Chapter 60 – Self Preservation
AN: Wow, chapter 60. Feels like only yesterday this was just a vague idea in my head and now here we are. Ok, this is one of my adult top warnings. Nothing major, just talk about the 'morning after the night before.' LOL. Ok, on with the show. BTW, if you haven't yet, take a look at a couple stories worth your time, they are 'The Ultimate Betrayal', 'America's Fates' and 'Puzzling Pieces'. The last is a round robin type story with 5 of us taking turns writing. It's pretty cool, I'm number 5 so my chapter just went up. Oh, and watch for 'Knights on the Blacktop' By The- Knight2000. It should be appearing this weekend. (hint hint, you know who you are!) Check them out, review. Review me too please! On with the story.
The rest of the team thought Leon was going to make up with her, tell her he realized it wasn't her fault that the whole situation had occurred.
Leon caught Kat on the porch and closed the door so the rest of the team couldn't hear what he was going to say.
"Could you be pregnant?" Leon asked bluntly.
"Um..." Kat didn't have an answer to that. She hadn't thought that far ahead. She'd had some idea of course that she should do something to prevent that eventuality but since she'd had no frame of reference for when she'd never thought of it.
"Oh great. You could be then right? You don't take anything?"
"Well, clearly I never had a reason to before I met you. But it's not likely anyway."
"How do you know that? Neither of us did anything to prevent it."
"Well, I don't always have my..." Kat blushed scarlet. "I'm um..."
"Will you just tell me already?" Leon sighed.
She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. She wanted to tell him that while she knew she wasn't the kind of person who would make a good mother at all she'd treasure being pregnant with his child. A little boy she could keep forever if she ran away before Sergei or his friend found out she was pregnant. A little piece of Leon she could keep forever.
Scared the hell out of her.
She wasn't the maternal type. She'd never thought she wanted kids. She didn't like them much and she never thought she'd want to have a child of her own. She was the baby of her family so she'd never learned how to go on with young children or babies. She saw herself as the kind of person who just lived on the edge their whole life and never had time for children, never slowed down long enough to make time in their busy schedule to reproduce.
Now she could see herself with a little green eyed baby, cooing at him and letting him pull her hair. Could see a baby seat in the skyline. See herself with a little boy holding her hand and tottering after her while she worked on the skyline, handing her tools, all the wrong ones of course. Could see herself at 29, a young 29 she added to herself, with a 10 year old son who was already breaking hearts because he looked just like his father and couldn't wait till his mom bought him his first car and taught him to drive because he already knew all there was to know about fixing cars. But the trick there was she'd never be happy with just one child once she got started. Not if they were Leon's.
She'd want a green eyed daughter too. One she could teach Ballet and cars to. She'd treat her children the same no matter what sex they were. But Leon wouldn't be around to give her more children.
Not only that but she couldn't see having kids that didn't know their uncle Sean, Stacy, Kale and Connor either. Kids that didn't have uncle Jesse to learn to tune engines from and uncle Vince to give them piggie back rides and Aunt Mia to teach them to cook Italian food and Aunt Letty to teach them to be tough. Uncle Dom to teach them rotaries and give them their first jobs in his shop and store.
Hell, she'd never thought she'd make time for a man in her life either. But look how that ended up. She likely should have stuck to her live on the razor's edge, never slow down, never stop running too fast mentality. She sure wouldn't be in the situation she was in now if she'd just lived by her own philosophy. If she hadn't let herself slow down long enough to fall for Leon then there wouldn't be another innocent person involved in her mess.
"I don't always have...My...That time of...of...the...the month...because I'm so..."
Kat found trying to explain it to Leon was one of the most humiliating things she'd ever had to do. And he wasn't making it easier. He was giving her a very impatient look.
"I don't always have a period because I'm so thin that I don't carry enough body fat. It's often considered lucky for it to happen to a ballerina but I always just found it scary."
Leon looked like he really didn't know how to process that info.
"So even if you did get pregnant by accident it could be a long time before you even realized?"
She nodded.
"Great." He threw up his hands
Kat was very hurt that it was all he seemed to care about.
"You've no need to concern yourself anyway. Come 9 tonight I'm out of your life forever. I..." She stopped herself just short of telling him she loved him and thanking him for the magical night to keep her through the rest of her life. She knew there'd never be another man for her. "I should go now."
"You're just going to walk out of my life, possibly carrying my child and tell me it's ok because I'll never see you again?" Leon was red in the face he was so mad.
"It's such a slim chance that it could happen to me that I don't think you need to concern yourself over it. But if I am I'll find a way to let you know." With that Kat started down the steps.
"And what, raise my child while you're living with another man?" Leon started after her down the path.
"There is not going to be a child. And I'll not be living with this person for too long before I run away from him. Then I'll go into hiding somewhere like Mexico or Japan. I don't know just where yet."
