A/N: Kate thinks their little chit-chat while forced together has somehow solved the problem; she's pretending everything will be all right, but Castle's heart is not in it. This is a transition chapter more or less.

Disclaimer: I do not own Castle – all credit goes to Andrew Marlow and the writing team for ABC's Castle; my thanks to them for providing a foundation for this little exercise.

Chapter 11

"Beckett!?", called Esposito from the nearly black hallway.

"In here!, We're in here!", Kate yelled back.

"Yell again. I'm not sure which room it came from", Esposito called again.

Meanwhile, Ryan was checking the second and first floor hallways. Only the first floor had any artificial lights, courtesy of the temporary lighting strings left in place by the construction contractor.

"Guess what I found in the construction debris dumpster near the first-floor exit", Ryan declared proudly, as he returned to the darkened third-floor hallway, holding up police shields, guns, handcuffs, ID's, and wallets, and holding the only flashlight he could find. "Don't know where the cell phones are yet."

"Well, at least we won't have to fill out the paperwork and explain to Gates how we lost our precinct issued equipment . . . Beckett!, Where are you?, he yelled again after replying to Ryan.

"In here!" the words got louder as the two detectives yanked open the door to the room where Beckett and Castle were still bound securely to the steel pole; the beam from Ryan's flashlight revealing their predicament.

"Glad you guys are OK", the rescuers said in near unison.

"You guys . . . Castle when did you join the party?", inquired Esposito.

"Oh, I got an invitation around mid-afternoon. Rushed right over. Didn't know bondage would part of the entertainment."

The spare handcuff keys that the team had hidden in their wallets or behind their NYPD badges, a trick Castle had learned early on from the team's example, quickly appeared and the two were released from their confinement. The foursome made their way slowly down to the first floor behind the weakening beam of Ryan's flashlight.

"Shhh! Quiet guys . . . Kate, I might be imagining things, but I think I hear your cell phone ring tone coming from somewhere", Castle announced. They froze and listened intently.

"I hear it. It's down that way", Ryan announced as he headed in the direction of the muffled sound. Keep ringing . . . Keep ringing, he mentally commanded the device as he frantically tried to locate the exact spot.

Beckett caught up with him in an instant, even though her legs were sore and cramped from the position she had been in for the past few hours. She scooped the phone out of the mail drop and found Gates' caller ID showing.

"We're here Captain, Sir . . . no time to elaborate . . . only less than five percent of battery remaining . . . we're OK, send team to 17th street. We'll meet them" she concluded as the phone shut down on low battery. "Anybody else got a phone?", she asked lamely. "I hope she got that . . . but she's going to be pissed. I think I saw the time just before it went dead. I think it's about three-thirty in the morning."

Gates was at her desk. "Put a detail on that building. Have CSU do a full sweep in the morning . . . right, well it is morning; rather, as soon as dayshift begins", Gates' voice spilled over into the bullpen as the homicide team exited the elevator.

Gates was obviously commanding someone on the other end of the phone as the foursome entered her office.

"Nobody kidnaps people from my precinct and gets away with it. They are going to be found, and they are going to pay . . .", she concluded as she turned her attention to the team.

Gates only had questions pertaining to their health and wellbeing; and if anyone needed any treatment, and with those answered to her satisfaction, and with her permission, everyone dove for a desk phone and called their significant others to assure them everything was more or less back to normal, and they'd be home within the next half hour.

"What do you suppose the perps were trying to pull off?", questioned Castle, as he and Kate boarded the elevator and waited for the doors to close.

"Don't really know . . . obviously it was a set-up, and Gates is on the warpath about it. I'm only glad she allowed me to report at noon tomorrow. I'll worry about it then. What I don't understand is how two police cruisers could remain parked there for that many hours and nobody thought to monitor the lack of movement."

"You need an escort to your apartment, or are you good?", Castle mentioned off-hand.

Wow, he didn't even mention the loft . . . but then why should he? I suppose he's pretty tired of me at the moment. Girl, you've got some big dues to pay . . . Castle, Lanie, Gates, and God knows who else. I guess I'm going to be doing all the talking and they're going to asking all the questions . . . better face it sooner than later. "No, I'm a big girl Castle, I'll get there", she replied in a neutral tone.

Later, she entered the darkened apartment, the one she had left with no food, no clean clothes, and a dozen other things that needed doing, and went straight to bed. She knew the couple of hours before going back to the precinct were going to be busy by necessity.

The reunion at Castle's loft was brief for the sleep deprived threesome; Alexis having come back there for the night to stay with Martha during the vigil. They hit their respective beds hardly an hour before sunrise. Alexis decided to skip her ten o'clock class and get back to campus in the early afternoon. Fortunately, Castle had invested in black-out curtains for his room; something he drew closed very rarely. Sleep overtook him much faster than he supposed it would, after all the excitement, and the things Kate had mentioned in their brief conversations. He emerged, ready for brunch, around eleven o'clock.

The phone on the credenza rang around twelve fifteen that afternoon. He wondered why they had not called his cell phone, but then remembered that he no longer had a cell phone, or if he did, he had no idea where in Manhattan it was. Kate was on the other end.

"Gates wants you to come down to the precinct and give your statement as to what went down yesterday. I've already softened her up. She knows you had nothing to do with the matter other than being the last vic; but I assure you, she's full of questions . . . so get ready to face the music. We already have."

Castle got himself as ready as he could get, given the lack of sleep and trepidation of dealing with Captain Gates, his fault or not; and took a cab downtown toward the precinct. As he passed Tiffany's heading down Fifth Avenue, he began to add some details to a plan that would get a definitive answer from Kate Beckett once and for all. It was fraught with the risk of humiliation, just as he had mentally described it to Jameson Rook, but he didn't care, because like he had said . . . fresh air would be on the other side of the door; moreover, it would pave the way to a permanent fix or remain permanently broken with no hope of repair – problem solved, and then the Tempus could fugit all it wanted to, and it wouldn't be his concern. If the universe blessed him with good company in the future, well fine, and if not, he could remain an eligible bachelor in NYC to be advertised as such on page six of the NY Ledger until he was too old to be desirable to anybody.

"Like I said, Captain, I got a text from Detective Beckett on my cell phone about 2:15 PM yesterday. The number was from her police issued phone, so I didn't think anything was out of the ordinary . . . I mean, the team could have had a change of heart, or they could have encountered something twisted enough to merit one of my twisted theories to go along with it."

"Right Mr. Castle, we know all about your twisted theories", replied Gates with almost a touch of understanding and the minutest trace of compassion in her voice. "Oh, I almost forgot. Here is your cell phone. . . I'm sure the battery is discharged", she said as she handed him a plastic evidence bag with his phone in it. "Is there anything else missing that you know of?"

The perps are still missing he thought. "No Captain . . . Ryan recovered all of my other personal effects from the dumpster at the scene last night", Castle replied respectfully.

As he made his exit from Gates' office, he glanced around the bullpen to see who was present. Karpowski and her team were in a huddle around one of the desks looking at something on the computer monitor.

"Let Beckett and her team know that I'm done for the day. I'll catch up with them later", he politely interrupted the huddle, and then made his way to the elevator.

A/N: To be Continued.