Okay so it was pointed out to me that I essentially posted the same chapter twice...oops. I forgot that I had added those two chapters together and then did edits on the last one. So to make up for my oops, I pushed to get this small chapter out as quickly as I could. I have corrected the mistake and I am so sorry I didn't catch that. I am currently working on the next chapter as we speak and hope to have it to you guys soon.

Zaeed looked down at Lili asleep in the middle of their bed. It didn't matter what part of the bed she started out and fell asleep on, she'd always ended up in the center. He shook his head, both in amusement at her and in bewilderment at himself. He had never thought he would get this far with someone in his life. Damn it, Lili. What the hell have you done to me? He had never given a damn about anyone before; never thought once about someone else's thoughts or feelings other than his own. Yet the moment he stepped into that bar, she had been on his mind. After she had ran out on him, left him to wake up alone in a hotel room, and made him wait for her for two years, he bloody fell in love with her. …something he swore would never happen. He remembered the locket she left at the hotel their first night together, the only thing he had of her for the two years she spent dead and on an operating table, and smiled. The thought of her reaction to receiving it back to him was too much for him to pass up. He had meant to give it back to her before now, but damn it if she didn't always distract him one way or the other.

Slowly extracting himself from the confines of their blankets that she had managed to cocoon them in, Zaeed slipped out of bed and made his way over to her desk. A box of his items that had yet to bed unpacked and sat among the empty boxes her ship models came in. After a moment of searching, he looked up at the sound of Lili moving restlessly on the bed before she idly reached out where he had been only moments before, only to be met with warm emptiness. She mumbled lazily in her sleep and he was unaware if she were still sleeping or if she was consciously aware of his absence. "Zaeed…," she called out softly.

"Yeah?"

Lili begrudgingly opened her eyes to look up at him standing beside her desk in his boxers cradling something in the palm of his hand. With a groan she buried her face back into the pillow, mumbling against it. "What are you doing?"

He smiled as he walked back to the bed and pulled her away from the pillow she held onto like a lifeline. She gave a weak protest until he sat next to her and leaned against the headboard, pulling her up against him. She gave a contented sigh as she wrapped her arms around him and rested her head on his solid abdomen. He brushed away a curl that had fallen in front of her face as he tried to unsuccessfully wake her. "Lili, I've got something of yours."

Lili shook her head as she tried to bury her face further into him, just wanting to go back to sleep. She figured whatever he had for her would still be there when they woke up and she really couldn't think of anything that required her immediate attention at the moment. As far as she was concerned, she was still on medical leave from Chakwas and would be until she woke up for the next "morning" shift…which wasn't now, but when Zaeed lifted her chin and bent down to press a soft and affectionate kiss on her lips, she opened her eyes curiously. She was used to the hard and needing kisses that seemed to devour her and leave her wanting him, not this gentle loving expression. There was no need in it, no demand for her to give herself to him completely, just simple love. "What's wrong, Zaeed?"

He pulled her hand away from his waist and gently placed something small inside it and wrapped her small fingers around it and kissed her again; this time a little more forcefully. Sitting up and opened her hand, Lili gasped as tears formed in her eyes. What the fuck! She looked up at him as she tried to blink past the tears without letting them fall. "Z, where did you get this? I thought…" Lili looked back down at the simple golden oval locket in her hand and smiled as she opened it and saw the image of two young girls, ages thirteen and fifteen, with their arms wrapped around each other as they smiled up at her.

Zaeed lifted her chin and waited for her eyes to meet his, not a trace of lingering blue from her drug exposure in them anymore, just pure emeralds. "Lili…I've had this since before you died. When you left me alone in that hotel room, I found this on the floor next to the bed. The girl in the holo looked like you, so I took it with me. I didn't know you had died, wouldn't have known what to do with it if I did. Don't think I'd 'ave given it to anyone else."

Leaning her back against him, she lowered her gaze again, a smile spreading across her face as she relived the memories she and Britnee had shared together. "This girl…" She pointed to the dark haired girl standing next to her and smiled. "This is Britnee, my adopted sister. She was the first and only person I would let near me after my mother's murder. We were inseparable until I ran away at thirteen. This holo was taken two days before that. We met again five years later, on my eighteenth birthday." A small laugh left her as she realized she could essentially blame all of her luck with the Alliance on her, but she knew that she would have found her way to this at some point. If she hadn't joined the Alliance, she had no doubt in her mind that she and Zaeed would have met eventually and ended up at this spot; they were both naturally born warriors and the draw to the other was magnetic. "She's actually the one who convinced me to enlist in the Alliance."

Zaeed looked at her curiously, knowing she wasn't the type of woman to intentionally run out on someone she cared for. Even when she had run out on him, she'd had a damn good reason. Saving the entire galaxy tended to take priority over one person. While Lili made it a habit to take on galaxy ending missions, he was positive that she hadn't been saving life as they knew it when she was thirteen. "Why'd you leave?"