"You can't know that! You just said yourself it was possible and that you wouldn't even know till months in."
"It is possible but since I only have one...Time of the month in about every 6 the odds of me being able to get pregnant right now are so slim that I just don't think it's a big concern right now. Forgive me if getting my friend and yours back and planning my escape in a month or two is more important to me right now."
Kat started to get angry. She still blamed herself for Sergei finding her because if she'd just had the sense not to be photographed it never would have happened. But it was because of everything going so well that she'd gotten complacent in L.A. She'd had Harry treating her so indulgently, her guys taking such good care of her, Brian being like the best guy friend she'd always wanted but had never been able to have, Leon to teach her what it was to really want someone, and Dom to give her goals.
But she hadn't known Sergei would go after her friends. She would have rather just had him take her off the street. But he didn't do that, he went the route he did and Kat knew why. He wanted to take her of her own free will so that she'd be docile, or at least at first she would be.
But Leon really had no right to blame her. She'd thought he did at first but the more she thought about it the more she realized he didn't. She had every right to blame herself but he didn't really have the right to blame her. He picked her up. He pursued her too. He came into the racers edge to meet her the first day, he saw her on his street and asked her to his house to watch movies. He asked her out to dinner. He came to visit her at work. He pounced on her at his work. He picked her up off the bridge and allowed what had happened to happen. He wasn't totally innocent of the connection between the two teams.
She got ready to turn around and yell and scream at him over it. She could feel his eyes boring into her back so she knew he was still standing there watching her. Her muscles tensed and the adrenaline started to flow in preparation for the battle that was about to come. She was really ready to lash into Leon.
Then it occurred to her that these were the last few moments she'd ever see him. No matter how mad she was and no matter how out of line he was fighting with him about it now was silly. It wasn't going to be settled and in a few hours she'd never see him again anyway. Why should the last memory they had of each other be a huge fight. It was better if the last memory he had of her was her retreating back. And if she didn't have a huge fight with him she could hold onto the memories of the night before herself.
"Я лÑÐ±Ð»Ñ Ð²Ð°Ñ.[1]" Kat called back over her shoulder in Russian and started to walk away.
She continued to walk down the walkway, choosing discretion as the better part of valor and heading for her own house, head high and back straight.
*~*
Leon watched the woman he'd just realized he loved walk out of his life. If she had her way she was walking out for good.
And the last memory she had of him was going to be of him basically calling her stupid for letting there be a chance she was pregnant. She thought he was mad at her for not preventing herself from getting pregnant or telling him that it was a possibility so he could have done something about it.
She thought he was mad because he thought it was her fault Jesse was involved in the situation as well.
But the truth was he was mad at her for an entirely different reason.
She'd let him fall in love with her.
And he'd fallen hard.
He was mad that she'd let him fall in love with her the night before she knew she was going to be walking out of his life. It wasn't right for her to let him love her then to walk away. She'd spent the night with him, given her virginity to him knowing the whole time she was going to get up the next day and make plans to barter herself for two people she cared about. He'd never fallen in love with a girl before, and she let the first time be with her, when she had known he couldn't have her.
And Leon didn't know if he himself would have the strength to do what Kat planned on doing. It was a totally selfless act. And he'd made her feel like shit over it. She was doing it to get his brother back and he'd made her feel like everything was her fault and what she was doing wasn't enough.
When in reality it was all she could do.
She was doing the only thing she knew how and he'd belittled it.
She was doing more then she should do and he'd yelled at her over it.
She should just take off and run. She should save herself and say fuck it about Sean and Jesse. But she wasn't like that and she didn't have it in her to do that.
She should.
But she wasn't going to.
She was going to do the right thing and Leon had made her feel that she'd messed up.
He wanted Kat to be the mother of his children. And yet he'd made her feel bad about the fact that they might have made a baby together. It took two to make babies and Leon knew that fact quite well. Yet he'd acted like it was all her responsibility and he knew it wasn't. She'd been totally innocent and it was him that should be begging for forgiveness for not realizing she'd never been with a man 'that way' before. When he let himself think back over the whole time he'd known Kat the signs she didn't know as much about men as she tried to let on were glaringly obvious.
The way she danced so sensually with guys she didn't have romantic feelings for, for one thing. She didn't know how much she was turning them on so she continued to act in ways that would be seen as her being a tease by lots of guys, but was just natural to her.
The way she'd responded to him every time he ever kissed her. Something had been telling of her naivety in her kisses but he'd chosen to ignore it. To pretend he didn't know something was different.
Kat took all the aspects of Letty that he liked and rolled them up with her own unique personality. She had Letty's tom boy, racer chick, grease monkey, just one of the guys attitude down. But she added her own ultra girly, vulnerable, Russian ballerina, Kat essence that just made her all the more special.
