'You did it beautifully...'

That voice comes from the other side of a dark doorway, still holding back. It is a familiar voice, in a way, like that of a long dead actor appearing on television.

For a moment, everything, everyone, stops.

The messenger is frozen for less than a second. Then she's on her feet and crosses to that door, flings it open and practically screams with delight. A pair of hands in heavy black gloves reach out and hug her into placid, overjoyed silence.

Mies can't keep the light in her eyes switched off. She covers her mouth and her chest swells because she can't breathe, and she can't move enough to even turn and look.

Holmes very simply feels the world fall away. And his heart, beating hard, beating out of his chest, alight. "Impossible," he breathes.

"So are you," Mies bites. Her voice, for once, is quiet, almost beneath notice.

And far away in the background that shadow is smoothing down the angel's hair, tipping up her chin. "There now, let go. There's a good girl. Turn around, how'd those wings of yours heal up? Let me look at you. You're run ragged, poor thing. Go, get sat down. Take the weight off your wheels."

That voice. That damned, sing-song, fairytale voice.

He rolls her out of the dark ahead of him. Then, finally steps into the light. Not quite so scrupulously well kept as he was in the past. A little ragged, perhaps, and looking older behind a heavy layer of stubble. He raises a hand, "I know, I know," then indicates his jacket. "But you have to admit, it's still good tailoring." For once in his life, Holmes has absolutely nothing. He went along with the suspicion to trap Mies. Never for a second believed that she might be right.

James Moriarty points over at him. "You need a minute to take this in. That's alright. I need a minute to say hello to the Queen, who hasn't even got up off her arse and it's been two years and I'm really, really offended, Danielle."

"I don't think my legs would manage." She is rapt as a saint, glowing, beatific.

She can't see him, but Holmes can, the way his smile twists as he steps up behind her and says, "Short of crushing a tree trunk, there's very little your legs wouldn't manage." He reaches over the back of the sofa and places a gloved hand on her neck, roving over her face and shoulder. She brings her own up to join it, leaning into his touch. Her need, her pleasure, is genuine where it has always been tempered with sense.

Holmes looks on like it's all another nightmare. Like he's about to reach into Moriarty's chest and remove his still-beating heart with ease and impunity. That, however, would be a dream. This is a nightmare because he can't move, can't do anything. He does, however, summon enough of himself to start reaching for his inside pocket.

Danielle Mies is lost, verging on tears. She breaks and words tumble from her, fast, uncalculated, tangling herself, "I always believed. I knew you'd come to back to me. If he was alive you had to be. If they told me you'd shot yourself after he jumped, I would have believed them, but you wouldn't leave before the curtain. I knew it." She's gone, and doesn't think how it torments Holmes to hear her say it and mean it so intensely she can't even control herself. She wants Moriarty so much she can't even look at him.

Holmes's hand eases inside his coat.

There should still be a knife in his inside pocket. The one the messenger put there on the very first night, when she all but knocked him off his feet. 'Helping him,' she kept saying, 'from the beginning.'

It's not there. He slept while he was guarded by a thief, or the angel straightened his lapels, but it's not there.

In the same moment that he discovers this fact, he sees Moriarty's eyes lift from Mies. They lock stares for just a second before Holmes sees the other gloved hand appear, and the knife, and the blade flicking out of the handle. Before he can call out her name or even breathe to do it, a flash of murderous silver cuts Danielle's throat.

The angel is screaming, but she's the only one. Mies is gasping, and choking on her own blood. Moriarty holds her head still and presses his own close, murmuring comfort in her ear, to be quiet, to be still, that it's almost over, that it's quick, it doesn't hurt, it's quick. Holmes isn't sure she can hear him. If she does, she doesn't find it all that comforting. She bleeds too much and breathes too little to last very long at all. Falling from her last real happiness, Danielle Mies dies afraid and confused and betrayed.

Holmes watches her fade out right in front of him. Then goes back to the folding chair, slowly, sickly, sits down.

Moriarty gently lets Mies's head hang down and releases her. For a moment he stands with both hands on the sofa back, looking as though a great weight has just come to rest upon him. He breathes out long and low, then suddenly stabs the knife in to stand in the cushion. He rounds the sofa and sits next to the body. Takes her hand in the clean glove, but the glove seems to disgust him now, and he violently strips it off, throws it across her knees.

He's wearing, Holmes notes, because noting things is easier and makes more sense, latex laboratory gloves underneath. He's more careful with those. Pulls them off with a snap and just as much hatred, but leaves them by his side. Then holds her hand again.

The girl is lingering behind him, and starting to feel a little forgotten, so she cries out again, wailing except that her lips are pressed together. Moriarty remembers she's there and hugs her down next to him. Over her head, he raises his eyes to Holmes and rolls them towards heaven; 'Sorry. What can you do?' "Sure you never liked her anyway," he tells the angel. She's happy not to answer, just to stay there against him. With the girl's scars and the madman beginning to smile again and Mies slumped at the other arm, the effect is very much that of a bleak, awful family portrait. To Holmes, as though explaining to a guest, "I used to forget myself and call Dani 'angel' too. She's an awful jealous little thing, this one."

All of this, perhaps, begins to explain why Holmes hasn't acted yet. Why he sat down as if to watch where this goes and no more. It is terrible and surreal and his sanity forbids him from entering the scene. That is, until Moriarty breaks it.

