A/N: Here's this weeks' chapter. Hope you enjoy. And are you guys as excited about the upcoming episode of Castle after that adorable Sneak Peek as I am?
Chapter 28
Maura stared at the table in front of her. It presented her with a collection of chemicals, cables, containers, and tools in such apparent disarray that it made her skin crawl. She might not be an expert on building the kind of end-product their kidnappers had set their minds on, but she saw instantly that the ingredients they had assembled here could be highly unstable, especially when they came into contact with each other.
Now, obviously that was the point, but Maura doubted that their captors planned on blowing themselves up as well, or at least not right here since there were no other victims except the two of them.
Suddenly, Maura realized that this might be exactly what she should do – use the tools at her disposal to incinerate them all, so that nobody else could get hurt – but the mere thought made her break out in a cold sweat. And she couldn't just sign Castle's death warrant like this, without even conferring with him first.
She looked at him in fear and indecision, and he mirrored her expression, but of course he couldn't know what she was considering, what she was asking him.
"So, can you do it?" Chalid asked impatiently, waving at the table with his gun. Either he wasn't afraid to die or he simply didn't realize how dangerous some of these chemicals were.
"Yes," Maura replied, because it seemed unwise to give any other answer. "But we will all need the appropriate protective clothing before I…"
Chalid didn't let her finish. He grabbed his gun by the barrel and whipped Castle across the face with the handle. Maura yelled in shock and Castle moaned and staggered, but one of Chalid's men grabbed him and kept him from going down.
"Shut up and just start working!" Chalid ordered her after this anything but subtle warning, and Maura didn't dare refuse.
Castle felt like that godforsaken bomb had already gone off, but only inside his head. The entire left half of his face throbbed with pain and he thought he felt blood trickling down his temple as well. But he willed himself to stay on his feet because he refused to be held upright by his captors like a defenseless punching ball.
Chalid motioned to one of his men and he placed a pen and paper on a table next to the one Maura was carefully inspecting. Chalid pointed to the fresh sheet of paper. "The Navy Yard blueprints! And if they don't add up, she dies."
Castle frowned, which turned out to be a really bad idea because it only intensified the sensation of thousands of tiny needles pricking his head. "You can't kill her. You need her to build you that bomb," he still countered.
It was a risky move to challenge Chalid like this, especially when it was Dr. Isles' life he was bargaining with, but he couldn't just stand here and do nothing. He did have the utmost faith in Beckett and the 12th, and he knew that they would find them, but he also knew that he had to give them as much time as possible.
But Chalid didn't miss a beat. "She doesn't need all her body parts to do it," he threatened maliciously.
Maura froze for a second and Castle responded by picking up that pen. Chalid smiled, but before he could say anything else, the guy he had positioned outside to stand guard called his name. Since they were careful to speak Arabic around them, Castle couldn't understand what he was saying exactly, but it caused Chalid and one of his men to join the look-out, leaving only one guard behind to keep watch over them.
But he had a gun and his three armed buddies weren't far away so Castle still didn't like those odds. But the blank piece of paper in front of him didn't seem like a good way to go either. If he'd still had his phone, he could have tried to check out the rough outline of the Navy Yard to make sure his drawings at least resembled the real one enough to fool Chalid. But unfortunately, their kidnappers had been smart enough to ditch their phones while they'd been speeding away from the morgue.
"How's that bomb coming along because I might have exaggerated my drawing skills just a little," Castle whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
Maura carefully met his gaze. "They do have everything they need to obliterate this entire farm house," she replied silently.
Castle raised his eyebrows, ignoring the pain and the blood. "You mean… with us in it?"
Maura nodded hesitantly.
Well, it was certainly an extreme way out and not the most preferable one by far, but Castle understood why Maura was suggesting it nevertheless. If these guys got what they wanted and took off to blow up innocent people, the blood of those victims would be on their hands, too. Plus, if Lanie had bled out, lying alone and scared on the cold floor of the morgue, the thought of blowing these bastards straight to hell made him feel pretty good.
"Sounds like a plan."
"But you would never get to meet your unborn child," Maura reminded him, because even though part of her was ready to finally end this threat – to themselves; to Jane, who would try to rescue her; and of course to all the other innocent people who might get in the way of these men in the future – at the same time, she crumbled under the pressure of being the one who had to do it.
"And you would never get to help those kids in Africa or to explain to Rizzoli why you applied for the job in the first place," Castle countered to hide how freakishly scared he really was. The thought of never seeing his loved ones again was beyond terrifying. Plus, he had never been a fan of this kind of suicide heroism anyway.
Ah, screw this, he thought. "How about we call that plan B?"
Maura nodded in relief. "What is plan A then?" she asked, though.
"To give Beckett and Rizzoli the time they need to do what they do best," Castle replied grimly.
"Hey!" Chalid's angry voice suddenly whipped through the air. "No talking!" he yelled, hurrying back towards them.
Castle gritted his teeth. They needed to stall for time. Fortunately, making stuff up was what he did for a living. "We were only discussing how to make sure this thing really works. You do know that neither one of us spends his days building bombs on a regular basis, right?"
"Then it's good that nobody asked you to. So shut it and give me those blueprints!" Chalid pointed to the still empty sheet of paper.
"Sure, but you won't really need those if the bomb doesn't work, now will you?" Castle argued and realized too late that Chalid seemed to be under so much pressure himself that his patience was already used up again.
He grabbed Maura's honey colored hair and yanked her towards him and his gun barrel. "You really want to see how I pull out her toenails one after the other?"