He watched her walk across and up the street the short distance she had to go to reach her own house, his pants almost falling off her butt and his shirt three sizes too big, even though he was pretty slim himself. Once she was in her house he re-entered his own.
"What the fuck is the matter with you?" Vince yelled at him the minute he entered the door.
"I'm sorry to say I have to agree with Vince on this one." Brian added.
Vince shot him a dirty look.
"Damn it Leon." Dom sighed and shook his head.
"Kat's going to give herself to some guy to get Jesse back?" Letty asked, not really grasping the full extent of what that meant.
Nyssa just sat beside Mia while the two weaker females of the team held each other and cried. They understood all too well what it meant.
Leon looked from one shocked face to another as he gazed into the eyes of his team mates.
"What were you thinking talking to her like that when she's going through what she is man?" Vince continued to rant. "Can't you see she's not as tough as she lets on? She's having a hard enough time without you talking to her like that!"
"What did you say to her outside Leon?" Dom asked in his deceptively calm voice.
"Nothing." Leon mumbled out.
"If you made her feel worse..." Vince threatened.
"Why are you blaming her for this anyway? It's not like she could have known." Brian added, puzzled about what was going on.
"I don't blame her. Well, I did at first, but I don't now. Not really. I'm mad at her but not over Jesse."
"Then why are you mad at her Leon?" Nyssa looked up with tears running down her cheeks.
Leon knew he owed his team the truth. They'd just had a serious shock about Jesse being captured, than they'd seen him act like a total ass to the girl who was going to try to get him back. He was through lying and through running. It was time to tell the truth.
Both to himself and to his team.
"Because she let me fall in love with her knowing she was going to go away and I'd never see her again." Leon didn't have it in him to lie about it.
Dom sighed.
Vince ran a hand through his already disorderly hair and went to Nyssa.
Brian spun on his heel and headed to the phone.
Letty looked like she still didn't know what to do or what to believe.
"Well, what are we going to do about this then?" Letty asked. "We can't let her just do what she's planning but we still need to get Jesse back. But Leon, damn! If you love the girl then you can't just let her go away and do what she has planned without telling her. If things don't work out and we can't save her and she goes through with her plan do you want her to think you're mad at her and hate her for the rest of her life?"
"Of course not Letty. Shit this is messed up." Leon sighed.
Brian walked back over to the group from his position beside the phone.
"Well, LAPD can't help. They don't have enough evidence and I could tell from the way Tanner spoke that they're just too scared to go after this guy. Maybe if they'd had someone undercover with him and knew his habits and had some idea where he could be keeping Sean and Jesse they'd help, but they won't go in blind. I'm still going to call Bilkins. The Bureau might have some idea about this asshole already. Especially if he's been traveling between Russia and the US. I wish we'd thought to get his last name from Kat."
"Just keep trying man. We gotta do something." Vince said from his place on the couch where he was holding Nyssa.
"We can't let her do this, no matter what." Nyssa sniffled. "She doesn't know what she's getting herself into."
"I think she does baby girl. But I don't want her to do it. I just don't see how we can stop her if she's insistent on doing it and we don't come up with a better plan." Vince sighed and pulled Nyssa closer to his side.
"Brian, you have to be able to do something!" Mia implored from the foot of the couch.
"I'm going to do everything I can Mia, but I can't make the FBI help me. I don't even know if they'll know who this Sergei guy is from just the first name. If he's as bad as Kat thinks then I hope they will."
Mia started to cry quietly in earnest again. Mia'd been more then mad at Kat by times, especially over what the other girl had pulled at races. But she could also see where Kat was hardly more then a child and Mia understood that Kat might not have great skills at dealing with things that upset her. What Kat was willing to do for Jesse and Sean was more then enough to raise her higher then Mia had ever thought she could go in Mia's estimation. And since Leon loved her Mia couldn't stand the thoughts of her leaving all their lives and never returning.
Letty still looked confused. She literally had hated Kat up till an hour ago for the words they'd exchanged at races. She felt like she'd been plunged into some parallel universe where right was wrong and up was down. She'd had Kat pegged as an immature, selfish troublemaking girl. She couldn't jive that image of Kat with the image of the resigned, selfless young woman who'd stood in her living room a few minutes before.
Dom paced around his kitchen. He was having thoughts along a similar vein as Letty. How could he mesh the feelings of hate he'd had for the girl who'd talked trash at races less then 24 hours before with the feelings of helplessness and anger he'd felt when he'd watched that same girl become a woman beyond her years in his living room and tell them about the crazy thing she was going to do to get the baby of his team home safe.
