EDIT 6.23.12: Because sometimes I just have to suck up my pride and admit that I didn't handle things as well as I thought I did. Author's notes irrelevant to the story itself have been removed from the previous chapter, not because I don't believe in what I said, but because this is not the right forum for it. My apologies.

Chapter Twelve

"You know what's bothering me, Detective?" Castle murmured as they lingered for a little while after Vong departed to maintain the illusion of a couple too caught up necking in the hall to care about anything else.

Kate poked him surreptitiously in the side. "No, but you're gonna get us blown if you keep calling me that."

"Ow, okay. Sorry. Undercover name, then. How about…Katerina? Oooh, Katerina," he repeated with a poorly done Russian accent. His eyes glazed over as he lost himself in what was mostly likely an X-rated daydream. "Oh yeah, that's sexy."

"Castle, will you focus?"

"Mm, yeah, I am."

"On getting out of here. We're not completely out of the woods yet."

That snapped him out of his pleasant fantasy. "Wait, what? We're leaving already? What about John Allen and his real killer?"

"What are you talking about? Trucho killed Allen."

"Did he? The task force has gathered enough to know that Allen was a drug mule, but we don't have anything about who actually murdered him. And besides, it doesn't make sense if it was Trucho. Trucho is a blade-man. As in, he uses a blade. Allen was strangled and tossed off a roof. It doesn't exactly add up."

Her fingers started tapping an indecisive rhythm against her thigh. "Well, investigating his murder isn't really our job. That's for Homicide to figure out."

"Yeah, but you can't tell me you're not the least bit curious," Castle cajoled, adding the weight of his bright blue eyes all alight with child-like enthusiasm. "Come on, what do your budding Homicidal instincts tell you? Ooh, that came out totally wrong. Um, homicide-investigating instincts? That's not very catchy."

"Castle. The point?"

"Right. The point is, I don't know about you, but my vast experience in killing people—on paper—tells me that there's more to the story behind this."

"A story."

"Sure. There's always a story. There's always a sequence of events that makes everything make sense."

Kate shook her head slightly, but decided to humor him just this once. It wasn't as if she really wanted to hear his theory or anything like that. Riiiight…

"Okay, so what's the story here?"

"Well, from what I saw of his bio in the case notes—"

"When'd you read the case notes?"

"When you were in the little girls' room."

"I was gone for like a minute!"

"Speed-reader. A little skill I picked up from my years stranded in the New York Public Library," he replied, brushing it off. "Anyway, from what I read, this John Allen guy seems like he was just your average Joe middle-class American, no criminal record, stable home. So how does a guy like that end up as a drug mule? And why?"

"Well," she slowly began as she picked up the thread he'd unraveled. "Most people smuggle drugs because they need money quickly. Maybe he was in debt."

"Right, but his financials came up clean, so…maybe he racked up debt that's unrecorded." He grinned triumphantly, eyes sparkling with the joy of telling the story. "And what better place to rack up debt than a gambling den?"

"You're saying he got in too deep here?"

"It makes sense doesn't it? Let's look at the facts."

"The facts."

"Yeah. We know that Allen suddenly felt the need to run drugs, presumably to make up his paycheck."

He looked at her expectantly, as if wanting, for some reason, her to continue his line of thought. After a brief internal battle, Kate gave in. "We know he's somehow connected to Trucho."

He grinned broadly at her, and she had the strange impression that he was...proud of her. He didn't comment on it though, choosing instead to continue their little theory-building session.

"We know that Trucho in turn is connected with the Triad."

"We know the Triad is in charge of this particular den of iniquity."

"Right, so is it really that far a stretch of imagination to think that some poker-playing loanshark is sitting at a no-limit table just waiting for the right guy to come along and be lured into betting too high, then buying him in at one of their typical cutthroat interest rates?"

Kate could see the logic in that. "Then when Allen lost it all, he had to make money fast to pay off the loanshark."

"But he couldn't pay it off in time, so the guy gets impatient and decides to make an example of Allen."

They both paused for a moment to go over the holes of the story in their heads. Beckett frowned. "That was complete conjecture. We have no evidence of anything."

"We've got all the evidence we've got right here," Castle said, sweeping his arm in front of him as he gestured at all the tables before them. "We just find the right no-limit table, spin a little story, and then bam! Step into my parlor."

She arched a fine brow at that. "I'm pretty sure Mary Howitt would consider you the fly, not the spider. Downfall brought about by vanity? Yeah, you're so the fly."

"I was thinking more of the sense that we'd be setting a trap for our delightful fly to step into, but wow, you read poems."

"It's not like 'The Spider and the Fly' is really all that obscure."

