A/N: And here we go! Again, sorry for the amount of time taken to update, but I think y'ins will like what I have for you this evening. It tooka while for the muse to speak, but then I couldn't shut her up.

Not liking the rumors I've heard about upcoming episodes. TPTB have some 'splaining to do.

I have never been inside the Waldorf or the Sheraton in Baltimore, hence why there is no description of the room. Also, I don't know if 24-hour butcher shops exist, but for the purpose of this story, they do. Humor me.

A little note: according to the rating systems for movies, it is acceptable to use the "f" word once and still maintain a PG-13 rating. Using it twice, however, automatically bumps it up to R. I figured fiction ratings would work the same way, so please don't hate on me for use of the word later in this chapter.

Keep in mind, parental discretion is advised. You have been warned. (But I still have the rating at T, so you know it can't be all bad.)

31 Hours Missing

They took a cab. There was really no other option. Molly didn't own a car, and they'd left Danny's car parked outside Molly's apartment. Molly was the one who suggested it, actually – leaving the car behind – though Danny would have made the same suggestion eventually. He knew that the first thing Jack would do would be to put out an APB on his car. Danny wondered how long it had taken Jack to figure out that the car was still parked directly outside Molly's building – or if he even had figured it out.

So they went to the Waldorf. Traffic flowed surprisingly well, despite the day and time, and Molly tipped the cab driver an extra twenty to forget he'd ever seen them. Danny couldn't help feeling like he was in some kind of film noir movie, kept picturing the two of them as a modern day Bonnie and Clyde – with the exception that neither of them had done anything wrong. Well, not robbing banks kind of wrong, anyway. Danny knew that Jack still suspected Molly – it was pretty obvious, given his behavior – but no one had spent as much time with Molly as he had, and he could tell that she had nothing to do with this. There was real grief in her eyes, real fear. He'd seen it at her apartment, first thing that morning, after all the cops had left. He'd seen it after she'd discovered the writing on her wall. And he'd seen it at the church.

Molly paid for the room in cash. Danny had made some comment about the amount of cash she carried with her, and she'd told him that she'd cleaned out her emergency stash shortly before leaving.

"They'll trace my credit cards," she said. "They'll pinpoint my location if I make a withdrawal from my account. Luckily I keep that much cash in the apartment, or we'd be up shit creek."

He was impressed. But of course she would know this kind of stuff, working for the CIA.

The room was huge – probably twice the size of Danny's apartment. He'd never been inside the Waldorf, and now he knew why. It probably cost an entire week's pay just to pay for the room. Molly didn't seem to mind, handed the receptionist the money like it was no big deal, and didn't seem all that impressed by the room.

"I've seen better," she said, with an air of nonchalance that surprised Danny even more. He'd been inside her apartment, and considering that both her and her roommate came from money, it wasn't very impressive.

"When have you seen better?" he asked, trying to sound flippant and casual and hoping he succeeded.

She smiled. "Well, I was mighty impressed with the Sheraton down in Baltimore," she said. "I had to go there for an 'emergency summit'." She used air quotes to emphasize how ridiculous she obviously found the idea. "All on the agency's dime, of course."

"Of course," Danny said, nodding.

She must have caught the disbelieving tone in his voice, because she narrowed her eyes. "Look, my parents were rich, not me, okay? I make decent money doing what I do, but most of it goes other places." She leaned against the counter in the kitchenette area, and if he shifted just so, he could see right down her shirt. "But when I indulge, you better believe I do it right."

He locked eyes with her then, and what he saw there convinced him that he hadn't misinterpreted the abrupt change in her voice. What just seconds ago had been angry and hurt turned so suddenly into husky and throaty that he thought he had misheard her. But the look she was giving him left little room for misinterpretations. She was still leaning on the counter, her arms folded in front of her, and she had to know that she was revealing more of her cleavage than necessary, because she was damn near popping out of her shirt – which was saying something, since it wasn't all that low-cut to begin with – and her lips were slightly parted and her pupils had dilated so much that her evergreen eyes were almost obsidian, and he knew that if he didn't get out of that room right then, he would be staying there all night – and not in any kind of platonic sense.

He back across the room, forcing his body to obey his brain's command, because his body – all of his body – wanted to stay and find out just what exactly that look in Molly's eyes would lead to.