Dom didn't kid himself. He was the leader of his team and while he knew Kat likely figured she was the leader of hers he knew the real leader of the house across the street was Sean. And Dom also, therefore knew, that Sean would want Kat to run as far and as fast as she could to get away. Dom knew Sean would want to just take what Fate and Sergei had in store for him if it meant that 'his Kitten' got away to safety. It was what Dom would want if they had him and they were trying to get Mia or Letty to do what Kat was about to do. He'd want Vince and Leon to take the girls and run, leave him to handle whatever it was and run as far away as they could. Even if it meant whoever it was followed through on their threats and killed him. He imagined Sean felt the same way.
It wasn't in Dom to quit, and he knew that Letty and Vince would feel the same way. He wasn't as sure about Leon as he would have been at one time. The whole rollercoaster ride of his relationship with Kat had changed Leon in subtle ways. It had made him more volatile and Dom didn't know what Leon was going to do about the whole situation. But Dom knew that he himself was not going to sit back and do nothing.
Dom rejoined the rest of his team just as Brian hung up the phone for the second time.
"Bilkens is aware of Sergei's presence and he'll help all he can. He's had a man undercover in Sergei's organization for a few years now. He'll give us Intel and a few agents but he doesn't think it will be enough. This is Sergei Kalmanovitch we're dealing with here. He's bad news. He runs Russian crime. The fucker owns Israel for crying out loud." Brian paused, thinking about what they were getting into.
"What do you mean he owns Israel?" Mia asked.
"Israel is a different country in it's immigration laws and views. They allow all Jewish people the freedom to enter the country and offer them all citizenship. There are Jewish people who are Russian. What the criminals do is say they're Jewish, enter Israel with their dirty money and start taking over. Then they're also free to travel the world and carry out their crime with the safety of an Israeli passport. Kalmanovitch has both Russian and Israeli passports and several aliases. Not to mention he's worth billions and billions of dollars. He's real bad news."
"So what does Bilkens say about the whole thing?" Dom asked.
Brian sighed and looked at his feet. He was trying not to cry with the helplessness of it all. He finally got control of himself and answered Dom's question.
"He'd rather if Kat just did what she has planned and then in a few months time when the Bureau is ready to bring down the whole ring he'll be able to bring her home safe then." Brian sighed. He did not like Bilkens' idea of a plan at all.
"Hell no!" Vince roared. "We are not letting her be reduced to slavery for a few months while the FBI tries to get its shit in order."
"And that is pretty much what I told Bilkens. I told him I appreciated his concern but we'd take the Intel and the few agents he can provide and hope for the best. We need to pick a HQ then I'll call Bilkens back and tell him where to set up and send his people."
"This is over our heads guys." Leon spoke for the first time since his revelation. "We're not cops or agents or whatever you want to call it. How are we supposed to take on the MOB?"
"Just like we took on Tran. As a team. We'll take it on as a fucken angry team. I mean he has Jesse guys. What he's doing to Kat sucks too but that doesn't change the fact that he has Jesse." Letty broke in. "We'll have the FBI on our side after all."
"Then maybe we should just let the FBI do their job." Leon sighed and mussed his own hair with a careless hand as he said it.
"You mean let Kat go through with her plan?" Nyssa looked up in shock.
"Well, she'd be reasonably safe then and the FBI can bring down her step father's whole crime ring and she'll be safe forever. It's the plan with the least chance of someone getting killed. If we go through with what you guys are saying and Sergei gets away from us then he can just come after Kat again."
"You'd let the woman you love, who to this point has ever only been with you be given to another man just to let the FBI do their job?" Nyssa was still looking terribly shell shocked.
The rest of the team looked at Leon in shock. They'd known what Leon and Kat had been doing in his room when they'd come up from the basement together and Kat had been in Leon's clothes but they'd never dreamed that Kat had been a virgin till she'd gotten with Leon.
Leon didn't know how Nyssa had known, but then again he didn't know how Nyssa knew half of what she knew.
"It's not what I want, it just seems like the safest way to keep Kat, Jesse and Sean safe. The FBI knows what they're doing with this guy and we have no idea."
"Kat knows." Vince jumped back into the conversation. "Not only that but you can bet if I have anything to do with it the fucker is dead as soon as I get a clean shot."
Nyssa looked at her boyfriend in mild shot. She knew Vince kept a gun but she didn't know how adept he'd be at using it.
"Look. I say we go tell Kat we have her inside information and see what she wants to do." Brian said, hoping that Kat would want to fight back now that they had a way for her to do so. He'd hated seeing her looking so small and broken. It wasn't the girl he'd come to care for over the time she'd been working with him or hanging out with him.
"Yeah, we can't really make any kind of decision on this till we speak to Kat anyway." Dom said and headed for the door.
"Maybe we better wait awhile Dom. She might be talking with her friends about where she was last night." Nyssa stopped Dom and made a pointed glance at Leon's bowed head.
"Alright." Dom agreed on a sigh.
