Kate eyes him with a hard glare before slowly standing up, never looking away from him as he shifts on the loveseat. "Why would you ask me that?" She demands in a low, hushed tone.
"Beckett," he starts and stands up after her, holding his phone, "please tell me you have an alibi for the night before Tuesday night." He says, worry quaking in his features as he steps toward her.
But Kate backs away from his approach, putting her hand out. "Why do I need an alibi, Rick?" She demands, her heart starting to race. "What did they tell you?" She asks back, thinking the worst as she turns around to get distance from him and his accusations, putting her hands on the back of her waist and pacing angrily around to the other side of his desk.
The color from his face drains as he steps forward, his desk separating them, and hands her his phone. She takes it after meeting his eyes with a hard, impatient glare. The same kind of glare she'd give him when she wasn't thinking of how he was feeling or how much their relationship meant to either of them. She's just angry at him. When she takes his phone and looks at the picture in the text.
"Blue and yellow nylon." She points out, her throat closing over her breath.
Rick feel his heart fall, motioning toward her with a heavy hand. "They found it in your trashcan."
Kate clenches her jaw, eyeing the phone, "And they don't need a warrant to search a trashcan." Kate doesn't look up to acknowledge him, instead swipes her thumb up his phone slowly to continue the text message. "Deputies are on the way."
Rick forces out a shaky breath and shrugs his shoulders, still not earning her eyes back. "And I don't know how much time we have."
She lets the phone fall down to her side and looks away from him for a moment, and old feeling starting to creep over her. Like an old, comfortable suit of armor. One she thought she had no use for, and one she doesn't want to have on. Because when she puts on that armor to keep things away so she can do her job, she keeps him away also.
She tosses the phone down onto his desk with a clatter and turns to face him, shrugging her shoulders. "How'd I even become a suspect anyway?" She asks, letting a little more emotion seep into her voice.
"I don't know," he answers honestly. "When I left the station last night, they were pulling anyone who sells three quarter inch triple twist blue and yellow nylon rope in the area."
Kate eyes him emotionally, her expression straining as she tries harder and harder to hold onto her stoicism. "We sell it at the shop."
He can only look at her, feeling helpless. After a moment of them staring at each other in a thick silence, Rick looks away and down to the floor. "Well, it's circumstantial, anyway. I-I mean, they can't prove that you used it. Someone could have-"
"Rick," she stops him in a soft, firm voice. When he looks over, she feels her heart crack. "We're the only ones that sell nylon rope that thick nearby. It's used to tie boats off." She tells him, letting her hands fall off her waist. She wants so badly to be held right now, because she feels it coming. "I run the register at the shop during the day so that rope is going to have my prints on it."
"Kate, that doesn't mean-"
"Yes, it does, Rick." She rebuts him before he can argue. As she moves back around the desk, he turns to meet her. "We've put away people on less." She says as she stops in front of him. "And I don't have an alibi for the time of the murder, and in a town this small, they already know about us and someone is bound to find the timing of us getting back together to be very suspicious."
"Kate, you're talking like you're way to the sentencing." He argues, his expression finally breaking away from the arched brow and emotional eyes. "We need to fight this. We've gotten through this before."
"Yes," she starts emotionally, taking the last step into him and places her hands on his chest, "and before, I made the mistake of investigating it without you until I I had no choice but to let them take you in and let myself doubt you by what I found, thinking that you'd cheated on me." Rick clenches his jaw and pulls at her by her hips. "And I'm not going to let you make the same mistake." She says, her voice hushed and quiet, just above a whisper.
He pinches his brow and eyes her worriedly. "What are you talking about?"
She has to tell him, and tell him everything. If her name is sent through the system, it's going to pop up on someone's screen at the AG's office. He has to hear the truth from her first. She feels a hot tear leak out of her eye as she looks up to him. "I love you," She tells him in a whisper and places her fingers over his lips. He blinks at her curiously before she reaches up and places a finger of her own lips, gesturing for him to keep quiet.
