…..

You all did it again and beat both goals! I'll post this chapter tonight and the next one tomorrow.

I debated for a while about whether or not to include this chapter, but I ultimately decided to because I think it's nice to get a piece from Allie's past that can help you understand her a little better. I know she's kind of still a mystery, and this might shed some light on a couple of things.

Thank you to all of you that have read, reviewed, favorited, and followed this story. I love you all for the support.

Reminder: I only use the characters and the premise of the show, not the storyline. You've been forewarned.

Happy Reading!

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Chapter Twenty-One: A Bitter Memory

Steve

I got to Allie's house a little early, but she'd said that she had left the front door unlocked for me.

"That's not safe," I'd told her.

"You think Gideon is going to let someone break in?" she'd asked me, to which I could only respond no. I'd seen what he had done to a potential rapist; I didn't even want to think about what he would do to someone trying to break into his house.

When I walked in, Gideon looked up from his rawhide, saw that it was me, and went right back to chewing. He had gotten used to me very quickly and seemed to like me, as long as he still got some time alone with Allie on occasion, which I didn't mind.

We took him with us sometimes – on our runs or out fishing – to let him know that he was still important to us. Allie had been worried that he would start feeling left out, so she'd bought a bunch of dog behavior books and had read up on it.

"Hey, buddy," I told him and went to set the bag of groceries in the kitchen. "Do you know where Allie went?" On the phone, she'd just told me that she'd had an errand to run and she'd be back in a bit.

As if he understood me – sometimes, I could have sworn that he did – he barked and then went up the stairs. Is she here? I put the milk in the fridge and then followed him up the stairs and all the way into Allie's bedroom, where he stood by her side of the bed, tail wagging.

Allie was nowhere to be seen.

I laughed. "I don't think that you understood my question, Gideon."

He barked again and then lifted his muzzle up to the top of Allie's nightstand, where there was a decorative wooden box. He sniffed at it and then looked back to me expectantly. When I didn't respond, he made a sound low in his throat.

I pointed at it. "I'm guessing that has something to do with where she went?"

Impatient, he came to me and nudged my legs.

"Okay, okay," I told him and went to pick up the box, taking a seat on the edge of the bed.

The box was beautiful, made of the finest dark wood and with a painted design of flowers on it. It was obviously handmade and foreign, and a glance at the sides told me that it was a puzzle box. I'd seen one once before, but it still took me several long moments to figure it out. Once I did, I slid the top off and dumped the contents onto the bed.

The first thing I picked up was a rolled-up piece of paper. When I unrolled it, I saw a quote – most likely from a poem – written on it in a man's handwriting.

'That I must love a loathed enemy.'

I set it aside and then picked up the next item, a fancy silver watch with an inscription in Hebrew that I couldn't read.

The last item was a picture. It had obviously been handled a lot, and clearly by Allie. She was in the photo, smiling with her arm around a man that I didn't know. He was dark-skinned – likely Hebrew, which would have matched the inscription on the watch. His eyes were dark and his hair was darker, styled flat down on the sides and messier on the top. They were both dressed casually, dressed for the environment.

The background of the photo was a lush green forest that I couldn't place, but it was beautiful. It belonged on a post card. There was nothing about the photo to give an indication of exactly where they were, but it was obvious that they were both very happy.

I replayed every conversation I'd had with her, trying to remember if she'd ever mentioned this man. But as far as I could remember, she hadn't. Yet, she had a box with some memories of him, which would have indicated that he was important to her – or at least, had been at one time.

Gideon was sitting near the bed and I looked up at him, showing him the picture. "This is why she's gone today?" I asked him, thoroughly confused. "What, did she go to… meet this guy?"

Something beeped from somewhere downstairs and Gideon ran off. I watched him for a moment and then stared back down at the picture, trying to puzzle out who he could be. Obviously not one of her brothers, as he looked absolutely nothing like her. And their body language spoke to a more intimate relationship than that of siblings.

So… who was he?

"Steve?" I heard Allie call out from downstairs and maybe I should have put everything away and pretended that I hadn't seen it, but I needed answers. If she had gone off to meet a man that she'd obviously been close to before and she hadn't told me… I just needed answers.

I heard her footsteps on the stairs and she called out for me again, but I didn't answer. Then, she came into the room and took in the scene, her eyes going wide as she realized what I was holding.

I held up the picture. "Is this who you went to see today?"

Realization dawned in her eyes. "No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." There was something in her expression that I couldn't read. "He's dead."

Well… that put a whole new spin on things. "Who is he?"

She sighed and came closer, gently taking the picture from my hands and staring down at it. There were about a hundred emotions in her eyes, and she smiled with tears in her eyes. "His name was Ari. He worked for Mossad."

"The Israeli version of the CIA?"

She nodded and then put the picture back in the box, followed by the watch and the rolled-up paper. "He was an assassin."

"I thought you said that you weren't an assassin?"

"I wasn't," she confirmed, and I could tell that she was somewhere far away. "That's actually why I met him in the first place. They sent him in to save me. And he did so… in more ways than one."