----------------------- [1] I love you
AN: Wow, chapter 60. Feels like only yesterday this was just a vague idea in my head and now here we are. Ok, this is one of my adult top warnings. Nothing major, just talk about the 'morning after the night before.' LOL. Ok, on with the show. BTW, if you haven't yet, take a look at a couple stories worth your time, they are 'The Ultimate Betrayal', 'America's Fates' and 'Puzzling Pieces'. The last is a round robin type story with 5 of us taking turns writing. It's pretty cool, I'm number 5 so my chapter just went up. Oh, and watch for 'Knights on the Blacktop' By The- Knight2000. It should be appearing this weekend. (hint hint, you know who you are!) Check them out, review. Review me too please! On with the story.
The rest of the team thought Leon was going to make up with her, tell her he realized it wasn't her fault that the whole situation had occurred.
Leon caught Kat on the porch and closed the door so the rest of the team couldn't hear what he was going to say.
"Could you be pregnant?" Leon asked bluntly.
"Um..." Kat didn't have an answer to that. She hadn't thought that far ahead. She'd had some idea of course that she should do something to prevent that eventuality but since she'd had no frame of reference for when she'd never thought of it.
"Oh great. You could be then right? You don't take anything?"
"Well, clearly I never had a reason to before I met you. But it's not likely anyway."
"How do you know that? Neither of us did anything to prevent it."
"Well, I don't always have my..." Kat blushed scarlet. "I'm um..."
"Will you just tell me already?" Leon sighed.
She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. She wanted to tell him that while she knew she wasn't the kind of person who would make a good mother at all she'd treasure being pregnant with his child. A little boy she could keep forever if she ran away before Sergei or his friend found out she was pregnant. A little piece of Leon she could keep forever.
Scared the hell out of her.
She wasn't the maternal type. She'd never thought she wanted kids. She didn't like them much and she never thought she'd want to have a child of her own. She was the baby of her family so she'd never learned how to go on with young children or babies. She saw herself as the kind of person who just lived on the edge their whole life and never had time for children, never slowed down long enough to make time in their busy schedule to reproduce.
Now she could see herself with a little green eyed baby, cooing at him and letting him pull her hair. Could see a baby seat in the skyline. See herself with a little boy holding her hand and tottering after her while she worked on the skyline, handing her tools, all the wrong ones of course. Could see herself at 29, a young 29 she added to herself, with a 10 year old son who was already breaking hearts because he looked just like his father and couldn't wait till his mom bought him his first car and taught him to drive because he already knew all there was to know about fixing cars. But the trick there was she'd never be happy with just one child once she got started. Not if they were Leon's.
She'd want a green eyed daughter too. One she could teach Ballet and cars to. She'd treat her children the same no matter what sex they were. But Leon wouldn't be around to give her more children.
Not only that but she couldn't see having kids that didn't know their uncle Sean, Stacy, Kale and Connor either. Kids that didn't have uncle Jesse to learn to tune engines from and uncle Vince to give them piggie back rides and Aunt Mia to teach them to cook Italian food and Aunt Letty to teach them to be tough. Uncle Dom to teach them rotaries and give them their first jobs in his shop and store.
Hell, she'd never thought she'd make time for a man in her life either. But look how that ended up. She likely should have stuck to her live on the razor's edge, never slow down, never stop running too fast mentality. She sure wouldn't be in the situation she was in now if she'd just lived by her own philosophy. If she hadn't let herself slow down long enough to fall for Leon then there wouldn't be another innocent person involved in her mess.
"I don't always have...My...That time of...of...the...the month...because I'm so..."
Kat found trying to explain it to Leon was one of the most humiliating things she'd ever had to do. And he wasn't making it easier. He was giving her a very impatient look.
"I don't always have a period because I'm so thin that I don't carry enough body fat. It's often considered lucky for it to happen to a ballerina but I always just found it scary."
Leon looked like he really didn't know how to process that info.
"So even if you did get pregnant by accident it could be a long time before you even realized?"
She nodded.
"Great." He threw up his hands
Kat was very hurt that it was all he seemed to care about.
"You've no need to concern yourself anyway. Come 9 tonight I'm out of your life forever. I..." She stopped herself just short of telling him she loved him and thanking him for the magical night to keep her through the rest of her life. She knew there'd never be another man for her. "I should go now."
"You're just going to walk out of my life, possibly carrying my child and tell me it's ok because I'll never see you again?" Leon was red in the face he was so mad.
"It's such a slim chance that it could happen to me that I don't think you need to concern yourself over it. But if I am I'll find a way to let you know." With that Kat started down the steps.
"And what, raise my child while you're living with another man?" Leon started after her down the path.
"There is not going to be a child. And I'll not be living with this person for too long before I run away from him. Then I'll go into hiding somewhere like Mexico or Japan. I don't know just where yet."
