A/N - hello readers! thanks for all your reviews and support. I really do appreciate it and it keeps me wanting to write more and finish this story for you. I'm publishing this chapter and the next right now and chapter 16 will be ready hopefully tomorrow night. These next two are rough ones, so I hope you stick with me but I won't apologize for the content.

Thursday, June 14

Alex squirms in the plastic chair, its cushion not soft enough against her bruised legs and still tender backside. The chair is as hard as it's been for the past three or four hours, but it seems for some reason to be getting more and more uncomfortable. She shifts in it one more time, searching for that spot she hasn't yet bruised that might be okay to stay on for five minutes.

And she has been thinking for all the time she's been sitting here, that Olivia sat in this same position a week ago, waiting for Alex to wake up from her surgery. She wonders bitterly if the chairs were as uncomfortable then. Olivia sat here most of the night, watching her rest, studying her bruised face at a moment when Alex couldn't conceal the pain she felt inside and out.

It isn't fair, how much the trooper got to discover about Alex so early on, when much of what Olivia told Alex about herself ended up being false information. Not that she really said much about herself in the first place. Her favorite color, her best childhood memory, what she'd like to eat if given the chance to go out for dinner, what she eats when she cooks for herself at home, her best subject on school, her first kiss. None of these things Alex knows about this woman. And her feelings about wanting to know more are conflicting.

There were countless times that Olivia could have divulged her secret, let Alex in on the charade so that this encounter after everything came out wouldn't have to be so hard. All it would have taken was a little trust from Olivia, just a tiny bit, and they both could have been saved the pain and dramatics of that last pursuit.

Anger flashes again through her veins, hot and coursing. She's angry about almost everything, so angry that several times throughout the early hours of this morning, she thought about simply getting up and leaving, never speaking to Olivia again. Just cutting the trooper out of her life completely for all the things that happened. How much of it could have been prevented? How much of it did Olivia know and simply did nothing to prevent?

But these questions and two other facts kept Alex glued determinedly to the worst chair in America throughout the night. One, that Olivia saved her life. They saved each other's lives, really. And two, Olivia had no one else to wake up to. Just like Alex, the brunette had lost everything to Cesar. Most of her dignity, her family, her ability to trust new people.

And Olivia, although she had lied and kept things from Alex, had stayed at her bedside all night, so Alex grants her the same courtesy. And directly after that, she'll find out what she wants to know and leave. They have no other connection save for Cesar, and now that he's gone, Alex no longer wants memories and reminders of him in her life. She wants more than anything to just move on. And if that means not seeing Olivia anymore, so be it. It all depends on what she says when she wakes up.

But right now all she can feel is anger. And nausea. Shit, not again.

Rising from the chair and rushing to the bathroom, Alex catches the first glimpses of sunlight through the hospital's blinds before she pulls the bathroom door closed behind her. Leaning over and retching into the toilet, Alex tries ineffectively to keep her hair out of the way. It's almost impossible.

She knows what's happened, she's confirmed what's happened, and the way she feels about it is like she feels about Olivia. Conflicted.

How can she not be conflicted about it? It's a part of her now, this bundle of cells, this reminder of what happened over the course of a week with Cesar and his brothers. She'd rip herself open with a knife right now if only she had one. Just to rid herself of Cesar. He's infiltrated himself into every part of her life, and this is one he won't be a part of. Not him, not now, and not like this.

Standing up, Alex flushes the toilet weakly, moving to the sink and rinsing off her hands and mouth the best she can. The bile burns the back of Alex's throat still and she regrets it immediately when she looks up into the mirror. It's like deja vu, staring at the reflection of a woman she hardly knows anymore, a woman shattered and broken and trying desperately to hold the halfway-glued back together pieces in their places.

Alex limps back into the room, staring down at her leg as she struggles again into the awful chair. When the ambulance first brought them in hours ago, they had wheeled a pale and unconscious Olivia away into surgery while Alex was left standing speechless in the waiting room. A nurse pulled her through the ER doors and convinced Alex finally to sit still and let her make sure she was okay.