Kate slips from his grasp quickly and moves around his desk, taking his letter opener from his desk that sits next to the cup holding his pens, taking his phone with the other hand. She jabs the letter opener into the side casing of his phone and forces open the back. Rick tries to interject, "Kate, wha-"
He's silenced by a hard, intense look she shoots him as she removes the battery from his phone, tossing the battery and phone behind her and to the other side of the room. She then takes her own phone out from her pocket and does the same, moving around his desk and to toss her phone off to the other side of his office, then turning around and taking his laptop.
"Wha..." he trails off as she flips his laptop over and removes the battery. Once she takes his laptop apart, she turns around with burning eyes and he takes it as a cue that the silence can be broken. "What are you doing?" He asks quickly.
"Making sure they aren't listening." She rushes before stepping up to him again. "Rick, if they ran my name through the system, someone somewhere was notified, and I can't know what they're going to tell the Crestfield police about me. And just like when Ryan and Esposito showed me those emails Tyson wrote, you're going to form conclusions that aren't true unless you hear the truth from me first."
"Kate, they don't even know you."
"I don't care what they think of me, Rick." She exclaims, looking up to him emotionally. "I care about what you think of me." She says, putting her hands on his sides and pulling him in. "And I can't expect you to not believe them when I'm holding the truth from you."
"Then..." Rick starts, frozen in place as he looks into her eyes, "what are you talking about?"
Kate pinches her lips together and feels her heart clench. "In mid January, my partner and I were assigned to a task force to route out a terror cell operating somewhere inside of DC. Everything was going normally when my partner got a lead that one of the suspects from the cell named Hasan Abdalla had been spotted going into a warehouse, so I pulled the security footage from the warehouse to see if he was meeting anyone."
Rick is just listening intently, an emotionally curious expression pulling at his features. "It usually took you a day or two to get the court orders for security footage unless it's from a federal building." He points out.
But Kate clicks her jaw and feels part of her heart sink. "We were allowed to cut a lot of corners and use a lot of methods under the purview of stopping terrorism." She says in a hushed tone. "When I pulled the footage, I saw Abdalla gun down a woman in cold blood. I showed it to my partner and we went to the scene and there was a woman... medium height, short blonde hair on the ground with three gunshots to the chest. So we called it in, I combed the scene for a lead on Abdalla, and when the rest of the team arrived, my partner came up to me and told me... explicitly... to back off of Abdalla... and that we were going to follow other leads."
Rick nods, his eyes softening. "But you didn't." He says, knowing her. She upholds the law, gets victims justice, even if she's not allowed to.
Kate smiles sadly and shrugs. "It's why I became a cop." Rick smiles heavily and gives her an encouraging nod, silently telling her that he's proud of her, and would have backed her if he could have. But when she gets back to her tale, her heart falls again quickly. "So I went behind my partner's back and tracked down Abdalla to an apartment complex in Brentwood and when I found him... he turned... and he drew on me."
Rick brushes his thumbs over her hips, seeing a dark curtain of terror wash through her eyes. "And you shot him."
When she nods, she feels her eyes burn, and takes another step into him. "Rick, he was undercover."
His heart skips, finally understanding the gravity of what she's been through, and why she couldn't tell him.
"He was an Israeli intelligence agent on loan to the AG's office for the task force I was assigned to. The woman he shot wasn't even dead."
Rick's brow pinches. "But you said you found a body."
Kate lets out a trembling breath. "Castle, it was a setup. The woman I saw in the video was a junior agent working with Abdalla. The body I found was of a young girl who died of a drug overdose that the AG's office used to stage the murder. Abdalla's weapon was loaded with blanks."