Lili hung her head shamefully, her suppressed tears spilling over and leaving tracks in their wake. "I hurt her." She looked up and met his eyes, her guilt evident in her soulful gaze. "I was having a dream of my mother's murder. While it wasn't my first dream about that, it was also the night my biotics manifested. Britnee and I shared a room in the small orphanage. When she tried to wake me, I threw her across the room. I…I broke her arm."

"Lili…"

She shook her head, ignoring the excuses he was trying to give her…reasons for her to assuage her guilt. "No Zaeed. I hurt her. I gave her a fucking concussion. It may have not been intentional, but I still hurt the one person I loved!" She paused as she looked away, ashamed. She didn't know if her shame came from harming her friend or leaving her to deal with it alone. She had thought leaving had been the best option. Though after talking with Britnee five years later, she realized that she had abandoned her best friend, just as everyone else in her life had. After almost twenty years, she had yet to forgive herself of that one action, the inadvertent action that had set her on her current path. "I did the only thing I thought would protect her from me at the time…I left, met with the Reds, and joined their gang. Only later did I realize what I had put her through by leaving her."

Zaeed looked at Lili with a raised brow, surprised by both her uncharacteristic actions and by their results. "You were in The Tenth Street Reds?" He let out a deep breath as he shook his head with a ghost of a smile at her nod of affirmation. "Leave it to you to find the hardest and meanest gang in Vancouver at age thirteen and convince that bastard in charge to let you join them."

Lili looked at him cautiously, unsure how he personally knew the Reds. "Do you know the Reds?"

Nodding his head in affirmation, Zaeed looked down to the woman before him curiously. "The Reds started hiring me about ten years ago. They would send me out to find someone who owed them money. Every now and again, they'd pay me to take care of someone who had pissed off their leader."

"Rod Armstrong." Lili growled his name low in her throat. It was a name she never wanted to hear again.

Zaeed pulled Lili closer to him and wrapped his arm around her shoulders and across her chest. He knew of the man and didn't really care for him, but credits were credits. So long as he didn't stiff him on his payment, then there was no need to take action against the man. Albeit Lili's reactions to the name alone made him reconsider that thought. He kissed the top of her head before speaking to her. "Yeah. You know 'im?"

She gave a dry chuckle at the seemingly innocent question. Did she know him? Unfortunately, yes…she did. "Yeah, he's my ex. You remember that guy I killed in Chora's Den when we first met? Finch? He was a Red. Rod sent him…"

Zaeed pulled back away from Lili and met her emerald eyes as she glanced up at him. "You were that high up the chain of command?"

Lili shrugged and closed her locket and placed it gently around her neck. "Yeah, I was his second there for a while…not that it consisted of anything other than flaunting me off at social gatherings or taking me with him to meetings with rival gangs…giving them the feeling of power." She gave Zaeed a devilish smile as she thought about the times that had worked in her favor, both in the Reds and in the Alliance. "I can look pretty harmless when I try to be. I can also attribute my status to the group that found me. His social circle, the best of the gang at the time, took a liking to me real fast. It wasn't long after my full initiation that he made a claim on me." She gave him a sweet smile and he couldn't help but see how she could easily fool people into believing she was harmless. "Those tattoos I used to have…they were his handiwork."

"He's good I'll give 'im that, but I know someone better. Does all his work free hand and the old fashioned way. None of that drawing it and having a VI fill it in bullshit."

Lili smiled as she moved to straddle his hips and wrap her arms around his neck. She was ready to have new ink on her body. Despite the fact that they tied her to him in a way, she still missed them. They were a part of who she was. Now she felt empty, but she was no longer that Shepard, the Bloody Lily, and hadn't been in a while. "Maybe you can take me to him. I'd love another tat." She paused before she closed the distance between them and kissed him softly.

Zaeed growled at the feeling of her pressed tightly against him and gently his hands gripped her hair, pulling her closer, trying to show her how much he cared with just that one kiss. He remembered the contract Rod had personally requested of him, the one he had turned down for this job. Cerberus paid more money than what the Reds even had. "You know they want you dead, right?"

Lili laid her head against his chest and smiled in contentment. The Reds wanting her dead wasn't even a blip on the list of things she was concerned with. Actually, it was something she had suspected over the years. "Who does…Rod? Doesn't surprise me. I ran out on the gang, probably humiliating him, killed one of his top men, and allowed the Turians to take another to prison for dealing Red Sand in Turian space. How do you know this?"

The mercenary wrapped his arms around the waist of the half naked woman sprawled across him as he rested his face on the top of her head. "I was offered a job by him just after I heard from your Illusive Man. Bastard he may be, but he can move a lot more bloody credits than the Rod even has. At least I'm assuming it's you; an ex-girlfriend and ex-Red was causing problems for their business.

