Disclaimer and such: Check Prelude.

A/N: Ok, ladies and gents, here is the fourth. My eternal gratitude goes to leochick, ranma8962, winnievbt, Ginger6, ICD and imag1ne. Thanks for the encouragement. Ice cream pints of your choice to all of you. =)

I also want to say that I adore Miss Parker; she's one of my all-time favorite female characters. However, pure and angelic, she's not. So…yeah.

As always, anything and everything you want to say about it will be absolutely welcomed.

This chapter is for Eva and George, for putting up with my Sunday morning madness.

Chapter four

Through the eyes of the cat.

"Try what repentance can. What can it not? Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?"
Hamlet. Act 3. Sc 3 l. 65-66

Blue silk pajamas, that's what she'd been wearing that night. What she'd been thinking, she was still trying to figure out. Trashing around in her bed, Parker's thoughts drifted back to that hotel room in Cambridge and for the umpteenth time, she fought the urge to smack herself. Had she been thinking at all? No, probably not. It was sheer providence, the fact that some huge disaster hadn't snowballed out of it.

'It'. Funny how six nights ago 'it' hadn't seemed so terribly unappealing.

I was drunk!

No, no you weren't.

And she hadn't been. She'd been tired, yes, and definitely out of sorts, but not drunk. Which of course made her actions all the more….

Real? Honest?

Stupid!

Tossing around little bit more, Parker glared at her bedroom ceiling as the battle continued inside her head. Images started swirling behind her eyes making it hard to remain objective on her judgments.

He didn't put up much of a fight, either.

No, he didn't.

She'd started things out; that had been all her, she could take that. However, after she'd kissed him the first time she'd moved back and held his eyes. It had lasted only a few seconds but it had been tangible, so the kiss that had followed had been entirely his fault.

Not true. You didn't move back. You moved forward.

I was tired.

Tired, Parker. Not dead.

No, not dead. In fact, she'd had plenty of opportunities to end the damn thing. But instead, she'd been the one to straddle his hips while he was still sitting against the headboard. She had undone the buttons of her shirt and tugged his coat and sweatshirt off his body. She'd let him roll her around the bed; allowed him to kiss, nibble, and bite on her skin. She'd scratched, bitten and kissed as well, and then, it had been her who had fallen asleep. Her, not him.

"I was tired", she mumbled out loud as she rolled on her side to glare at a wall. The excuse sounded lame even to her own ears: she had been conscious, and she'd willingly let it happen. That was the truth. She'd slept with him.

… Him!

The Centre's lab-rat.

The genius freak.

Jarod.

Jarod.

I slept with him. And he left.

Serves to show…

Parker had woken up to the sound of rain on the windows, naked and alone in the hotel room. On the nightstand by the bed, a piece of hotel stationery had been waiting for her, with a number scribbled on it in an all too familiar handwriting. A phone number, his cell phone number no doubt. At first, she hadn't had time to linger on her discovery since soon enough knocks had landed on her door, followed by Sydney's voice telling her that he and Broots would be waiting for her by the reception; so she'd just crumpled the paper and flushed it down the toilet. However, as the day had worn on and the clouds in her head had begun to dissipate, so had her ambivalence over the note: Parker was annoyed. Over the course of the years, she'd had quite a few men in her life, many of them passing affairs born out of practical circumstances. But no man had ever managed to make her feel as cheap as Jarod had with that number. Cheap and stupid.

What was she supposed to do with it? Give him a call and ask him out for lunch?

Please! What had the rat been thinking?

What the hell had you?

Nothing. She'd been blank and bad things had happened.

Bad? You enjoyed it.

No, enjoyment was too big a word. If Parker had to pick an adjective to describe their encounter, needy would be the one she'd go with. Two days ago she'd still had marks that needed coverage, and she knew for sure, she hadn't been the only one.

So it was intimate…

Yes, intimate, which didn't always equate to nice. It hadn't been nice.

It'd been…it didn't matter anymore. What did matter was the fact that if anyone ever found out, or even as much as suspected something…Then renewal wing would seem like paradise. For both of them.

But it didn't -

No!

She'd lose her head, whatever was left of it anyway; he'd lose his, Raines and Lyle would win. Game over.

God! What the hell had she been thinking?

