Jamison felt her tap against his thigh with her fingers. He doesn't want to look away, knowing these are her last moments. But when he looked down to his leg, he saw she had drawn a heart on the inside of his pant leg in blood. His heart broke in that instant, knowing it will never be repaired. He only ever got to have her body. But only now, in her last moments, does he have her heart.
Jamie looks back up to her, a painful smile pushing onto his face. "I love you too, Nikki." He said, cupping her cheek again.
A tear fell from her eye and she smiled.
She convulsed in his arms once more before her eyes drifted shut and when her body goes limp, Rook feels her hand lay limply onto his leg.
Rick grits his teeth, pausing before he flicks his eyes to the last line on the screen of his laptop.
And in that moment, he knew she was gone.
With a short, hard sigh pushed out in a huff, he looks away, shoving his laptop away from him in a fruitless effort when the rubber stops on the bottom keep it from moving more than half an inch. He turns away and rolls himself away from his desk, petting Persius's neck and back in a slow, gentle motion back and forth. He looks down to the cat, sitting in his lap and sleeping soundly, his arms opened and draped around him. Rick smiles sadly and strokes his hand down his back.
He looks back up to his laptop for a moment, where he has the entire section highlighted, his finger dangling above the backspace button to erase it forever. It wasn't the ending he ever planned for the book, it wasn't an ending he ever planned for the character, it wasn't the ending he ever planned for the story as a whole. Like so many writers before him, it would be changing and altering the fundamental and defining traits of his characters just to tell a story nobody wanted to hear, instead of doing what he was taught, and just developing characters and letting them tell the story.
He was angry, furious. He wanted to erase her from his life. He wanted her gone. He was tired of constantly being at war with some part of himself, constantly being at war with other people and their expectations. And it wasn't because he was over her, not in any sense of the phrase. As he takes up the picture in his hands that lies face down next to his laptop, he reads the words she'd written in her elegant handwriting, Always, My Love.
After another deep sigh, feeling his lungs strain a bit, he flips the picture over but doesn't look at the two people pictured just yet. They were never at the point when they could be that loving and that affectionate with each other. They'd whispered sweet-nothings and adoring compliments to each other in bed, but never anything like what she wrote. They never got to the pre-wedding honeymoon phase.
He swallows and runs his fingers down Persius's head and looks at the picture, feeling everything inside him tighten just as it used to when something reminded him of her before she showed up here. And as he lets the two beautiful people, illuminating happiness with their smiles and her eyes, he looks back over to his laptop. He was never over her. He never stopped thinking about her. He never even thought ill of her, was never poisoned to think any less of her, admire her any less. If anything, everything that she did just made him miss the her that he let slip away while he was distracted by trying to keep her around.
He breathes another hard breath and sets the picture back down, his fingers falling lightly onto her face as he continues to stroke Persius.
When he hears a creak of the stairs from down the hall, Rick turns his chair around by pushing against the side of his desk with his foot while Sasha perks her head up off the loveseat adjacent to his desk at the sound. His heart skips when he sees the laptop still open to what he wrote and reaches over to simply pull it closed.
Kate is heading up the stairs after catching Alexis by the door and being pointed up. He never called her back last night. She ran back out to check on the store briefly, get a change of clothes, but nothing ever came of his open ended offer to have her spend the night with him again. Now, she's tired and worried about him, about them and where they stand now. She's terrified that something happened or that he thought up some reason to think yesterday was all a mistake. It's making her feel sick with how selfish the thought is. Someone close to him lost their life, was murdered.
But nonetheless, Kate makes it to the top of the stairs and goes to the door to the right at the end of the hall that's cracked open slightly, pushing it open with her shoulder. She peaks her head inside just in time to see him glance over his shoulder for a quick second and then start to get up from his chair. She freezes momentarily as the door falls open and leaves her standing in the doorway with two cups of coffee. Sasha whimpers softly and jumps off the loveseat behind him just as Rick is making his way around his chair and over to her in just a few steps.
Her eyes lock with his when he takes the few steps to close the distance between them. "Hey," he greets her softly and reaches for her with a hand on her waist.
Kate can't help but let a happy smile engulf her features as he gently yanks her into him and finds her lips with just as much ease as he used to, kissing her firmly, lovingly, chastely, but also letting his lips linger on her's for a few seconds before leaning back and taking the cup from her hand.
She feels herself smile brightly, knowing that he settled her doubts and fear with one simple action and set the record straight for her. Nothing has changed from where they were on his couch yesterday. As Rick smiles tiredly yet gratefully, he turns back around to pace through his office just as Sasha is stretching herself out in front of her. "Hey," she finally says back.
Rick turns and lets himself fall back into one side of the loveseat that Sasha just got up from, holding the coffee in his lap.
Kate hesitates to follow him after scratching Sasha behind the ears for a moment, but heads over when she notices how tired and worn his features look. "You look exhausted." She points out as she passes his chair.
"Mmmmm..." A low growl comes from his chair.
Kate turns quickly, taking a step away from his chair and looks down, seeing a dark brown, skinny Siamese sitting in the seat, looking up at her with blackened out eyes and a violently flicking tail. "Uh..." Kate starts, looking back over to Rick.
Rick lifts his head, waving at the cat before brushing his unruly unkempt hair back. "That's uh..." he says, sounding tired, "that's Sierra's cat."
Kate maneuvers around it and comes over to the loveseat to sit down next to him, not smashed into his side as she would like but not having the distance of the loveseat between them either. "Oh?" She encourages him.