Alex could only stare at the door while the nurse had worked, waiting for the doctor to come back out and tell her that Olivia had died during surgery. She had just known it was going to happen. That one more person would be dead on her account. But it never happened. The nurse cleaned out her road rash and bandaged her up, checked on her previous healing bullet wound and then sent her to the waiting room after her X-ray came up negative for broken bones. She was just bruised and would be in pain for a while, the nurse told her. But that was a given for Alex.

Finally the doctors did come out of surgery and, being that Olivia had no one else present as her close family, Alex received the news that she was fine. Surgery went well and she would hopefully wake up in a few hours. Alex was permitted to sit in the recovery room with Olivia after some skillful word-sparring with the nurse.

Poking at her bandage now, Alex hisses in pain and contemplates taking the pain medication offered to her earlier that she refused. The pain at that point last night was simply dull and throbbing, but now it burns and aches vibrantly, as if it only just happened.

"Hurts pretty bad, huh?" A raspy voice reaches her ears from the bed, and Alex jerks her head up. Olivia's eyes are open and she's blinking, squeezing her eyes shut every now and again, trying to focus her eyesight.

"You're awake," Alex says quietly, ignoring her pain and scooting the chair closer to the bed.

"Yeah, some noises in the bathroom woke me up," Olivia says, tilting her head slightly at Alex, who says nothing, but looks down at her scratched up hands.

A knock alerts both their attention to the door. There's Elliot, standing with a gift shop 'get well soon' balloon and a paper bag. Smells of hamburgers and fries waft nauseatingly into Alex's nostrils. She's not hungry. Still.

"Good morning," he says and Alex is reminded of how different he sounds now from when she was in the hospital and again when he came to visit them in the hotel. It's as if he's been scarred by life and not everything is well with the world like it was before this case came to a close.

"Morning," Olivia and Alex answer, and Elliot enters the room, placing the balloon on a side table next to the paper bag he brought, probably as a peace offering after holding his gun to Olivia's head. But Alex can't really blame him for that. She might have done the same thing. Betrayal does strange things to people.

"How are you feeling?" Elliot is watching Olivia carefully. She squints an eye, tilting her head to her shoulder. "Pain meds work great. Can't feel a thing."

"I'm guessing they took that bullet out?"

Olivia nods, stares down at her hospital gown. "Yeah. Said it was lodged next to an artery or something. Is your family okay?"

Alex is mildly surprised that Olivia jumps right into the thick of things, no hesitation, but she shouldn't be, she supposes. That's how Olivia has been in the two weeks she's known her. Cut the bullshit and get down to business. Elliot frowns, crosses his arms across his chest and nods.

"They're fine," he says, his voice even. "You know, it's strange. In all my years as a trooper first and now as a Ranger dealing with the cartels a little bit and murderers and all kinds of horrible people, my family hasn't ever been threatened."

"Until I came along," Olivia finishes for him, looking slightly abashed. But Elliot shakes his head. "It's not your fault he came after me too. I'm surprised he didn't try something like that sooner, actually."

He moves to the opposite chair in the room, sitting down and adjusting his tie. "Most law enforcement families live under that sort of threat all the time, especially when dealing with the big criminals with connections. I've just been lucky, that's all."

Olivia gives a half smile, but Alex can see that underneath her facade, she's still stinging from it. From being the cause of Elliot's worries about his family and for having to endure his backlash. "So is this your way of apologizing for putting your gun to my head?"

Elliot shrugs, and it's a tense moment, neither of these are things easily apologized for. "I guess you could say that."

"So what's happening with Marcus now that Cesar is dead?" Alex asks, needed to break the tension, and Elliot swivels his head towards her, taking in her disheveled appearance and bruised-again face.

"Well, thanks to you, we've got Cesar's confession to your parents' murders and your assault on tape, so we can use that in court against Marcus."

"Even though he gave up information on his brother's whereabouts?"