"Still. You read poems. That's sexy."

"You think everything concerning the written word is sexy."

"Correction, I think everything about you is sexy."

She rolled her eyes at him, but she could feel the light blush crawling up the smooth expanse of the upper swells of her breasts to spread her cheeks.

"Either way, it doesn't really matter because it's not part of our job today to get that information. Like I said, the murder is for Homicide to investigate."

"Aw, come on. We're already here. If we just so happen to hear something relevant to the case, we're not really stepping on any toes, right?"

That wasn't exactly how it worked, but before she could find it in her to muster up more than the token protest, the curious cat in her was already processing the theory they'd built and probing it for possibilities.

"How many no-limit tables are there?" she asked before she could stop herself.

"Usually there's usually four or five, for different types of poker."

"Usually? And you know this how?" she probed menacingly.

Castle sucked his lips into his mouth and winced like the kid who accidentally shattered his neighbor's window with an errant baseball. "Uh…I plead the fifth?"

She shook her head. "Unbelievable…" Then she simply had to ask because when it came down to it, she was probably just as bad as—if not worse than—he was about needing to know the story. "Do you remember anything else from Allen's file? About his autopsy report?"

"Hm. Well, he was strangled, and I took a look at the photos. It looked like whoever killed him strangled him with his bare hands. The weird thing is that the mark where the pinky finger should have been was lighter, like he couldn't use it with as much pressure."

"Broken finger maybe?"

"Could be a prosthetic."

"So what? We walk around all the no-limit tables and hope we spot someone with a fake pinky on their left hand? 'Cause that's not suspicious at all."

"Of course not," he scoffed as if that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, though his eyes gleamed with enough mischievousness for her to realize that she should be afraid—very afraid—of whatever half-baked idea he had tucked up his sleeve. "We sit down and play the game."

…

There was stupid, and then there was going-along-with-one-of-Castle's-ideas stupid.

When she'd found herself unable to do anything about the gun jammed into Castle's back without arousing suspicion in the thick crowd of gamblers, Kate felt a whole other category of stupid; namely, ridiculously-off-the-charts stupid.

And angry.

Angry at the tatted-up Russian mobster who'd marched Castle—and by extension, her—through the gambling den and toward the kitchen. Angry at Castle for being an idiot who didn't know when to just shut up (because trying to bait a murderer into slipping up by making up a story out of the bare bones of a few facts that just happened to be right is really just that brilliant). But mostly, Kate was just angry at herself.

She was the cop in this unorthodox shadowing experiment. She was the one with all the experience. She was the one who should have known better than to deviate from the plan. She should have been the one to pull them out right after they'd gotten what they needed from Lee and Vong.

Instead she'd been caught up in his story and in her own itching desire to dabble in Homicide.

This kind of situation was exactly the reason why they had procedure, rules. And this was also why civilians should never be trusted to go undercover.

Because Castle just had to tell his story, didn't he?

Rage painted the world in hazy red.

"Damn it, Castle, this is my job—my career! You can't just do stupid things like this that could potentially screw it all up for me!" she threw at him as she drove them back to the precinct—the 54th—after everything had finally played out.

Castle sent her an incredulous look, which admittedly, she deserved. Ever since they'd called in back-up to cuff Nikolai Demedov—their pinky prosthetic strangler and loanshark extraordinaire—Beckett had been feeling increasingly agitated, and she knew that she was taking it out on Castle.

Still, knowing what she was doing didn't make it any easier to stop doing it.

"We caught the murderer, didn't we?" Castle asked, a little defensively.

She scoffed. "Yeah, and do you how many rules we broke?"

"No, how many?" he returned, voice nonchalant.

That made her whip her gaze over to him. "What?"

He settled back into the passenger seat, though how he could make it look like he was sprawled across such a cramped (for him) space, she couldn't figure out.

He gave that infuriating smirk. "How many rules did we break? I'm gonna go with…seven. Maybe eight."

She brought her gaze back to the road even as she tried to tamp down the eruption of fury that just wanted out. "Oh my God, this is all just a game to you, isn't it? Just a fun game of let's play super spy. It doesn't matter to you because you're not the one who has to face the consequences!"

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him straightening in his seat, and too late, she realized that his casual demeanor was a façade.

"Okay, fine, you want serious? Let's do serious. Why don't you tell me why you're so angry with me when you were more than happy to go along with the investigation earlier? It was unorthodox how we went about doing things, sure—"

She snorted. Unorthodox was one way of putting it.

"—but we got the guy because of it," he finished without acknowledging her interruption. "I didn't hear you complaining before."