He takes a long sip of his coffee and sucks his teeth. "Yeah," he says, looking over to the cat. "The local shelter is a kill shelter so..." he shakes his head, looking down to Sasha who just sat down on the floor in the space between their legs, "I took him in until one of her family members came for him. Maybe... maybe Greg and Cecelia want him or... or her parents."
Kate nods, her eyes never leaving him. He looks... hurt. "So, what happened?"
She can see the color drain from his features. "She was strangled." He mutters as he lets Sasha prod at his hand with her snout. Kate waits for him patiently. "With a rope, blue nylon from the fibers they found, the ME thinks from the front, sometime between eight and ten o'clock the night before last. No sign of a clear break-in, no witnesses, no fingerprints... no motive." He says with a dragging voice.
Kate's heart feels heavy. Beth and Barbara were broken up about it when she went into the coffee shop. They didn't hound her for questions, they just looked distraught. "I'm sorry," she says, weaving her fingers through his and taking his hand.
Rick looks down to her taking his hand and grasps her fingers, petting her skin with his thumb. "We already cleared the usual suspects..." he rattles off, needing to get it out, "her ex-husband is living outside Seattle and was working night, and the last person to see her was the receptionist at the morgue and she said that nothing seemed off a-and..." he shakingly trails off, looking away from their joined hands, "my wild imagination isn't really getting the police anywhere." He says to her, mincing words to say his Tyson theory isn't holding up.
No one has heard of him or seen him, so there's seemingly no trace of him. Which is usually a sign that he would be here. But Chief wouldn't buy it. But Kate smiles to herself, lifting his hand off the cushion and letting it fall back down. "Well, your wild imagination has worked wonders before, Castle." Rick chuckles under his breath, managing a smile. "It's one of the things I love most about you."
Rick's eyes find the picture that sits on his desk. "Kind of amazing considering how much trouble it's gotten us into before."
Kate smiles, "That's where that courageous heart of yours came in, Castle." She says softly, leaning into his shoulder.
Rick grins heavily, "It wasn't so much courage as it was not wanting to know how mad you'd get if didn't get you out of whatever situation I got you into in the first place."
"You're a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for." She says, giving his hand a gentle squeeze. "And besides," she starts again slyly, "your imagination never exactly stopped at the murder board."
Rick looks over to her, "I believe that was your imagination at work, Ms. Beckett."
Kate smiles brightly, her teeth grasping her tongue as her heart flutters. As they chuckle with each other, sharing the moment, Kate lets her head fall onto his shoulder as she leans into him, letting her eyes fall shut when she feels him lay his head down onto hers. "You know," she starts in a soft voice, "I was worried that Sierra getting murdered would change things with us."
Once the words are out, she wishes she could take them back.
When he sighs, she's letting her head fall down his shoulder, almost in shame. "I'm sorry, that was really selfish of me."
"No," he says assuredly, "no, I get it. Don't worry." He brushes his thumb across the back of her hand, acting in the moment and lifting his head up and putting his lips to her hair. Kate readjust herself against his shoulder, relaxing at his acceptance. "And for what it's worth, nothing has changed."
Kate pauses before lifting her head off his shoulder to look into his eyes, seeing a sort of tired, loving gaze. "Really?"
He shakes his head. "I know things might be tough until I can get this case solved and Sierra's murderer behind bars, but that doesn't mean I want anything different than what I wanted yesterday." He says, his voice holding that soft, loving, confident tone he used when she had doubts about them, used to reassure her that they belonged together.
Kate blinks up at him. "And..." she starts, looking down to his lips briefly, "what is it that you want?"
Rick stares at her for a moment before leaning in, brushing his nose against her's for a moment, electrifying the air between them before stealing her lips in a quick, passionate kiss, tempered by desperation and needing comfort after yesterday. The kiss breaks with a soft pluck, Kate licks her lips in a quick motion, and she gazes up at him. "Right now, you're giving me all I need."
Kate smiles at him and lets her head fall back down to his shoulder. "You know, Rick," she says as he lets his head rest back down onto her's just as his phone vibrates in his pocket, "for what it's worth, I know what you saw in Sierra."
Rick looks down to her just as she's closing her eyes, digging out his phone from his other pocket. "What do you mean?"
Kate snuggles herself into his shoulder as he unlocks his phone to read the text message from Chief. "She is pretty easy to talk to." As Rick reads the beginning of the text message, his heart stops before he scrolls down, seeing the picture of the yellow and blue nylon rope sitting on the lid of a trashcan. "She was honest and... and she cared."
"Kate?" He asks, his eyes locked onto his phone before Kate lifts her head off his shoulder to look up at him. "I didn't know you knew Sierra." He states, looking over to her.
Kate shrugs and sits up. "Yeah, she came by the shop to talk to me the..." she trails off, "the night before last... just as the shop was closing."
Rick sits up in the loveseat, looking over to her. "The shop closes at... what, seven?"
"Seven-thirty."
Rick looks down to his phone again, at the picture of the nylon rope. "And what did you talk about?"
Kate lets go of his head and adjusts herself a few inches away from him, eyeing him with a furrowing brow. "What's going on?" She asks in an unquestioning tone.
Call me ASAP when you get this. Deputies are already on the way. He rereads the text. "Kate..." he struggles, looking over to her and still seeing her furrowing brow, "please tell me you have an alibi from eight to ten o'clock the night before last."
A/N: Now that the story is starting to pick up pace, I'm really going to try for more frequent updates. It may mean the chapters are a tiny bit shorter than the last few have been, but the pace needs to kind of remain intact for the full effect of the story. As always, let me know what you think.
A/N2: For full context, go back to the beginning of chapter 14 to read all of what Rick had written on his laptop.