"I'd better go," he said, practically stammering, making himself look anywhere other than at her, because he was getting a pretty good view from where he was standing, and the last thing he needed was more temptation. Lord knew he'd had enough of that today. But he was only so strong, and he wasn't sure how much longer he could resist.

"Don't go," Molly said, straightening so fast that he could have sworn he heard her spine snap into place. The throaty, sultry tone had vanished from her voice; she sounded almost panicky.

He dared to look at her again. The dark look of lust hadn't disappeared completely, but her eyes gleamed with unshed tears, and he realized that she was still scared – probably terrified out of her wits, afraid of what may happen if she was left alone. And leaving her alone probably wasn't the best idea – whoever had taken her roommate could very well have been following them all night, may know that Molly was staying in this hotel, and could try and abduct her as well.

But if he stayed…

"I really think I should," he said, but again his voice betrayed him and cracked.

The first tear trickled down Molly's cheeks, and he could already feel his resolve weakening. "Please," she said, and she sounded so scared and vulnerable that all Danny wanted to do was grab her and hold her and tell her that everything was going to be all right.

But he couldn't do that, because he didn't know if everything was going to be all right. The others may very well have already found Kate dead by now – he would have no idea, he'd turned off his phone. And he knew he couldn't hold her, because if he had her in his arms again, looking at him the way she was, his self-control would snap.

"I don't want to be alone," she said, taking a few steps towards him. Danny instinctively backed away, but when his back hit the door he froze. "Please. Don't go."

She held out her hand, and the tears were flowing freely now. "Stay with me."

Danny stared at her for several long seconds, knowing that if he stayed, he could very well lose his job. He was already in hot water for everything else, but he still had a choice. He could leave now and he could salvage what was left of his career or he could stay with Molly and maybe find one shining moment of bliss in an otherwise bleak and empty existence.

He sighed heavily, then reached out and took her hand.

As it turned out, there was only one butcher shop in the vicinity of Kate and Molly's apartment, which made it pretty easy for Martin and Sam. They'd canvassed the area twice, just to make sure, before parking down the street and making their way into the shop. Conveniently, it was open 24 hours, which Martin jokingly suggested was in case it was 3:00 am and you were jonesing for a ham. Sam had responded with, "I've had weirder cravings," and Martin remembered their undercover venture to the abortion clinic, where she'd "admitted" to being pregnant once before. He'd never bothered to find out if it was true – trying to learn personal information about Sam was like trying to fly by flapping your arms – but there was something about the way she'd said it that made him think that it was.

He let her slide on the comment, thinking that it had probably slipped out unintentionally, the way most of Sam's revelations did, and simply said, "When I pulled all-nighters in college, I used to order meatball subs from the all-night pizza place down the street from my apartment." She looked at him, amused, and he continued. "Always meatball subs. I don't know why. Something about being up at two in the morning and needing meat."

She laughed, and he smiled. He missed her laugh. Things between them had been tenuous ever since their argument on the steps of her apartment building, but she was all her ever thought about. He couldn't imagine his life without her – and he wasn't sure he wanted to.

"Look, Sam," he said, as she opened the door to the butcher shop, "about this afternoon – "

"Forget it," she said, flashing him a 1000-kilowatt smile. "Let's not even talk about it."

She walked into the shop, but he hung back. "Maybe I want to talk about it," he said, but quietly, so that she couldn't hear him. He wanted to talk this through, he wanted to hash things out, because he didn't want to fight with her anymore. He was already regretting suggesting that they end things, because he didn't want to end things. He never wanted to end things.

But she was already inside, so he walked in and followed her up to the counter, where the clerk was weighing a mound of ground beef. The clerk was an overweight man with male pattern baldness and a five o'clock shadow. Martin furrowed his brow. Why were there always fat guys in butcher shops? It never ceased to amaze him.

"Excuse me, sir," Sam said.

"What can I do for you, honey?" the clerk asked, removing the ground beef from the scale. "I got some nice porterhouses in last night. Grade-A. Top choice."

Sam flashed her badge, and the clerk's demeanor changed instantly. He straightened and took a step back. "I just need some information, actually," said Sam, "pertaining to a missing persons investigation."

The clerk nodded knowingly. "The girl from four blocks over, right?" he asked. But he didn't wait for a response before continuing. "Shame about that."