Elliot nods. "Death penalty's off the table for that and for all his information on higher ups in the cartel, but we'll get him for everything else. He'll get life. Almost makes you wish Cesar was alive to face all of his charges in court, doesn't it?"

Staring at him, Alex contemplates her answer. The way she feels inside, she realizes is why she can't go back to prosecuting any time soon.

"No, it doesn't actually," she says firmly. "There's no sentence the court system could have handed out that would give me justice for what happened."

Granted, it's a macabre and archaic way of thinking, but she can't help it. The only way she'd have been satisfied with Cesar living through all of that would be if he had received the death penalty. And even then, he would be alive for some time and able to pull his strings from the inside. Who knows what might have happened, what more hell he could have put her through.

No, the way it happened is for the best, he's gone, never coming back and she made sure of it.

There's a prolonged silence in the room, in which Alex is contemplating what happened and she has no idea what might be going through Elliot and Olivia's heads.

"So do we need to give a statement sometime?" Olivia asks, and Elliot nods, raising his hands up.

"Yes, but there's no rush. I can have someone take it a little later, whenever you both feel up to it."

He looks at Olivia pointedly. "And Cragen wants to talk to you, says you need to be debriefed."

Olivia nods and her expression is strained. He looks around, slaps his hands lightly on both his knees and then stands up.

"Well, I guess I'll let you rest," he tells Olivia and then looks over to Alex. "You need a ride anywhere?"

She holds his eye contact for a while, contemplating it. Other than her appointment later today, she has no good-sounding place to go. The house on the lake is a mess, another crime scene, something she'll have to call her uncle about. And her house is full of bad memories as well, but she doesn't have much of a choice. A free ride to her appointment seems as good of a plan as any, and after that, she'll have to figure out a way to contact her sisters.

"I might. Would you mind sticking around for a while?"

Elliot nods and tells them goodbye and walks down the hallway, leaving them sitting in an uncomfortable silence.

"Where are you going to go after this?" Olivia asks, reading the tumult on her face. Alex shrugs, not really wanting to tell Olivia what's going on and simultaneously needing to spill her guts. It's a strange feeling that Olivia invokes in her and she doesn't know how to explain it.

"I don't know. My house for a while probably. And then I'll try and call my sisters."

"You really didn't know where they were?"

Alex shakes her head. "No. They just took off, set up their lives again without me in it. If they want to stay where they are now, away from me, I don't know what I'll do."

She hates how morose and sad she sounds, but can't seem to help it.

"I'm sure they'll just be happy that everything is okay now."

Eyes lifting to the brunette's face, Alex can see that she doesn't even believe what she's saying. That the thought that everything is okay is utter bullshit. Everything is better, certainly, now that Cesar is gone, but it's not even close to okay.

"I can't believe you're still alive," Alex says suddenly, unaware that the words were forming before they exited her mouth.

"Me neither."

"Olivia, I . . ." She pauses. "I really don't know what to say to you."

Big brown eyes watch her thoughtfully, patiently. "I understand."

Alex is still conflicted. She wants to know everything all at once, and at the same time, she doesn't even want to hear it, afraid of what the truth might actually be.

"I just. . . I want to know . . . I don't know what I want to know."

"The truth?" Olivia asks, and Alex shrugs, nodding her head in agreement.

"Well, it's basically like you heard at your uncle's house, about four years after I graduated from the trooper academy, the Feds contacted me about working for them, undercover with the DEA, which here is called the Criminal Investigations Division. I was on the fence about it, but I caught up with Cesar anyway, he bought my story about being unhappy with the pay and frustrated with feeling alone except for my mother at my department. Stuff like that."

"And there was truth to your story, I'm guessing?"

Olivia nods. "The best stories are the ones with some truth in them. So yeah, I probably wouldn't have stuck with it if not for what happened with my mother." A dark look passes over her face, and Alex feels for her. It's not easy, that's for damn sure.

"You thought she killed herself."

