down to the lobby to respond.

"She doesn't deserve to be."