"You loved him." The spike of jealousy that I felt was unreasonable – I mean, the guy was dead. And it's not like I hadn't ever been in love before. She knew about Catherine and she hadn't seemed jealous.

"I did," she said and put the lid on the box before placing it into the bottom drawer of her nightstand. I supposed that she had forgotten to put it back there after she'd taken it out that afternoon.

"Are you going to tell me about him?"

She turned to face me and her expression was still mostly unreadable. What I did see was… pain. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything." I forced the jealousy away; there was no room for it in our relationship. "Starting with where you were today."

She came to sit beside me on the bed, leaving about five inches between us. She stared at the wall as she said, "Ari always wanted to go to Hawaii. He never made it here but, if he had, he would have wanted to take a helicopter tour of the volcanoes. I went and did that today. I don't know… maybe I just saw it as checking something off of the bucket list."

"How did he die?" I asked gently, well aware that it was always painful to talk about someone you loved that had died. Especially if they'd died in a terrible way, as my father had.

She looked over at me, expression serious. "You sure you want to hear this?"

"Of course. It's obviously important to you, so it's important to me."

She was far away again as she said, "We were in Washington DC… it was six years ago."

Allie

"Maybe I should start at the beginning," I stopped myself and nodded. "Yeah… the beginning would be better. So that you can understand…"

I'd felt a million different things when I had seen Steve with the box, holding Ari's picture. Anger that he had snooped through my things. Fear that he would be angry that I hadn't told him about Ari. Irritation that all of this was happening on the anniversary of Ari's death.

I could see how he might have been jealous, though. He'd found a picture of a guy I'd never told him about… a guy that I had obviously been close to. He deserved to know everything, hard as it was to tell him. I didn't even like to relive it myself.

"Not long after I got out of training at The Farm, I was sent to Colombia. They wanted me to get inside one of the cartels by proving myself adept at handling covert handoffs. My background proved useful for that. I already had the contacts, the skills…"

"Your background?" he asked me, curious and confused.

I shook my head and gave him a sad smile. "That's not important right now. I'll tell you, just… not today. Okay?"

After a slight hesitation, he nodded his agreement. "Okay. Go ahead."

It was like I was transported back in time, to those months in Colombia. "Colombia actually wasn't bad. Bogota was where the cartel had its home base, so that's where I went. Used a few of my connections and suddenly, I was being offered a job. They started me out with small stuff – didn't let me handle any of the drugs at first, just stuff like flash drives and small amounts of cash. After a while, others in the cartel began to take notice of me. Of how smoothly my jobs went, and how well I performed under even the most extreme pressure. They even sabotaged one of my jobs on purpose to see what would happen."

I laughed softly to myself. "I still ended up making the drop and getting away. So, they promoted me. Allowed me to start making drug deliveries. It was supposed to be a long job from the start, and I was making those runs for a year before I finally got promoted high enough to start getting the information that the agency was after."

There were some other things that I had gone through down there… but I didn't need to get into all of that. It was still a little too painful to recount.

"I got… close to the second-in-command of the cartel and gained access to his office. One night, I downloaded all of his files and then sent them to the agency. The next morning, when I woke up… the whole place was on lockdown. I've never been a tech genius, but I thought that I had checked the computer for tracers. Turns out… they knew that someone had gotten that information. And they wanted to know who. They were moving from room to room, questioning people. I was in trouble, so I contacted my handler and he began to make plans to get me out of there."

I had to take a deep breath before I could continue.

"The agency still has red tape, though a lot of people seem to think that there's not. It was taking too long… they were getting too close to my room. My handler didn't want to wait, so he reached out to other agencies. Turns out, Mossad had an assassin in the area. The assassin's handler owed my handler a favor, so they sent him in to get me."

"Ari," he guessed.

I nodded. "Ari. He had been sent there on a job and had actually just completed it the night before. He'd just gotten to the airport when his handler called him and told him that he had one more assignment."

"So, what happened?"

I closed my eyes as I remembered. "There were gunshots, and I remember thinking that they'd gotten tired of waiting and had just started shooting people. It wasn't exactly unheard of for them. I locked my door and stacked a few things against it, but I knew that it wouldn't hold for long. I couldn't get the window to open because the glass was unbreakable and it had been locked because of the lockdown. I was skilled at martial arts, but I knew that wouldn't be enough. The only weapon that I had was a knife. I thought I was doomed."

I sighed. "And then the shooting stopped and it was… eerily quiet. My heart was beating a thousand times per minute and I practically jumped out of my skin when there was a knock on the door and somebody called out the code that my handler and I had agreed upon. I thought maybe he'd gotten approval for an extraction, so I began to move stuff away from the door. And when I opened it… there was Ari."

I could still recall his messy hair, dark skin, and dark eyes. The stubble on his face and the fierceness of his expression. "I couldn't believe that it was only one man, but he certainly looked the part. He was dressed in all black and had an assault rifle, as well as multiple other guns strapped to him. He waved impatiently at me and told me that we had to go. He guided me out through a maze of dead bodies."