"Yeah. She was on that path. Self-destructive, depressed, she was an alcoholic for as long as I can remember."

"So your mother passed away and then you jumped headlong into it?"

"I did. I wanted. . .no needed, something to focus on, so I told Cragen I'd do whatever I had to do to infiltrate Cesar's part of the cartel."

Alex leans in, listening intently to the next things Olivia says.

"So I doubled-crossed Cesar and pretended to double-cross everyone I was working with. Originally, I was working with a division on the other side of the city, but Cragen had me move to this side of San Antonio to get away from coworkers that knew me too well. And so my cover was being a trooper for this new division while I was actually working for the Criminal Investigations Division."

"And what did Cesar have you do?"

"Small stuff, like information on prominent drug cartel leaders and what the DPS' plans were to slow their movements, letting some of his dealers go by after traffic stops when I knew they were dirty. I even transported drugs in my car several times, letting the Feds know the whole time, of course."

"And Cesar never divulged information about what his plans were for me?"

Olivia shakes her head, eyes earnest as she holds contact with Alex. "Alex, I knew about your connection to Cesar and what he was having you do, transporting and helping get his dealers off the hook, but I swear I didn't know he was planning on kidnapping you and raping you. He told me after your sisters disappeared that he was just going to talk to you, see what had happened."

"You really thought that was all he was going to do? He's fucking crazy, Olivia!" Her voice breaks with emotion and her good hand runs through messy hair. "Didn't you know that? You didn't think that maybe something bad was going on if I had to escape from him on a motorcycle? "

Tears fill Alex's eyes and a shiver runs through her at the memory of what happened all of that week and leading up to the day Olivia pulled her over. If Olivia knew and still pulled her over, Alex doesn't know what she'll do in reaction.

Olivia tries to sit up, wincing painfully at the movement. "Of course I thought that, Alex. I knew it was suspicious, him acting so desperate to get you back. And how badly you were beat up that day. But I tried to help you. That's why I brought the drug dog over, hoping maybe you'd have a trace on that bike or that you'd ask for medical treatment. That's all it would have taken."

Alex shakes her head. It wasn't that simple.

"Yeah, well, maybe you're right. But if I had gone with you, I wouldn't have killed Vicente. And Marcus never would have flipped on Cesar. And I don't regret that for a minute."

Olivia looks into her eyes. "I'm so sorry this happened to you. With everything that happened with your parents and your sisters and then what Cesar did to you, I thought Elliot contacting me to work with the Rangers on your case was the best way I could help you. And I don't know if I ended up doing more harm than good."

Alex watches Olivia closely, decides that she's being truthful and that she really did have Alex's best interests at heart. But she won't sugar coat it for this woman. Not after the lies.

"I don't know either," Alex says quietly. "Because you brought Cesar, inadvertently, purposely or not, back to me and almost got me killed. Again."

Shaking her head, eyes on her hands, Olivia breathes in deeply, or as deeply as she can with a deep shoulder wound. Alex knows what that's like. Hers still aches.

"I know."

"But you had no other choice, right?" Olivia glances up, shakes her head again.

"It was either come see you with Cesar, and hope that Elliot had it all figured out and could reach you before I got there because I didn't have the means to contact Cragen at that point, or sit by and allow Elliot's family to be slaughtered."

"And he would have done it too."

Olivia nods. They both know that all too well.

"So," Olivia starts hesitantly and Alex has a feeling what the next logical direction for their conversation will be. "You've been sick two mornings in a row."

Alex closes her eyes. Of course Olivia would hear her this morning, and she probably would have asked sooner if Elliot hadn't come in. She can only nod in response, unwilling right now to talk freely about it. But Olivia will push, like she tends to do, for information.

"Alex, what stopped him from shooting you at your uncle's house? When you took him back to the bathroom?"

"I, uh . . . I had to do something. Had to lie to him, make up a story. Something. I told him I was carrying his child."

"But you were telling the truth."

Nodding her head yes, Alex takes in a steadying breath. "And he believed me, but not at first. He did rape me for a week straight."