She grinned, proud of what she had done to cause such an upheaval within their network. "Yep, sounds like me. To my knowledge, I'm the only one Rod ever actually claimed and was with exclusively. Regardless, it doesn't matter; I can handle them."

"Trust me, love, that I ain't bloody concerned about," Zaeed chuckled. He kissed her deeply, groaning as she pulled away, smiling.

"Thank you." Lili sat up fully in his lap, her hand ran along the chain around her neck as she fought to keep the motion in her voice at bay. She knew she wasn't really an emotional person, but it seemed that everything she had held in throughout her life always came out around the man beneath her, and he did nothing but provide her with the support and comfort she felt she didn't deserve. "I thought this was lost when the Normandy crashed. It was the only thing I owned that I didn't leave behind when I enlisted."

Zaeed understood her sentimentality for the simple item. He and Vido had been almost that close at one point; it was one thing that had made his betrayal so painful. "That message Anderson sent out for you?"

Lili nodded as she lay back down against Zaeed, pressing the side of her face against his bare chest. "Yeah, I asked Hackett to pass it along for me. At the time I didn't have Kasumi here to debug these terminals, and Britnee is married to Hackett's son. Damn, Ash's almost four now." Lili moved to get up, only to have Zaeed grab her and pull her back down a little forcefully. She prided herself on always providing the little guy with the best gifts and the most fun – even if it cause his mother slight distress. Granted, she knew that he had no others aunts or uncles, but they had family friends, and she was the one that he always ran to when she was planet side.

"Where do you think you're bloody goin'? You're still on fuckin' bed rest!"

She shook her head at him and tried to move once again as she realized how much time she had missed with him, how many birthdays and holidays she needed to make up for. "But I've got to find Ash something to make up for the time I've missed." Lili looked at him with new tears forming in her eyes at the thought of leaving her family, causing Britnee to mourn for her once again. She stopped her struggling and looked up at the man who held her tightly in his grasp. "Zaeed, I never met my father and my mother was murdered with me in the next room when I was three. Britnee and her family are the only family I have and I left them again!"

He reached up and wiped the tears falling from her eyes away gently before he leaned down to kiss her. "You didn't leave them Lili; you died. I'm sure she isn't going to hold it against you and I'm sure both she and Ash are excited to see you again. You can't blame yourself for what happened. We'll take care of finding something for the boy tomorrow, love."

Lili grumbled as she slid back down in the bed and curled up next to Zaeed comfortably. She knew he was right and she knew that Britnee didn't blame her for dying, but she couldn't help but feel a little guilty for putting her through that again.

Wrapping his arms around her, Zaeed looked down at the fragile woman who held the locket reverently in her hands. Pulling her close, he kissed the top of her head. "Tell me about your mother, Lili."

With a sigh, the redhead shook her head as she dropped the locket, letting it settle against her chest. Her gaze lifted to see the curious mismatched one of her boyfriend. "Honestly I don't remember much of her. I remember her murder most vividly. I woke up to someone beating on our door. Then there was yelling. I was three and so scared. I crawled underneath my bed to hide from the ones who barged in. In all honesty, it was probably what saved my life." Lili closed her eyes, both to remember and to try and fight back the tears. She had spent her entire life trying to forget the sounds of that night. "I remember two men. They were looking for me, but said that I was too young, so it really didn't matter if they found me or not. I remember hearing my mother's screams, begging them to stop." Lili opened her eyes as she felt Zaeed's hand on her face. She leaned into it and kissed his wrist. "After what felt like hours of silence, I made my way into our front room." She fought back a sob as the image came to her clearly and she realized this was the first time in her life that she had willingly spoke of that night. Most times it was just her giving basics to Alliance shrinks. "I saw her lying there on the floor in her own blood. That's all I can remember now…not her face, but her broken and bleeding body. It was cold, but not cold enough to prevent me from curling against her, crying loud enough to try and gain any type of response from her." Lili let out a laugh that sounded like a choking sob. "How sad is it that the only memory I have of my mother is of her dead body?" Her voice hardened as she clenched her fist tightly. "If I ever find out who did that to her, I'm going to fucking kill them!"

"They never found out who was responsible?

She gave Zaeed a short and sarcastic laugh. "Z, I grew up in the slums of Vancouver. There are hundreds of cold cases that go unsolved every year. What is one more added to it? I'm the only family my mother had, and I was just a child. There was no one there to push for the continuation of her case. It was just another cold case to be filed away."

Zaeed pulled her close, as she rested her head against his chest she let out a contented sigh. She realized that Britnee and Ash weren't the only family she had anymore. Zaeed had managed to worm his way into that part of her heart, and she wasn't sure that she could willingly let him go. Lili smiled to herself as she inhaled the intoxicating smell of Zaeed, that of rich whiskey and expensive cigars, before falling back to sleep, her locket nestled safely between her breasts.