Martin joined Sam at the counter. "Do you know her?"

He shook his head. "Nah. But the roommate comes in all the time. Nice girl. She doesn't deserve to go through this."

"We need to ask you some questions," Sam said.

The clerk nodded again. "Anything I can do to help."

Sam smiled – her work smile. Martin had learned to tell the difference between all of her smiles. She had about five different ones, but there was one that she used with him and only him. But this smile was the one she reserved for work; it was wide enough to be seen as polite, but it didn't quite meet her eyes, which proved that there was no real emotion behind it. "Thank you," she said, and Martin remembered the purpose behind being in a 24-hour butcher shop at midnight. "Do you remember anyone that came in here between 5:00 and 7:00 pm and bought some kind of blood?"

The clerk made a noise in the back of his throat. "Oh, yeah. Hard to forget something like that. Girl comes in and buys two pints of pig's blood. Don't get many requests for pig's blood nowadays."

Sam looked at Martin, and he wondered if she was thinking the same thing he was. A girl had bought the blood? That meant that a girl had painted that message on Molly's wall. A girl was responsible for everything.

"This girl," said Martin, "do you remember what she looked like?"

"Yeah," the clerk said, nodding again. "Like I said, hard to forget something like that. Besides, I usually remember a pretty girl." He paused, looking off at something in the distance, as though trying to picture her. "She wasn't all that tall," he said, holding his hand out to his shoulder, "probably came to about here on me. She was skinny and blonde, and she had the most amazing blue eyes."

Martin glanced at Sam, who was hurriedly writing everything down. As long as she was, then he didn't have to. "Anything else?" she asked.

"Yeah. She had a mole – a beauty mark, whatever – by her mouth. Like Cindy Crawford."

Sam thanked the man and turned, jerking her head towards the door, indicating that they should leave. Martin offered the clerk a wave as a goodbye and followed Sam out the door, eager to share his opinion with her.

"Think it was one of the sorority sisters?" he asked as they made their way back to the car.

Sam sighed and shook her head. "I really don't know. Judging from my conversation with them earlier, Kate wasn't very popular in the chapter, but I really think that someone is out to get Molly, and I don't think any of the girls in the house would want to do that."

Martin nodded, following her same train of thought. He no longer believed that Molly was behind this, not after hearing Sam's account of her "interviews" with the three sorority sisters, not after learning that the article that Kate was supposedly working on was actually Molly's senior thesis. But there were still so many unanswered questions. "Well," he said, as they reached the car, "at least we know we're looking for a woman. That narrows our suspect list by about half."

"Great," Sam said, playfully rolling her eyes the way she always did when they disagreed, "so now we're only looking at four million people instead of eight million. Way to be optimistic, Martin."

He grinned and slid into the driver's seat, but she paused just before climbing into the car. "Sam? Something wrong?"

Sam squinted at something across the street and down the block, and Martin got out of the car so that he could have a better view of what she was looking at. "Isn't that Danny's car?"

Martin looked and saw that it was, indeed, Danny's car. "Jack put out an APB on it right after they disappeared," Martin said with a shrug. "Looks like we found it."

Sam shook her head in disbelief. "But, that's where it was parked earlier. I mean, that's Molly and Kate's apartment building. The car obviously hasn't moved all night."

Martin turned to look at her. "Then where the hell are they?"

Danny knew he had surrendered to some force bigger than he and Molly. It was fate, really, and their fates intertwined together, that made it practically impossible for him to set foot outside of that door that he was now leaning against. Something was telling him to go – probably his good sense – but another, much larger portion of his brain was telling him that it had been a long time – a very long time – since he had felt this way about someone. His outstretched hand still had a tight grip on Molly's, but she wasn't complaining. She wasn't saying much of anything – neither of them were. They just stared at each other.

The regular lustful urges were there – the desire to touch, to feel, to taste. He recognized those. He'd never been in love before, so he didn't know what it felt like, but he imagined it felt something like the way he was feeling now – this all-consuming need to crawl inside of her, this unfamiliar ache in his chest.

But it couldn't be love – it just couldn't. After all, he barely knew her. He'd known her less than twenty-four hours. But he knew her favorite book, and her favorite movie and color, and that she cooked when she was stressed out, and when she was nervous she chewed on her bottom lip, and she'd had trouble trusting people after her parents died, and when he was around her he could feel the air between them crackle with some kind of electricity, and she didn't have to be touching him for him to feel her fingers on his skin.