"And in the bathroom . . ."

Alex doesn't meet her eyes. "I took a pregnancy test in front of him. My aunt had several stored away in her drawers and I took one that first morning I threw up. I knew it would be positive."

"And that's the only reason he left you alive. And hesitated later, in the trees."

Nodding, Alex looks up and studies Olivia's face now, looking for signs of contempt, disgust, anything. But all she sees is understanding and acceptance.

"He was happy. Said we'd go to the Bahamas, get away from all this and start a family. It was all I could do not to throw up again in front of him."

"So what are you going to do?"

Alex shrugs, looking for signs of disapproval in Olivia's face, wondering if she can divulge her secret safely. She just doesn't know, doesn't want to know. Doesn't want to risk the negative response. Not from someone who really means so much to her.

A pause grows between them, because Alex is sure that Olivia doesn't know what to say. What can you say? I'm sorry? Congratulations? Hope you have a wonderful and happy pregnancy?

Alex stands up, finished talking and satisfied enough with the answers she's gotten from Olivia. It's still going to take some time, but she knows now that all of this wasn't her fault. This happened because a man went crazy with power and his world started crumbling beneath him.

"Where are you going?" Olivia asks, and Alex pats her leg lightly as she walks around the bed, her first affectionate gesture since their kiss that evening at the lake, besides holding in all that blood in the woods. Olivia watches her hand, brows furrowed.

"I don't know. I'll wander around the hospital for a while. Maybe get this bandage changed again. We'll see. You should rest."

Nodding, Olivia's eyes go from the hand leaving her leg on top of the scratchy hospital blanket up to Alex's face.

"Okay. Come see me again?"

"I will," Alex nods and sends a tight smile towards the brunette before leaving the room.

As Alex rides the elevator downstairs, intending to wander aimlessly around and look for Elliot, she thinks about what it's going to take to get past all of this. Moving on and getting over something can only come with one thing. Acceptance of the past.

And accept it she does. It's not going to be easy, getting through all she has yet to face, but Alex vows to get better, to try and remember the good things rather than the bad. And Olivia happens to be a part of her past, good and bad. So maybe cutting Olivia out of her life completely isn't the answer, maybe she needs more support than she gives herself credit for.

In the lobby, a voice calls out her name from the door and she turns. It's Elliot, still here. Good, she thinks. Whatever his opinion about it, she needs a ride. And he's here.

"Hey, Elliot. You still up for giving me a ride?"

He looks into her eyes. "Of course. I wanted to make sure you were okay, you know. That you have someplace to go."

"I do have someplace to go as a matter of fact, but I'll need a ride there, and then a ride to my house as well."

"Sure thing," he says earnestly, turning and walking with her towards the door. "Where to?"

She tells him the address and he looks sharply at her. He's Catholic, she knows that by the crosses she's seen on his belongings. Practicing or not, he'll have mixed feelings about this. And it won't be easy to talk about. But she doesn't have her car currently and has no one to drive her home afterwards.

Elliot pushes the door open, holding it for her as she steps out into the sunlit mid-morning.

"You heard everything on the phone, didn't you?" She knows he did, the way he looks at her gives it away. He nods.

"Will you drive me there and then back to my house?"

Pausing over the hood of his car, Elliot stares at her for a few moments, eyes squinting in the sunlight, and then puts his hand lightly on the hot metal. "Yes."

"Thank you," Alex says quietly as he turns the key and the air conditioning starts up, giving them some relief from the heat.

"Don't you have to have a waiting period of some sort?"

Alex nods, impressed at his knowledge, although it makes sense for him to keep up with the most recent news in women's health, having a wife and three daughters.

"24 hours. I called them yesterday when Olivia left the lake house. They'll do one of those 'medically necessary' ultrasounds when I get there, and then . . ."

She trails off, not really wanting to think about the rest of it. Elliot doesn't ask any more questions, he simply maneuvers the car onto the highway towards the clinic.