Lockwood kneels still when she rounds the corner back into the kitchen. Esposito hasn't moved but Ryan leans against the counter, arms crossed and eyes on Lockwood. She knows they had to have heard some of the conversation; the walls are thin and everything carries too well in the single-level house.
"Everything good, Beckett?" he asks, eyeing Castle warily.
"Yeah. Espo, Ryan," she says, stepping around Lockwood even as Castle pauses in the doorway. "This is Castle. He's my…"
"Partner," he jumps in. "At least temporarily."
"Just temporarily," Kate mutters while she joins Ryan against the counter. She waves a hand at Lockwood, raising a brow as if to tell Castle that the assassin rests in his hands.
And then she watches.
Castle dominates the room as he systemically takes apart Lockwood's defenses. It's masterful and a little frightening how quickly he latches onto the lies being spilled onto the tile floor by the hired hitman and turns them against Lockwood. Even Lockwood looks surprised when Castle gets him to reveal the location of a second safe house on the island, one that a man named Cole Maddox could be holed up in once he took possession of the jewels not ten minutes prior to Beckett arriving.
"But you have no idea what you're up against," Lockwood says, desperation and exhaustion coloring his tone as Castle paces over to Beckett's side. "This is all bigger than you could imagine."
"You have him?" she asks Esposito and Ryan, ignoring the man's warning and pushing away from the counter.
Ryan shrugs. "Gonna owe us even bigger to get rid of this guy, Beckett."
"Tell you what. You two ever make it up to New York and I'll put you up somewhere nice. Room service and everything," she offers. "We can go see Annie."
Esposito laughs. "Sure. Orphans singing is just what we want on our days off."
"Then how about a burlesque club I know in the Meatpacking District?"
"Better," the two other men agree.
Kate grins. "Thanks again for this. Couldn't have done it without you."
"Geez," groans Esposito, shoving her toward the door. "It's not like we're a team or anything. Go."
Castle follows her out the front door of the house, tugging her phone from her hand as she starts to dial up a cab. "I rented a car," he says in explanation, angling them around the block and past the red Charger. "It was faster than waiting on a taxi to get me here."
He parked the gold sedan under a tree, half-hidden in the shadows. He unlocks it with the keyfob, waiting for her to get into the passenger seat. But she stops with her fingers on the handle.
"Kate?"
She shakes her head. "Nothing. Just…" She raps her knuckles on the glass of the window. "Thank you."
Castle slides into the front seat with a shrug. "Your mother deserves justice. You deserve whatever type of closure comes from finding the man who did it."
"But you made sure I did it the right way," she says.
"You gonna owe me?"
"Sure. You can join the boys in New York for a weekend."
He grins, sly and teasing just out of the corner of her eye. "Not the kind of owing I mean," he replies.
Kate snorts out a laugh as she sits back into the seat.
"Actually," he continues, glancing over at her as he navigates onto one of the main roads. "I think we need to talk about that. About last night."
She doesn't want to. Not now when she's stuck in the car with him as they go to face down Maddox. She wants to focus on their task and definitely not remember how he felt pressing her down into the mattress. Kate twists her thumb into the hem of her shirt, wetting her lips as she tries to organize her thoughts.
"It wasn't a mistake," he says, scattering her almost-crafted outline to the wind. "At least, not for me." He pauses as they merge onto the Hawaii Belt Road. "I like you, Kate."
"You like me," she repeats back dumbly, attempting to work the knowledge into her mind. Trying to pull it all together into something that actually makes sense. "No. You hate me."
"But I don't. Isn't that weird?"
Kate doesn't have a response. Not now when she can feel his eyes on her. Not now when she's trapped in the car not ten feet from him.
"I don't want to pretend it didn't happen," he says as they switch onto Route 130.
"Listen," she says after a minute. "I can't say that I'm proud of what happened. I let my guard down and slept with the enemy but I can't do this right now. Not before we're supposed to go take down Maddox."
"I'm the enemy?" he asks, the bite of anger finally leaking into his voice.
Kate rubs her fingers against her eyes, a headache already forming behind her temple. "Not… the best choice of words, I'll admit. But Jesus, Castle. We're rivals. We're not supposed to sleep together or have a relationship or─"
"Have a life?" He clenches the wheel as he passes a slower car on the left. "Last I checked, we don't take an oath of chastity when we sign up for these things. Putting the job ahead of your heart is a mistake. Do you really want to look back on your life and wonder 'if only'?"
She pulls her legs up onto the seat, her arms looped around her shins. This is too much.
"I can't."
"Can't? Or won't?"
They spend the next thirty minutes in a heavy and suffocating silence.
The house sits on the corner of an intersection, a beautiful two-storied building with a balcony that wraps all the way around the second floor. Bright purple flowers in colorful pots decorate the balcony and front yard. Kate gets a glimpse of a backyard, a child's jungle gym set up with a bike toppled over along the very edge of the grass before it slopes down to the beach.
Castle keeps driving, taking a right onto the private drive, backing the car into a little pull-off to shelter it with the huge, leafy trees. A safety precaution in case anyone stands watch for cars that show a little too much attention to their house.
"I say that we─"
Kate doesn't wait for him to finish making the plan before she opens the door and jumps out. The anger and fear and the need to just have this whole mess done with makes her stupid with adrenaline. She hears him calling her name even as she skids on the loose-packed gravel until she gets her balance and starts sprinting back toward the safe house.
She only stops to draw her gun from the ankle holster, rounding the fence with Castle at her heels. She ignores him and goes for the front door.
"Beckett! Stop!"
Instead, she steps into the house, weapon up and ready.
It still doesn't prepare her for the spray of gunfire that appears as she enters the first room. She dives for cover behind an armchair. The stuffing doesn't provide a lot of safety and she knows that she only has a short amount of time to move. Kate takes a deep breath.
A bullet zips past her arm as she runs for the neighboring room. The kitchen has no island in the middle, no dining room table to flip for a barricade. Shit.
Cole Maddox appears in the doorway, tall with short, dark hair and an automatic weapon aimed at her. She turns, firing a series of rounds at him even as he darts for the back door and into the yard. Castle shouts for her to stop, to wait for him.
She can't let Maddox escape.
Kate doesn't think when she charges out after the man. She sees her her mom in that alley in the floral skirt Kate had mocked her for wearing before Johanna went to work that morning. So when she nearly trips over the runner for the sliding glass door and comes face-to-face with Maddox holding his gun up, she stumbles to a stop.
"Wait," she says, holding her hands up, her fingers away from the trigger. "I just need the name. Who hired─"
The shot steals her words, the bullet burning through her chest. Her gun clatters to the ground, her knees buckling so that she slides down the plastic siding of the house. She hears Castle, his voice fuzzed as if traveling through thick water, but she can't focus on him. Can't focus on the ringing echoes of gunshots or how Maddox crumples to the grass.
Can't really feel him as he pulls her down onto the ground, his hands pressing firmly into her chest or his wrist when she wraps her fingers around the joint, needing something to anchor her as her vision goes blurry black.
The last thing she does hear is her name, a whispered and desperate thing on his lips.