"You can't know that! You just said yourself it was possible and that you wouldn't even know till months in."
"It is possible but since I only have one...Time of the month in about every 6 the odds of me being able to get pregnant right now are so slim that I just don't think it's a big concern right now. Forgive me if getting my friend and yours back and planning my escape in a month or two is more important to me right now."
Kat started to get angry. She still blamed herself for Sergei finding her because if she'd just had the sense not to be photographed it never would have happened. But it was because of everything going so well that she'd gotten complacent in L.A. She'd had Harry treating her so indulgently, her guys taking such good care of her, Brian being like the best guy friend she'd always wanted but had never been able to have, Leon to teach her what it was to really want someone, and Dom to give her goals.
But she hadn't known Sergei would go after her friends. She would have rather just had him take her off the street. But he didn't do that, he went the route he did and Kat knew why. He wanted to take her of her own free will so that she'd be docile, or at least at first she would be.
But Leon really had no right to blame her. She'd thought he did at first but the more she thought about it the more she realized he didn't. She had every right to blame herself but he didn't really have the right to blame her. He picked her up. He pursued her too. He came into the racers edge to meet her the first day, he saw her on his street and asked her to his house to watch movies. He asked her out to dinner. He came to visit her at work. He pounced on her at his work. He picked her up off the bridge and allowed what had happened to happen. He wasn't totally innocent of the connection between the two teams.
She got ready to turn around and yell and scream at him over it. She could feel his eyes boring into her back so she knew he was still standing there watching her. Her muscles tensed and the adrenaline started to flow in preparation for the battle that was about to come. She was really ready to lash into Leon.
Then it occurred to her that these were the last few moments she'd ever see him. No matter how mad she was and no matter how out of line he was fighting with him about it now was silly. It wasn't going to be settled and in a few hours she'd never see him again anyway. Why should the last memory they had of each other be a huge fight. It was better if the last memory he had of her was her retreating back. And if she didn't have a huge fight with him she could hold onto the memories of the night before herself.
"Я лÑÐ±Ð»Ñ Ð²Ð°Ñ.[1]" Kat called back over her shoulder in Russian and started to walk away.
She continued to walk down the walkway, choosing discretion as the better part of valor and heading for her own house, head high and back straight.
*~*
Leon watched the woman he'd just realized he loved walk out of his life. If she had her way she was walking out for good.
And the last memory she had of him was going to be of him basically calling her stupid for letting there be a chance she was pregnant. She thought he was mad at her for not preventing herself from getting pregnant or telling him that it was a possibility so he could have done something about it.
She thought he was mad because he thought it was her fault Jesse was involved in the situation as well.
But the truth was he was mad at her for an entirely different reason.
She'd let him fall in love with her.
And he'd fallen hard.
He was mad that she'd let him fall in love with her the night before she knew she was going to be walking out of his life. It wasn't right for her to let him love her then to walk away. She'd spent the night with him, given her virginity to him knowing the whole time she was going to get up the next day and make plans to barter herself for two people she cared about. He'd never fallen in love with a girl before, and she let the first time be with her, when she had known he couldn't have her.
And Leon didn't know if he himself would have the strength to do what Kat planned on doing. It was a totally selfless act. And he'd made her feel like shit over it. She was doing it to get his brother back and he'd made her feel like everything was her fault and what she was doing wasn't enough.
When in reality it was all she could do.
She was doing the only thing she knew how and he'd belittled it.
She was doing more then she should do and he'd yelled at her over it.
She should just take off and run. She should save herself and say fuck it about Sean and Jesse. But she wasn't like that and she didn't have it in her to do that.
She should.
But she wasn't going to.
She was going to do the right thing and Leon had made her feel that she'd messed up.
He wanted Kat to be the mother of his children. And yet he'd made her feel bad about the fact that they might have made a baby together. It took two to make babies and Leon knew that fact quite well. Yet he'd acted like it was all her responsibility and he knew it wasn't. She'd been totally innocent and it was him that should be begging for forgiveness for not realizing she'd never been with a man 'that way' before. When he let himself think back over the whole time he'd known Kat the signs she didn't know as much about men as she tried to let on were glaringly obvious.
The way she danced so sensually with guys she didn't have romantic feelings for, for one thing. She didn't know how much she was turning them on so she continued to act in ways that would be seen as her being a tease by lots of guys, but was just natural to her.
The way she'd responded to him every time he ever kissed her. Something had been telling of her naivety in her kisses but he'd chosen to ignore it. To pretend he didn't know something was different.
Kat took all the aspects of Letty that he liked and rolled them up with her own unique personality. She had Letty's tom boy, racer chick, grease monkey, just one of the guys attitude down. But she added her own ultra girly, vulnerable, Russian ballerina, Kat essence that just made her all the more special.
