New York, NY
Tuesday, July 31, 2001
2:20 pm
"Where do you think she is?"
Nottingham had just gotten home an hour ago after being out all night looking for Elizabeth's body. Irons was still on the warpath, but he had conceded that Nottingham needed some sleep before he tailed Sara later in the afternoon. But Nottingham wasn't sleeping, he was lying on the bed in his briefs, watching his wife beat up on his boxing dummy.
Lilianna paused in her attack for a minute to answer his question, "I don't know. Maybe she went to go see the people she said she would protect, the ones that Irons would blame for the break in. I don't know if she actually has a home somewhere. I hope she does."
"What do you think she's done to support herself for however long she's been here?"
A frown marred his wife's brow momentarily, and then she smiled at him, "Well, you did raise her. She's probably an assassin like us."
"Sara is really going to hate me for this, isn't she?"
Lilianna crossed the loft and lay down beside him on the bed.
She cupped his face in her hands and looked him directly in the eye, "It doesn't matter what she thinks. She is my mother, and of course she is important to me, but you are my life. She can accept it or not, but that's the way it is. My being an assassin has nothing to do with you. The way I grew up is not your fault. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have grown up at all." His eyes thanked her and she kissed him softly. "Besides, Mom may never know about Susanna. Susanna may choose never to let Sara know who she is, and whatever decision she makes, I'm going to stick to it."
"Me, too," he agreed, quietly adding, "I wish I could have met her."
"You will," she said with absolute certainty. "She told me she wanted to get to know you in this timeline."
"When do you think she'll come back?" he asked after smiling tenderly at her.
Lilianna paled. "I hope it's in the next week or two."
Nottingham launched himself off the bed. He paced for only a minute before the mattress dipped once more with his weight. He pulled her closer so that she was snug against him, wrapping his arms around her and pressing his lips to her temple.
"I don't want to think about what's going to happen. You are my wife, and I will do everything in my power to stay with you for all eternity, but for now I just want to enjoy every moment we have together. Can we do that?"
She nodded, tears in her eyes, and pressed kisses to his neck and chest. When her lips grazed one of his scars and he stiffened, she proceeded to kiss each of his scars tenderly, showing him that there wasn't a single part of him she didn't love. Even if neither one of them was capable of saying the words.
The alarm next to the bed went off, signaling that it was time for Nottingham to go keep an eye on Sara. They both sighed in tandem, and he got up to get dressed.
He was about to walk into the elevator when she asked, "You'll be home tonight, won't you?"
Nottingham hadn't been allowed to go home the night before, and Lilianna had stayed awake the whole time, worrying about him.
"As long as your mother doesn't stir up too much trouble," Nottingham grinned.
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Nottingham watched from the catwalk of the warehouse as thirty feet below Sara and Jake took their positions for a stakeout. The man they were lying in wait for was a murderer and a rapist. He was also a con artist who used the warehouse as his base of operations. The cops had been fruitless in their search for the elusive criminal until they had received an anonymous tip early that afternoon. A tip Nottingham had called in on orders from Irons.
Whether the man was someone who had once worked for Irons and disappointed him, or whether he was someone who knew something about the billionaire that he had threatened to expose, Nottingham neither knew nor cared. He was here only to protect Sara and her future husband. The second protectee had been his own idea. He didn't like Jake McCartey, knew that the blonde man would betray Sara if ordered to do so, but he was still Lilianna's father, whether he ever knew it or not. Nottingham did not want to cause a rift between Lilianna and her family, and that meant trying his hardest to get on the former surfer's good side. If it were possible.
From his perch, Nottingham could see Captain Dante and his lackey, Detective Orlinsky, conversing quietly on the other side of the warehouse. The Stone of the Blade on Nottingham's finger hummed. The White Bull leader was up to something.
Out of sight of the detectives, Nottingham dropped down silently to the floor and stealthily crept to hide a few feet from Dante and Orlinsky.
"...don't trust Fraser anymore," the dark man was saying. "With this plan, we kill two birds with one stone."
Dante waved a gun held in a gloved hand in the direction of the hiding place of two officers Nottingham knew only as a White Bull screw up, presumably Fraser, and his dumb-as-a-post partner. The gun wasn't Dante's. It was Sara's.