"How many did he kill?" Steve asked me.

I shrugged. "Maybe twenty. Thirty."

"By himself?" he asked, surprised.

"He was an assassin. And he had the element of surprise. And grenades."

"Grenades help," Steve agreed. "Then what happened? Did you get out of Colombia?"

"That was the plan, but the cartel had gotten the word out and they had people watching the airports. We ended up going to a safe house, where we stayed for a month, just laying low. I couldn't go out in public at all; he had to make all the trips for us. And when you live in close quarters with someone for that long…"

"You fell in love with him," Steve concluded.

"It was hard not to." I sighed. "And believe me, we both tried. Especially him. He had hardened himself so much to become an assassin… It took a while for him to admit that a soft side of him still existed. But yes, we fell in love. And it was really complicated, not only because he was an assassin and I was not, but because we were from two separate agencies."

"I thought that the CIA and Mossad were friendly?" he asked me.

I laughed. "As friendly as two spy agencies can be. They help each other when they can, but they always want something in return. Ari and I knew that our relationship couldn't be out in the open. At least, not until we were both done working for the agencies. If that ever even happened."

"Did that ever happen?"

"No." I shook my head. "It never happened. Mossad and the CIA worked together on several missions and Ari and I were frequently involved in those missions, since they'd seen how well we worked together. We would always drag the missions out to spend more time together. We didn't have a lot of time, but we didn't waste what we did have."

"I'm guessing he was killed in action," Steve said.

I nodded. "Protecting me." I cleared the lump in my throat before I continued. "We were supposed to be getting information from a suspected terrorist. I got into the inner circle pretty quickly and I was on my way to the information. Ari said that he smelled a trap, but I told him to stop worrying; he was always overly paranoid when it came to me and I convinced him that there was nothing to worry about. He kept insisting that we needed to call it off and abandon the mission, but I just chalked it up to him not wanting me to be in danger. I told him that when it was all over, we'd go and get some pastries from that bakery he loved."

God, how I still wished that I had listened to him. "Somehow, they'd found out that I wasn't who I said I was. I never found out how. There was a fight and I was losing until Ari came in, guns blazing. We fought together for a while and had cornered the boss when he surprised us with a grenade. I'd never been in combat before and I… I didn't know what to do. I froze."

Steve was so quiet, and I knew that he had an idea as to where the story was going.

"Ari had been a special ops soldier before he'd been recruited into Mossad. He didn't even hesitate, he just… jumped on top of the grenade and covered the blast. They say that he died instantly and couldn't have felt any pain, like that somehow makes it better. The only thing that made me feel better was that I killed the terrorist cell leader after that. Not myself, but… I had him killed. A sniper friend of Ari's was all too happy to do it for me while the CIA was transporting him after his interrogation. I watched, and it was the first time that death didn't chill me."

"I can understand that," Steve told me quietly.

"I never told you about him," I said softly. "Not because I didn't want you to know, though. Just… it's a hard thing for me to talk about. I hate reliving it. It was all my fault."

I didn't realize that I'd been crying until Steve reached over and gently wiped away my tears. "It wasn't your fault. In situations like that, our brains don't operate at full capacity. Ari was trained for that kind of thing and you weren't. That doesn't make it your fault."

The sobs came then and Steve scooped me up into his arms and just held me, letting me cry against his chest. I'd cried many times in the months following Ari's death, but it had always been alone. It was nice to finally have someone there with me that knew what I was crying about and why. It was comforting, somehow.

When I was finally through, I blew my nose with the Kleenex that he handed me and said, "Those things in the box… they're all that I had from him. We didn't keep much evidence of our relationship, just in case. The picture was from a hike in Bali, and the watch was the one that he always wore."

"What about the quote?" he asked me. "That I must love a loathed enemy."

I smiled. "It's Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet. Ari said that every relationship should have a quote, and Romeo and Juliet was one of the only things that we had to read at the safe house. It seemed fitting, being that we were from two competing spy agencies."

"Is there more to the quote?" he asked.

I nodded. "My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy."

"Sounds sad."

"Well, it was a tragedy. I guess that part turned out to be fitting, as well."

He reached over and took my hand.

"Are you angry?" I asked him. "That I never told you about him?"

"I was," he admitted. "But now… no. I understand. It was a terrible experience, and I can understand how you wouldn't like to talk about it. I'm just glad that you trusted me enough to share it with me. Now, over dinner, I'm going to tell you about Freddie Hart. That's my heartbreaking story."

"Can't wait to hear it," I told him.

As we headed down the stairs to go and prepare dinner, he said, "I guess we need a quote now. Is there a Shakespeare quote that fits us?"

I smiled. "I'd have to do some digging."

"Do that," he said. "But for now, start peeling the potatoes while I get the steaks on the grill."

I gave him a mock salute. "Anything you say, Commander."

"I'm holding you to that," he warned me.

"I hoped that you would."