He watched her walk across and up the street the short distance she had to go to reach her own house, his pants almost falling off her butt and his shirt three sizes too big, even though he was pretty slim himself. Once she was in her house he re-entered his own.
"What the fuck is the matter with you?" Vince yelled at him the minute he entered the door.
"I'm sorry to say I have to agree with Vince on this one." Brian added.
Vince shot him a dirty look.
"Damn it Leon." Dom sighed and shook his head.
"Kat's going to give herself to some guy to get Jesse back?" Letty asked, not really grasping the full extent of what that meant.
Nyssa just sat beside Mia while the two weaker females of the team held each other and cried. They understood all too well what it meant.
Leon looked from one shocked face to another as he gazed into the eyes of his team mates.
"What were you thinking talking to her like that when she's going through what she is man?" Vince continued to rant. "Can't you see she's not as tough as she lets on? She's having a hard enough time without you talking to her like that!"
"What did you say to her outside Leon?" Dom asked in his deceptively calm voice.
"Nothing." Leon mumbled out.
"If you made her feel worse..." Vince threatened.
"Why are you blaming her for this anyway? It's not like she could have known." Brian added, puzzled about what was going on.
"I don't blame her. Well, I did at first, but I don't now. Not really. I'm mad at her but not over Jesse."
"Then why are you mad at her Leon?" Nyssa looked up with tears running down her cheeks.
Leon knew he owed his team the truth. They'd just had a serious shock about Jesse being captured, than they'd seen him act like a total ass to the girl who was going to try to get him back. He was through lying and through running. It was time to tell the truth.
Both to himself and to his team.
"Because she let me fall in love with her knowing she was going to go away and I'd never see her again." Leon didn't have it in him to lie about it.
Dom sighed.
Vince ran a hand through his already disorderly hair and went to Nyssa.
Brian spun on his heel and headed to the phone.
Letty looked like she still didn't know what to do or what to believe.
"Well, what are we going to do about this then?" Letty asked. "We can't let her just do what she's planning but we still need to get Jesse back. But Leon, damn! If you love the girl then you can't just let her go away and do what she has planned without telling her. If things don't work out and we can't save her and she goes through with her plan do you want her to think you're mad at her and hate her for the rest of her life?"
"Of course not Letty. Shit this is messed up." Leon sighed.
Brian walked back over to the group from his position beside the phone.
"Well, LAPD can't help. They don't have enough evidence and I could tell from the way Tanner spoke that they're just too scared to go after this guy. Maybe if they'd had someone undercover with him and knew his habits and had some idea where he could be keeping Sean and Jesse they'd help, but they won't go in blind. I'm still going to call Bilkins. The Bureau might have some idea about this asshole already. Especially if he's been traveling between Russia and the US. I wish we'd thought to get his last name from Kat."
"Just keep trying man. We gotta do something." Vince said from his place on the couch where he was holding Nyssa.
"We can't let her do this, no matter what." Nyssa sniffled. "She doesn't know what she's getting herself into."
"I think she does baby girl. But I don't want her to do it. I just don't see how we can stop her if she's insistent on doing it and we don't come up with a better plan." Vince sighed and pulled Nyssa closer to his side.
"Brian, you have to be able to do something!" Mia implored from the foot of the couch.
"I'm going to do everything I can Mia, but I can't make the FBI help me. I don't even know if they'll know who this Sergei guy is from just the first name. If he's as bad as Kat thinks then I hope they will."
Mia started to cry quietly in earnest again. Mia'd been more then mad at Kat by times, especially over what the other girl had pulled at races. But she could also see where Kat was hardly more then a child and Mia understood that Kat might not have great skills at dealing with things that upset her. What Kat was willing to do for Jesse and Sean was more then enough to raise her higher then Mia had ever thought she could go in Mia's estimation. And since Leon loved her Mia couldn't stand the thoughts of her leaving all their lives and never returning.
Letty still looked confused. She literally had hated Kat up till an hour ago for the words they'd exchanged at races. She felt like she'd been plunged into some parallel universe where right was wrong and up was down. She'd had Kat pegged as an immature, selfish troublemaking girl. She couldn't jive that image of Kat with the image of the resigned, selfless young woman who'd stood in her living room a few minutes before.
Dom paced around his kitchen. He was having thoughts along a similar vein as Letty. How could he mesh the feelings of hate he'd had for the girl who'd talked trash at races less then 24 hours before with the feelings of helplessness and anger he'd felt when he'd watched that same girl become a woman beyond her years in his living room and tell them about the crazy thing she was going to do to get the baby of his team home safe.