The ringing of her cell phone took her away from her answers, leaving her with the question of what to do next. As she picked up the small device Parker decided it was no longer important what she'd been thinking before, as long as she could focus on her new task: Damage control.

...

Lyle wasn't a hateful man. As a matter of fact, there were only two things he could claim to have such a strong reaction to: being screwed over and Jarod 'the disappearing pretender'; any of the aforementioned, either alone or combined, had the potential to put him on a warpath. For the most part, however, the man formerly known as Bobby Bowman thought of himself as someone both methodical and patient. After all, the process of converting a human body into edible goods was, well, complicated to say the least. And if things went down as he suspected, he was likely to end up with a Centre endorsed permit to show his sister just how complicated that process could be.

As the town car glided over the empty Seaford streets, Lyle tried in vain to relax into his seat. This was a sham, he was at least ninety percent sure of it. The other ten percent, he was saving in case he needed it upon his return to the centre. It's always best to keep one's options open, just in case. Especially in this case.

When Parker had first called him, Lyle had figured she had probably found out about the T-Board and come up with this colorful fireworks show to polish her image and get around it. But there had been no paper trail on request or the subsequent order: he'd worked it all out by phone, personally getting in contact with Bekele in Africa; and though he didn't think bugging his phone line was beyond his sister's capabilities, the fact that she hadn't just made a run for it had him doubting that hypothesis.

But if she didn't know, why had she called him to help her throw the final punch? He wanted Jarod back, and she wanted this chase done; that's what she'd told him over the phone almost two days ago, before explaining the general idea of what was about to go down: apparently she'd been getting the pretender on string for a while, and now that he was secured, she was ready to end the charade. Lyle hadn't really bought it, not only because she hadn't really told him the details, but because it seemed…very un-Parker. In any case, he'd agreed to pitch in, knowing that if she was trying to screw him over somehow, retribution would come in the form of a very unavoidable board that he would be presiding.

Tapping the back of his index finger against the black leather of the door, Lyle allowed himself to consider something: this was the first time they collaborated since that trip to Cambridge six moths ago. If what she had told him was true, had she been playing him back then? Now, that was something he could picture Parker doing, along with sending him bogus clues to get him looking in the wrong direction while she dug around for the treasure chest. It would certainly explain her strange behavior of the past two months or so…the very same absent behavior that Lyle had manipulated before Bekele in order to prove his twin's unfitness to fulfill her role.

It had almost worked, and it still might, if Parker failed to come through with what she'd promised.

Feeling the car hitting a gravel road Lyle unconsciously started to brace himself. Not five minutes later, the car was slowing down. All lights were off but outside his tinted window, Lyle could see the two sweeper teams he'd brought with him falling into position.

'Three, two, one…What's the news doctor?' As soon as his men in black had stormed the place, he opened the car door and let himself out of the car. In the clarity of the summer night, Lyle could observe his surroundings well enough. The place was secluded, away from the town and sufficiently separated from nosy neighbors, but not completely isolated: A perfect location for a clandestine rendezvous; right across the Centre's backyard. When the first sweeper exited through the front door and gave him a nod, Lyle felt that the ten percent of belief he'd been saving could prove to be an excellent thing to hold on to, after all.

Finally he entered the small cabin, and the first thing he noticed was his very pissed sister walking towards him.

"You've been served, now make the call". Not paying attention to his twin, Lyle moved farther into the house, finally reaching the bedroom where his brain dropped rational functions for a second or two. This was it.

"Wait, what's wrong with him?" The pretender was lying on the bed, hands tied and cuffed, ankles shackled, face looking like a massive hangover was going to come and haunt him in the morning.

"The Phenobarbital is wearing off". He raised his eyebrow and Parker continued. "I wanted him out of it, not completely brain dead".

Lyle's surprise was turning into smugness with the speed of sound. "Well, well, well, sis, looks like you've finally nailed the jackpot. Literally".

"Lyle, I've been locked up in here for over forty hours. I don't have the patience for this. Make. The damn. Call "

"As you wish"

Strolling happily outside, he punched a number on his cell phone and as he waited patiently for his recipient to take the call, he felt an invigorating mixture of glee and anticipation.

As far as Lyle was concerned, he was eight years old and this was Christmas morning.

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A/N2: Thanks for reading.