"I know! And that's what makes me such an idiot!"

She broke off and stared resolutely on the road, willing the damn tears—why the hell was she tearing up anyway?—from falling.

Kate Beckett was a rational person. She didn't give into fits of histrionics or throw out wild accusations at people who didn't deserve it. So what the hell was wrong with her?

She clenched her jaw. The problem was that she knew exactly what was wrong.

In just four weeks, it'll have been seven years. Seven years since she and her dad came home to find that detective—Detective Raglan—waiting for them. Seven years since they'd crossed that yellow tape, her world shattered and naivety destroyed. Seven years since every moment of every day became about finding justice for her mother.

Seven years.

And in half an hour, she'd almost thrown away seven years of hard work because she'd gotten caught up in one of Castle's stories. Seven years she'd almost spilled down the drain because she suddenly saw herself as the heroine in one of his novels. Seven years she'd almost destroyed in a moment that would have been professional suicide if anything at all had gone sideways.

Seven goddamn years.

If wasn't his fault. (Not entirely his fault, anyway.) She knew that. But damn it, she just couldn't believe how she'd let herself come so close to ruining everything that meant anything to her at all.

Get into the Academy.

Make detective.

Transfer to homicide.

Solve her mother's murder and put the bastard who did it behind bars for good.

How many times had she repeated these very words to herself? How many times had she chanted them like a prayer in her head, a four-step battle plan pushing her to get over her physical limitations? How many times had she wanted to bury her head in the ground like her father did, to drown herself in sorrow only to be reminded by these four simple goals that she had something to fight for?

But tonight...

Tonight, she'd lost sight of her endgame, and she couldn't allow herself to do that ever again. She couldn't let anything get in the way of this.

Still, this was a personal problem of hers, and Castle didn't deserve this kind of unwarranted abuse from her.

"I'm sorry," she finally conceded, breaking the tense plane of silence that had settled around them.

"It's fine," he replied, and she knew that he would let this go. He wouldn't push, and when he said that it's fine, he really meant it. The Richard Castle she'd come to know in the time she'd spent with him was surprisingly gracious.

But…he deserved more than that. He'd been…a friend, and maybe for the first time in her life, she wanted to explain.

So she took a deep breath, focused her eyed doggedly on the road, and began. "Remember that day in the park you asked me why I became a cop? You were right. About everything." She swallowed, licked her lips, her knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. "My mother…my mother was murdered seven years ago."

"Kate, you don't have to tell me this. I don't—"

"No, I should. It's good for me."

She let out a huff of humorless laughter, equal parts embarrassed and frustrated with herself for not being to just talk about this normally. But then again, when had she ever been normal?

"She'd been stabbed. In an alley."

The words came slowly, tentatively, as if by speaking the words, she was recreating her mother's death. And maybe she was. That was the beauty of words, wasn't it? That it could capture a moment, suspend it?

"A robbery?" Castle asked, voice respectfully soft.

Kate shook her head. "No. She still had her money and purse and jewelry. And it wasn't a sexual assault, either. Gang violence, they said. Random wayward event. They never caught the killer. And I couldn't let go of that."

"That's why you became a cop. You wanted—want—answers."

She nodded. "That's part of it. I want answers for every victim, every family that was torn apart like mine was. Answers that I haven't gotten yet. Mostly, though...Mostly I just want justice. That's why...It's not really a good reason for blowing up at you, but that's why I reacted so badly just now. I put in my papers to transfer to Homicide just weeks ago, and I can't let anything show up in my performance report that might sway the high-ups into believing I'll be anything but the best homicide detective there can be. I need to be Homicide."

His lips parted and his eyes lit in understanding. "You want to reopen her case."

The fire that she usually banked behind composure and tightly controlled emotion flared up hot and bright at his words. "Yes. I want—No, I will find her killer. And when I do, I'm going to throw his sorry ass behind bars for the rest of his miserable life."

She could feel him studying her intently with those writer's eyes that saw too much, and she wondered if he'd be repulsed by the strength of her vicious ferocity. She refused to meet his gaze.

Let him come to whatever conclusions he will.

He nodded. "I understand."

She gave him a faint smile, but she couldn't help but think, You can't possibly understand.

A/N: I think this is a good time to remind everyone that this fic is labeled "Drama" and not "Humor" for a reason. I'm trying, for the most part, to keep the balance between the serious and humorous that's found on the show, and overall, this will stay on the lighter side, but there will also be some moments in the indeterminate future that are kind of heavy. It won't be an angst-fest, but it won't stay forever light-hearted. Just thought to give a fair warning because I know a lot of you enjoy this fic for its humor.