Dom didn't kid himself. He was the leader of his team and while he knew Kat likely figured she was the leader of hers he knew the real leader of the house across the street was Sean. And Dom also, therefore knew, that Sean would want Kat to run as far and as fast as she could to get away. Dom knew Sean would want to just take what Fate and Sergei had in store for him if it meant that 'his Kitten' got away to safety. It was what Dom would want if they had him and they were trying to get Mia or Letty to do what Kat was about to do. He'd want Vince and Leon to take the girls and run, leave him to handle whatever it was and run as far away as they could. Even if it meant whoever it was followed through on their threats and killed him. He imagined Sean felt the same way.
It wasn't in Dom to quit, and he knew that Letty and Vince would feel the same way. He wasn't as sure about Leon as he would have been at one time. The whole rollercoaster ride of his relationship with Kat had changed Leon in subtle ways. It had made him more volatile and Dom didn't know what Leon was going to do about the whole situation. But Dom knew that he himself was not going to sit back and do nothing.
Dom rejoined the rest of his team just as Brian hung up the phone for the second time.
"Bilkens is aware of Sergei's presence and he'll help all he can. He's had a man undercover in Sergei's organization for a few years now. He'll give us Intel and a few agents but he doesn't think it will be enough. This is Sergei Kalmanovitch we're dealing with here. He's bad news. He runs Russian crime. The fucker owns Israel for crying out loud." Brian paused, thinking about what they were getting into.
"What do you mean he owns Israel?" Mia asked.
"Israel is a different country in it's immigration laws and views. They allow all Jewish people the freedom to enter the country and offer them all citizenship. There are Jewish people who are Russian. What the criminals do is say they're Jewish, enter Israel with their dirty money and start taking over. Then they're also free to travel the world and carry out their crime with the safety of an Israeli passport. Kalmanovitch has both Russian and Israeli passports and several aliases. Not to mention he's worth billions and billions of dollars. He's real bad news."
"So what does Bilkens say about the whole thing?" Dom asked.
Brian sighed and looked at his feet. He was trying not to cry with the helplessness of it all. He finally got control of himself and answered Dom's question.
"He'd rather if Kat just did what she has planned and then in a few months time when the Bureau is ready to bring down the whole ring he'll be able to bring her home safe then." Brian sighed. He did not like Bilkens' idea of a plan at all.
"Hell no!" Vince roared. "We are not letting her be reduced to slavery for a few months while the FBI tries to get its shit in order."
"And that is pretty much what I told Bilkens. I told him I appreciated his concern but we'd take the Intel and the few agents he can provide and hope for the best. We need to pick a HQ then I'll call Bilkens back and tell him where to set up and send his people."
"This is over our heads guys." Leon spoke for the first time since his revelation. "We're not cops or agents or whatever you want to call it. How are we supposed to take on the MOB?"
"Just like we took on Tran. As a team. We'll take it on as a fucken angry team. I mean he has Jesse guys. What he's doing to Kat sucks too but that doesn't change the fact that he has Jesse." Letty broke in. "We'll have the FBI on our side after all."
"Then maybe we should just let the FBI do their job." Leon sighed and mussed his own hair with a careless hand as he said it.
"You mean let Kat go through with her plan?" Nyssa looked up in shock.
"Well, she'd be reasonably safe then and the FBI can bring down her step father's whole crime ring and she'll be safe forever. It's the plan with the least chance of someone getting killed. If we go through with what you guys are saying and Sergei gets away from us then he can just come after Kat again."
"You'd let the woman you love, who to this point has ever only been with you be given to another man just to let the FBI do their job?" Nyssa was still looking terribly shell shocked.
The rest of the team looked at Leon in shock. They'd known what Leon and Kat had been doing in his room when they'd come up from the basement together and Kat had been in Leon's clothes but they'd never dreamed that Kat had been a virgin till she'd gotten with Leon.
Leon didn't know how Nyssa had known, but then again he didn't know how Nyssa knew half of what she knew.
"It's not what I want, it just seems like the safest way to keep Kat, Jesse and Sean safe. The FBI knows what they're doing with this guy and we have no idea."
"Kat knows." Vince jumped back into the conversation. "Not only that but you can bet if I have anything to do with it the fucker is dead as soon as I get a clean shot."
Nyssa looked at her boyfriend in mild shot. She knew Vince kept a gun but she didn't know how adept he'd be at using it.
"Look. I say we go tell Kat we have her inside information and see what she wants to do." Brian said, hoping that Kat would want to fight back now that they had a way for her to do so. He'd hated seeing her looking so small and broken. It wasn't the girl he'd come to care for over the time she'd been working with him or hanging out with him.
"Yeah, we can't really make any kind of decision on this till we speak to Kat anyway." Dom said and headed for the door.
"Maybe we better wait awhile Dom. She might be talking with her friends about where she was last night." Nyssa stopped Dom and made a pointed glance at Leon's bowed head.
"Alright." Dom agreed on a sigh.
----------------------- [1] I love you