Disclaimers and everything else in chapter one.
A/N: This is it..thank you so much to everyone who stuck with me. You all are so incredible and I can't thank you enough.
*
Jillian Bradshaw gripped Dylan's hand tightly in her own and whispered something to him as he answered a few, final questions, and Samantha wondered idly what the other woman was saying.
Samantha had given him the news in the parking lot of First Union. She hadn't planned it, but under the scrutiny of those raw green eyes, she'd looked down at her hands and told him quietly that Margo was dead.
She'd expected an explosion of rage, expected to have to hold him back from the cuffed James Larkin, but she wasn't prepared for the simple bend of his head toward the ground, a movement that turned skyward as hot tears made their way down his pale cheeks and clashed with the chilled air of the afternoon.
There was no surprise in Dylan's tortured reaction, just the searing ache that accompanies the complete and total loss of hope.
He'd known, then, Samantha decided there in the parking lot.
Somehow, he'd known about Margo before she spoke a word and maybe he'd heard it from James Larkin, maybe the man had bragged about his kill, but Samantha didn't think so.
Close, Simon Reed had described Margo and Dylan. Close enough that when the bullet passed through Margo and the life finally left her, Dylan had felt it too?
Samantha watched through the glass as Jillian Bradshaw wrapped an arm tightly around her husband. She wondered, and then admitted it didn't matter, not really.
One lost, one found.
Maybe someday, he could be whole again.
*
"James Larkin's not saying a word about Will Bradshaw but the bullet found at Margo's scene is identical to the bullet that killed Will," Vivian told Samantha as she erased the timeline from the whiteboard.
"Good. That's good," Samantha replied softly.
Vivian looked at her curiously before nodding. "Yeah," the older woman answered. "You should get out of here," Vivian commented off-handly, gathering her things. "It's getting late."
"I'm leaving in a minute," Samantha responded, forcing a smile. "See you tomorrow."
"Good night, Samantha."
*
He watched her through the glass windows in his office, making no attempt to disguise his staring as sorting paperwork or preparing to leave, as he had done so many times before.
Tonight, he watched freely as she held the two pictures in her hands; watched her scrutinize them, the faces so alike and so very different, both captured forever alive in the brief moments in time that she held.
She'd like to keep them that way, Jack knew, and as she set the photographs down and her eyes slid closed, he felt her quiet ache as if it were his own.
Maybe it was. Maybe it always had been.
And maybe she felt him, too, felt his eyes and his pain across the hall and through the glass, because in that moment she turned from the pictures to his face.
Their eyes locked, and for a timeless second, an unbounded eternity, there were no barriers between them.
Not the glass walls and door that boxed him in, not what they were now or what they had been before, and she was running through his veins like the searing heat of a bullet through flesh or the icy crash of a wave on the shore.
But it was just a moment, and when it ended and her eyes dropped, he was left with only her aftertaste, a remembrance of the feel of her with him, around him, in him and above him, and if only to capture that forever like faces in a photograph, he whispered her name.
"Samantha.."
She couldn't hear him, didn't know he'd dropped her name like a sacred prayer, but somehow, she looked back anyway.
The smile reached his eyes just as they met hers.
[end]