Before Castle could try to rectify his mistake, one of the lookouts yelled another warning, and this time he sounded so urgent that Castle thought he didn't need to speak Arabic to understand. Chalid's panicked reaction confirmed that. He pushed Maura roughly into the arms of the other guard, shouting something at him. While that guy tried to make a run for it, dragging Maura with him, gunshots exploded outside.
Knowing that the cavalry had arrived, Castle used the short distraction to go for Chalid's gun. He managed to catch him by surprise, but Chalid recovered quickly, and they started fighting over the weapon. Castle clung to it as if his life depended on it – which it kind of did – but Chalid let go with one hand to claw at Castle's bleeding head wound. Instant pain seared through him again and made him loosen his grip enough for Chalid to rip the gun from him. He didn't hesitate for a second and struck Castle across the face with it once more. The pain that exploded inside his head was twice as bad as the last one, and this time Castle went down. Black spots clouded his vision, but he could still see that Chalid now aimed the gun at him to use it the way it was originally meant to be used and to finally end this once and for all.
When the gunshot went off, Castle thought he was done for and closed his eyes. But when the pain didn't really get any worse, he dared to open them again and saw that it was Chalid who was staggering. He struggled to stay on his feet and turned when the second round hit him squarely in the chest.
Castle tore his eyes away from the blood oozing from Chalid's body, and from where Castle lay on the ground, he could see familiar legs on ridiculously high heels walk slowly but determinedly towards him while ever more bullets riddled Chalid's body until he finally dropped to the ground unmoving. Castle looked from the bloody mess to Kate, who slowly lowered her gun and allowed herself a deep breath.
Ryan and Esposito came running up behind her and Ryan took the extra precaution of securing the gun that Chalid had dropped, but then he bend down and announced, "He's dead."
Esposito snorted. "No kidding." He looked at Beckett and made a mental note never to cross an armed pregnant woman again.
One of Chalid's men, who was also already bleeding from his left arm but still held his gun in the right hand, came bursting into the room behind them. But Castle had only just opened his mouth to shout a warning when the L.A. guys entered through a side door and opened fire.
Once Chalid's man was down as well, Deeks reported, "All clear out front."
Kate acknowledged that with a nod and hurried to holster her gun and to finally kneel down next to Castle. "You okay?" she asked, eyeing the blood on his face, some dried and some fresh.
"Well, I've been better, but my day just improved significantly," Castle replied, allowing himself a moment to relish the sight of her leaning over him and especially the smile that spread across Kate's face in response to his answer.
But then the moment was over. "What about Dr. Isles? One of these guys took her out back."
Kate rested a soothing hand on his shoulder. "Don't worry. Rizzoli and the others are covering the back."
Maura tried not to trip over her own feet while her kidnapper dragged her along with him, too scared of being caught to care whether she could keep up or not. But he kept his gun pressed against her stomach and Maura was afraid that if she made a false move or slowed him down too much, that he might send Chalid's orders to hell and simply shoot her. And at his current angle, she would die a very slow and very painful death.
They burst through the back doors and out in the open. Maura needed a second to adjust her eyes to the darkness and the same was probably true for her kidnapper because they were both equally surprised when they heard a voice that was at least to Maura wonderfully familiar.
"Police! Don't move!"
The man flinched and whirled them both around, pulling Maura closer to him and adjusting his gun to aim at her head. "You don't move or she's dead!"
Maura looked at Jane who seemed as fierce and determined as always, the gun perfectly steady in her hands, but her eyes betrayed the mixture of fear and anger that boiled inside of her.
"Just shoot him, Jane!" Maura shouted.
"Shut the hell up!" Chalid's man hissed at her, clawing his fingers into her arms and pressing the barrel of his gun so hard against her temple that Maura whimpered.
Jane's knuckles turned white because she was gripping her gun so hard. She would have loved nothing better than to shoot this asshole, but he was shielding his body pretty well with Maura's and they were both shaking and moving constantly, so she didn't have a clear shot, and she simply couldn't risk hitting Maura. She knew from personal experience how much that hurt, and she refused to be responsible for causing Maura that kind of pain. But she also couldn't allow anyone else to do it.
"If you hurt her, I will personally make sure that you'll regret the day you were born."
"Jane…" Maura pleaded with her, meeting her gaze.
She knew Jane was afraid to take the shot, but Maura was so scared and so sick of this, she just wanted it to end, and she was glad that she got to see Jane again. They were both scared, and frustrated, and angry right now, but beyond all that they felt just as deeply connected to each other as they always had, and nothing that had happened could change anything about that. And Maura trusted Jane to do the right thing.
"Hey, dumbass, how many terrorists does it take to change a light bulb?"
A voice suddenly spoke up behind them and Maura was once again whirled around when her kidnapper turned to face the new threat. It were agents DiNozzo and David, but Maura had barely recognized them when a gunshot went off.
Blood sprayed across her face and she was propelled forward. But when her knees hit the ground, she realized that it had only been the momentum of her captor, who had been blown off his feet by Jane's bullet, that had pulled her down as well. The NCIS agents and Jane rushed forward to make sure that the threat had been eliminated, but Maura was already staring into the men's open and glassy eyes and knew it had been.
"Maura!" Jane put an arm around her shoulders and helped her back to her feet again. "Are you okay?"
"I'm unhurt," Maura replied because she wasn't really sure whether she was okay, but all of her bodily functions were certainly still intact.
An ambulance came blaring onto the premises, and she and Castle were collected by the paramedics. Castle would need stitches for that nasty wound on his forehead and Maura was supposed to receive a thorough check-up at the ER as well. It wasn't strictly necessary, but Maura didn't protest. While the SWAT team started clearing the area and taking care of the bodies and their belongings, Maura only wanted to get out of here.