He jogs the angel's shoulder, "I need to get this one home and counselled before the trauma burns too deep, so let's get this over with. You're alright? You've come to terms? We can talk, I mean, and the shock won't get in the way?"

"I'll live."

"Aha, well, quite." From sobbing, muffled in his shoulder, the messenger giggles. "Ah, you like that, angel? Listen in, because the best joke's yet to come. Now, detective, before I had to interrupt dear Dani just now, you were starting to figure something out, weren't you? I have to admit, the look on your face was priceless."

"I have been resurrected."

Moriarty makes a noise like a microwave bell going off, "Correct. Tricked over the edge one careless step at a time."

"It can be denied. If I disappear again, there's no proof. All your supposed clues, Forrester and Adler's diamonds and all of it, it's just circumstantial."

Tossing his head, "Not quite all of it. You don't know all of it yet. Anyway, even if it was, it wouldn't matter. All people have to do is talk about it and after Baker Street, well... That was quite good, actually. Was that your idea, Odbody, did I hear that right?" She peels back from him and nods, turning pointedly away from Mies' body. "You're a good girl. You're my angel, aren't you?"

She snivels miserably, "Always."

"My best angel. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, aye, the clues... Clues is a funny word for them. Me, I just think of that as set-dressing." During this, he pushes the angel up by the small of the back, gliding her towards the door. She goes and hangs by the post. Moriarty himself looks around at Mies, pulling her hair out of the wet black gash across her neck.

Holmes is supposed to ask, 'Set-dressing for what?'

What he does instead is point at the dead woman, "She would have done anything for you."

"That's sort of my secondary point. And it's the one I was trying to show you too. You and me, we don't need anybody to do for us."

"Oh, so that's why Molly was a target. And Mag Slope."

He laughs, ducking his head in to kiss Mies's sallow cheek. "And John Watson, no doubt." Holmes starts out of his chair, but Moriarty pulls back, both hands raised, "Oh, hold on a minute. Look at the facts here. I've let you have Milverton, Morgan, Moran's rendered himself useless now he's the London bloody Sniper. I've given you Dani, Christ's sake. Honestly, sometimes you don't think before you open your-"

"Car," the messenger calls. "People. Soon. Now, sir."

"Already?" Moriarty asks her thoughtfully. He looks smiling back to Holmes. "You might have to put the rest of this one together for yourself, old sport. Don't worry, there's not much work left to do."

Holmes grabs for him, tells him he's not going anywhere. But then he feels the laser sight in the side of his head again, following Moriarty's sight-line and can't help but ask, "You've just murdered Moran's closest friend, why would-"

"Oh, that's not Moran. Do you think I'd still be alive if that was Moran? Moran was replaced by another sympathetic party just after Danielle spoke to him then. He's gone down by the river to draw off the spooks." Under the sniper's eye, Holmes is forced to stand and watch again as Moriarty simply gets up and slips away. "I suppose I don't have to run out the old cliché about no sudden moves, do I?"

"You didn't, no."

The only things Moriarty takes with him are the latex gloves, his own appreciative smile and the girl. "Don't worry. We'll see each other again once I've packed my angel off home."

Hating it all, and mostly the voice disappearing away down the hall, Holmes doesn't answer.

He is thinking, obsessively, Draw, Win, Lose, Draw, Win, Lose. Round one was a draw, round two he won, and this third round he's lost. But all the loss means is that the scores are even now. The next hand will be sudden death.

Speaking of sudden death...

He is looking at the knife sticking out of the sofa behind Mies. His fingerprints are on it. He covers his hand and reaches out, but a round is fired, enters at the empty window frame and is buried in the wall near the door. Damn. And thinking of fingerprints, he thinks of Moriarty's gloves and looks down at them, limp in Mies's lap.

They're not Moriarty's at all. They're his. The ones he gave to the girl to get rid of the night he visited Milverton's victim. He abandoned her then, left her in the suburbs with no taxi. Well, that'll teach him.

Those gloves are still full of his untainted traces, and none of the madman's, because of the lab gloves he wore underneath.

Damn.

He stands back from the body and sees the laser still dancing for a moment on the wall before it follows him. Why is he being kept here? Just to let them get away? Or is there something he has yet to see?

Car, the girl said. Car-people-soon-now. Footsteps that come creeping along because they heard the first round fired. Two sets of them.

He remembers the angel texting Molly from the cab. Molly appears first, and the sight of him standing over Mies leaves her breathless, unable to speak, unable to explain. And whoever is with her she is trying to push them back, keep them away from this. But a voice that pains Holmes as much as it did this afternoon argues against her, "What is it? Molly, get out of the way."

Because Morgan stole the watch from the pawnshop and the angel took it to Mies and Mies took it to where its significance would be understood.

Draw, win, lose.

"Jesus Christ, Maya" John Watson breathes in shock. And on that breath, the whole sick house of cards collapses.

[Now, if you're an old fashioned villain like me, that's a very satisfying ending, don't you think? All you believers, if I'm feeling kind, maybe I'll write you a sequel to tell you how Holmes was framed for far, far more than just the murder of Danielle Mies. Who knows, I might even be persuaded to let him clear his name. He's alive to do it now, I suppose...

What do you think? Let me know three things – a) if you're up for another round, b) what you liked about this one (so I can do it again), and c) anything you didn't like (so I can... take a look at it and assess its literary worth objectively...)

And finally, if you've been with me this far, please just know you have my gratitude and, eternally –

All my hearts,

Sal.]