"Yeah," Orlinsky snickered in his sandpaper-rough voice, "too bad it ain't completely literal."
"All in good time, my friend. All in good time," was the Captain's reply.
Nottingham slipped back to the area where Sara and Jake were waiting for the suspect to show. They each had a gun trained steadily on a different entrance. The man they were waiting for was known to shoot first and forget to ask questions, already having killed three cops during previous encounters.
Nottingham didn't act on his initial impulse to reveal his presence to Sara; now was as good a time as any to try to show Jake that he wasn't a threat. Nottingham put himself in Jake's line of vision and pressed a gloved finger to his own lips. Jake glared at him, and Nottingham could feel the blonde man's hatred from fifteen feet away. Swallowing his own distrust of the younger man, he held his forefinger and his thumb at right angles from each other, a child's imitation of a gun. He inclined his head slowly in Sara's direction. Jake frowned at him, but glanced Sara's way, never moving his gun's aim from the center of Nottingham's chest.
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Jake fought his hatred with the memory of all his training. It took every ounce of self-discipline he had not to blow their stakeout by shooting the man in black. But it wasn't the thought of what his superiors would do to him that stayed his hand, it was the fear of losing Sara if he did exactly what she had told him not to.
At least now Jake understood how Sara had kept them all alive that night at the club when the gang had shown up. Nottingham had obviously helped her. Jake had checked out the Black Dragon information she had given him, and it was all true, and then some. As for Sara's argument that Nottingham had saved his life by not letting him go into the Rialto theater, Jake wasn't sure he believed that. But Nottingham had helped them at the club and, according to Sara, had saved them all when Jake had been kidnapped by a man obsessed with Angel. Jake couldn't remember much of what had happened that day, and Sara refused to tell him more than a few details.
It didn't make sense to him that the maniac, Marcus, would kidnap him. He didn't mean anything to Angel. He didn't even know her, only having seen her twice before that day, and only having spoken to her once, very briefly. And how had Marcus known to pretend to be his aunt Lilianna? She was the only person he would have risked blowing his cover to go and see. How had Marcus known that? It was one question Jake hadn't been able to ask Sara. Not that he thought she would have answered it, even if she somehow knew the answer. Sara had always been a little secretive, but now she was being downright uncommunicative.
Keeping his gun aimed at Nottingham's chest, Jake glanced over at Sara. It took him a moment to notice anything amiss. Then he saw it. The gun in her hands was department issue, but it wasn't hers. Sara's gun had a deep scratch on one side from a near miss with a knife a few months back; there was no scratch on this gun. Lowering his own weapon, he turned back to Nottingham and reluctantly beckoned the other man forward. Jake tapped Sara on the shoulder, and she gasped when she turned and saw Nottingham standing next to him.
"Sara, where's your gun?" Jake asked, his voice low.
Sara whispered back, "The Captain gave it to Vic to clear up the forensics on an old case."
"Dante still has it," Nottingham said, just loud enough to be heard. "He's going to use it to kill Detective Fraser."
"Why would Dante set her up like that?" Jake asked Nottingham.
"He hates me," Sara answered simply.
"How are we going to stop him?" Jake once more directed his question to the man in black.
Nottingham shrugged, "I can't stop him, he knows I work for Mr. Irons."
"Well," Sara said, "we can't stop him, how would we explain how we knew what he was up to?"
Jake looked thoughtful. "Obviously, he's gonna have to wait until the suspect shows to start a fire fight. Our shift is over in two hours and we'll be relieved." Jake looked over at Nottingham. "If you can stop this guy from getting here before then, we can find a way to get Sara's gun back when the next shift comes."
Nottingham nodded and disappeared around a stack of boxes.
"Does he always do that?" Jake asked.
Sara rolled her eyes in affirmation.
"Well," Jake said by way of apology, "now I'm glad I didn't shoot him."
Sara nodded and settled in to wait for two hours to pass. Nottingham had seemed like his old self. Actually he was different from his old self. A better kind of different. He had even been civil to Jake, who he had always shown contempt for before. To her mind, that could only mean one thing, he and Lilianna were back together. It would certainly explain why Lilianna hadn't been to the apartment in a couple days, a fact the Witchblade had refused to let her worry about. Much to Sara's surprise, all she felt now was relief.