Then, with one tug on her arm, he brought her flush against him, their faces just inches apart. He could feel a change in the atmosphere almost instantly – it became charged with something he was afraid to put a name to.

"We don't have to…" Molly said, but her voice died in her throat as he combed his fingers through her hair.

For several seconds, the only sound in the room was the sound of their labored breathing, until Molly tried again. "We can just talk," she said, her words ending on a sigh as Danny curled one hand around the nape of her neck, just under her hair. But he could tell from the look in her eyes that she didn't want to just talk any more than he did.

So they continued to stare at each other, both seemingly unwilling to be the one to make the first move. Because once that line was crossed, there was no going back, and although the results would be fireworks, the consequences could be disastrous.

She parted her lips slightly, and he licked his in anticipation. With his free hand, he reached up and lightly ran the pad of his thumb across her bottom lip.

Finally, Molly said, "Fuck it," and grabbed Danny by the lapel of his jacket.

As soon as his lips touched hers, he was lost.

Jack was at his wits' end. A small part of him had realized that trying to track down Danny would be pointless, because Danny was smart enough not to do what was expected of him, and Jack was fast realizing that he didn't know as much about his team as he liked to think. Like the fact that Martin and Sam had been sleeping together for who knew how many months. Or the fact that something was seriously wrong with Viv, and she just didn't feel like sharing.

He could tell, now, that there was something going on. They'd been driving around for about two hours, and every now and then she was gasp and clutch her chest. He got the distinct feeling that she was only doing so because she thought he couldn't see her doing it. But she wasn't saying anything, and he wasn't exactly sure how to bring it up. How would he broach a subject like that, anyway? Hey, Viv, couldn't help but notice that you look like death. What's up with that?

And at the moment, he was obsessed with finding Molly and Danny, convinced that Molly had orchestrated this entire thing, for as yet unknown reasons, to get some kind of revenge on her poor, misguided roommate. It didn't matter that there was no motive and no concrete evidence linking Molly to the crime. She did it. He knew that she had.

Vivian's cell phone rang while they were stopped at a red light, and her conversation with the person on the other end was brief. "Johnson," she said. "Are you sure? Okay. No, just start asking around. I know it's late. Do what you can."

When she hung up, she turned to him. "That was Sam. They found the guy who sold the blood, and he said that some blonde girl with a beauty mark was at the shop around 6:30 and bought two pints of pig's blood."

Jack nodded thoughtfully, stepping on the gas as soon as the light turned green, and accelerating so quickly that both he and Viv were pushed back against the seats. "Could be Molly wearing a disguise," he said.

Viv shook her head. "They also found Danny's car."

Jack slammed on the brakes, causing the two of them to fall forward. Jack nearly bumped his head on the steering wheel, and Vivian winced as the seatbelt cut into her chest. He whirled to face her. "Where did they find it?"

She just looked at him. "Outside Molly's apartment building. It's been parked there all night, Jack They never took it. They could be anywhere by now."

Danny was in heaven. There was no other way to describe it. Kissing Molly was…unreal – unlike anything else he'd ever experienced. He'd been with his fair share of women, but it was safe to say that none of them had ever done to him what Molly was doing to him. He was vaguely aware that his name was Danny, and that he was in a suite at the Waldorf, but other than that, he was only aware of Molly and everything about Molly, from the way she still smelled faintly of vanilla to how soft her hair felt underneath his fingers to the way she was devouring him as if he were her last meal.

He was so intent on the way her mouth was moving over his that he didn't even realize she had begun to attack the buttons on his shirt. She didn't seem to be capable of unbuttoning them in the state that she was in, and with a growl of frustration, she tugged at both side, sending buttons flying everywhere. Unwilling to lose contact, he let go of her one arm at a time, shaking each one free of its offending sleeve, only to put them right back where they had been.

Only now that wasn't enough. He slid his hands underneath the hem of her shirt and in one swift movement had yanked it over her head. And he trailed kissed down her throat and greedily ran his hands down her sides.

He could barely breathe. He didn't even want to. Oxygen be damned. He didn't need it. He only needed her.

They didn't even make it to the bed.