Rick's breath hitches and he shakes his head. "But... but there was no way for you to know that, Kate. From what you saw-"
"Blanks..." she stops him, "don't have any recoil. I was shown the footage by the director, and the gun didn't have any recoil. And even if there was, it wouldn't have mattered.' She pleads, her eyes burning. "I was ordered not to pursue Abdalla by a direct superior and I didn't listen." She says desperately. "Rick, I should have been charged with treason and thrown in a federal prison for the rest of my life because of what I did." She can feel him grasp her hips tighter, as if afraid to lose her in that moment. "Getting fired and never being able to be a cop again is the best thing that could have happened."
Rick looks into her eyes, tugging at her hips while she pets his chest. He wanted to take it slow, he wanted to slowly rekindle what they had together, slowly work back up to being the amazing couple they were. But all it took for him to feel exactly the way he felt last year when she was about to get blown up in that apartment was something coming to take her away from him again. He looks over her features and feels the words at his throat. They used to flow so naturally.
Kate blinks hotly and forces a quick, sad smile. "I'm a lot of things, Castle." She mutters, looking away from him as she pets his chest. "I wasn't the best daughter to my parents. I'm... intense and critical and... stubborn and at times, I'd rather be in a gun fight than be honest with myself about my feelings. I was an awful girlfriend to the man I've loved the most in my entire life and I was so closed off that he believed I never loved him at all."
Rick lets out a silent but shaky breath, seeing her reddened eyes leak out a tear.
"But I'm not a murderer."
He looks down to her lips and gently tugs her forward into the cove of his arms kissing her passionately, her arms sandwiched between them as he weaves his arms around her. "Mmm..." she moans desperately, putting her hands into his hair and pulling him down to her to deepen the kiss. He holds her to him tightly as he turns his head to deepen the kiss even further, each of them taking as much of the other as they can in the single gesture. The kiss breaks as he's putting his hands on her waist and tugging her up into him, feeling her breath shake against his lips.
He feels her pet his hair back in a soothing motion, it's a motion that reminds him now of how close and connected they can be, how connected she wants them to be. He doesn't want to lose her now. "We'll get through this, Kate." He says softly. She sniffles and drapes her arms around his neck, leaning her forehead against his. "Besides, us running into trouble right as we get together isn't exactly something we've never been through before." He halfheartedly jokes.
She can feel his grin on her lips, and she musters up enough emotional energy to match it. "I hated it then too, Rick." She says and leans back, looking up to him. "I wanted the first night you stayed over to be more romantic."
Rick smirks and narrows his eyes. "Well, promise me this time if Ryan knocks on the door, we just pretend we're not home?"
She feels a smile break away her sunken heart and she lightly chuckles a few times and nods. "Deal."
Right then, they can we a car door close outside and they both feel thrust back into the dark, grim reality of the situation, the gravity of what's happening to them switching back on. Kate looks back up to him and hardens her expression, giving him a strong look that says she's ready for whatever is about to get thrown at her. Rick meets it with a simple solemn nod. Slowly, Kate steps back and unweaves her arms from around his neck, running her hands down his chest and feeling his hands move down from her waist to her hips, picking at the hem of her work shirt.
A loud, forceful knock on the door makes them jump and break eye contact. Kate takes one last hard sigh to try and fruitlessly cleanse her system of jittery nerves and turns, making for the door to his office when she feels him take her hand and stop her. When she turns, she sees him almost choking on words. "I..." he struggles, finding her big beautiful eyes, "I'll get you out of this." He says, and Kate can't help but feel her heart sink a bit. "I promise."
She smiles heavily and squeezes his hand, stroking his fingers with her thumb. "I know you will."
A/N: Did you know a toothache heavily impairs your ability to sleep? Because I didn't. T~T
A/N2: as of twenty minutes after posting this chapter, I'm not getting notified of new reviews via email, which is how I normally read them, and fanfiction doesn't seem to be updating the review page with the new reviews posted. So if you have a question or are airing a concern of some kind, or just want to chat about where the story is going, it may be a while until this is fixed until I can respond. Thanks for the understanding!