Disclaimer: They are not mine, I can swear it.

Title: Not without you.

Dedicated specially to my patient and sweet beta, I can't do it without you, literally.

By Lylou

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He opened his eyes slowly.

They felt like lead, and the first time that he blinked, he didn't know where he was.

There was something hard and cold under him.

"The floor"

Why was he on the floor?

His brain was very slow, he was confused, unable to think clearly against the fog clouding his mind.

He frowned as he tried to order his jumbled thoughts but they were just a thick and heavy blur on his mind.

What had woken him?

"Stella"

Something was wrong with Stella.

The only thing that he could really remember was her warm smell, hot and intoxicating, different from anyone else he knew…

But she needs help…he frowned as he tried to remember but all his thoughts were turned around and confused in his head.

He tasted her brown-sugar flavour on his dry mouth again, or at least, he thought that he did…

Had he really kissed her? Had he felt her hot breath in his dark bedroom? ….Why couldn't he remember?

And then he felt it, above all the confusion or the cold: the fear.

He tried to sit up

Pain.

He gasped as a searing pain shot through his side as he tried to move.

Suddenly everything became clear as images shot into his mind.

The intense pain as a foot ground into his injured side, as he lay on the cold ground unable to help her, Stella shouting his name… being taken from him.

He looked across the room to the phone.

And gritting his teeth against the pain, Mac dragged himself along the floor towards the telephone.

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The doctors in the ER were just finishing re stitching the wound in his side.

The stitches in his side had been torn open and he had lost a lot of blood so the paramedics had forced him into going to the hospital.

He didn't want to, he just wanted go out there, and find her.

But it hurt like hell. Everything hurt.

Mac always had hated the hospitals, they where cold and depressing , the disinfectant smell on the air, the doctors running around, the tired and worried faces of the patients… and theirs families.

-So…nobody saw anything?

That's strange…

Mac could heard Flacks voice somewhere in the background, or at least he thought that he could, his head hurt like hell and he found it hard to concentrate. He knew very well how pain can blind the mind, how it can make you fell fire inside, even stopping you to think.

The doctors had just finished treating him He winced as the nurse pressed a dressing over the newly re stitched wound and taped it in place.

The pain radiated through him in waves making him feel sick and dizzy.

But maybe it wasn't just the wound that hurt.

Maybe what was hurting him most right now was the memory of seeing her black winter coat lying on his chair, her shoes thrown on the floor... the blanket over the sofa.

He almost hadn't been able to remember what had happened, how did things get so bad, and so fast.

Like everything bad that had happened in his life, all it took was just a second for his world to shatter like a broken mirror, leaving him alone to pick up the damn pieces of his new discovered loneliness.

Mac was lost in thought as he started to get when he heard a familiar voice at his back:

"You should be staying in the hospital Mac."

"I am ok Danny."

But he wondered why his own voice sounded much braver and more determined than he felt

"You look really bad Mac….. And you won't be able to help her if you bleed to death."

"I am not going to bleed……"

Mac turned to watch him, and although the pain on his side made him think that he was about to pass out again, his voice sounded controlled and hard, like if he was a different man now:

"And don't say again that I won't be able to help her."

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She blinked several times until her eyes grew accustomed slowly to the dark, she felt sick and dizzy, like if she had been going round in a merry-go-round for hours.

She felt pain somewhere in her left leg, maybe in the knee, the ankle...she wasn't quite sure.

She tried to move but she felt an acute and sharp pain in her wrists, she was tied to the wall, but when she tried to move, besides of the intensive pain on her wrists, she felt small fragments of wet gravel falling over her hair and her face.

Stella felt ill and confused, but the worse thing above all, was the almost painful cold that she was feeling.

Suddenly, she realized of she wasn't wearing her own clothes anymore; just some kind of a nightdress, Stella could see the fabric of the thin straps on her shoulders.

She listened to the water dripping in her dark and dirty jail, but she wasn't able to distinguish where.

Her whole body was freezing and hurting her, but when she began to think that the things couldn't get any worse, she heard breathing next to her ear.

And she froze.

Stella could feel his chilly and nauseous breath on her cheek, she had already felt it before, in Mac's house… her mind shot back to the apartment and Mac in pain lying, bleeding on the floor, and then she felt it for the first time since she had woken up.

The fear.

She was really felling it, the kind of fear that made her want to run and hide like a little girl, the kind of fear that could make you feel your heart pounding in your head…. . She wasn't alone, he was watching her in the dark, to close to her, breathing on her hair, and then Stella thought that no matter what happened now, she wasn't going to give him the pleasure of crying out in fear..

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Mac was staring at the name written on the white label on the folder over his table.

He never thought that there would be a folder with her familiar name on it crossing his desk; it looked weirdly different written down on a label on a case file. Just like so many others files that landed on his desk reporting murders, rapes, suicides… missing persons….

He was trying to think what to do next, when Flack knocked the glass door of his office and came in.

"We have been looking at everything that we have on Jack Thomas and his family. There are no properties in his name or in name of his son, the wife died fifteen years ago, someone beat her to death.

According to the cop who worked the case they thought that husband killed her but they couldn't prove it"

"Anything else Flack?"

Mac was staring at the file in silence but listening to every word.

"Yes… now comes the spooky part."

Mac raised his eyes from the file and looked at the young detective, waiting for him to continue.

"…. Jack has criminal records of drug dealing ten years ago. According to the file, he used to use his own son to pass heroine in his neighbourhood, they got caught and our guy spent seven years in prison, but they let him out early when his lawyer argued that: "His mental health was being deteriorated on the environment of prison" Nice, isn't it?

Mac blinked twice and went back to looking at the folder on his desk.

"Is that all Flack? "

"No, there is something else... but you aren't going to like it. The report says that the vice cops who picked him up ten years ago... were Tom Alvares and Stella Bonasera."

Her name echoed in Mac's brain. He knew that Flack was looking at him, waiting for some order or idea, but he didn't know that to say, he did not know what he had to do now, that was the damn truth.

He always knew what to do, what the next step was that they had to take but now…. he felt lost and tired, but above all, Mac felt completely helpless.… Danny words repeated again and again in his exhausted mind:

"You won't be able to help her"

When Mac Taylor spoke again his voice sounded distant, like if he were actuality talking to himself.

"All this time, we were wrong, we thought that this had something to do with me... but it was Stella he wanted all the time... and I was easiest way to get to her, damn it! "

Flack was in silence, watching the far-away and pale expression on his boss face, his creased shirt and the darks rings under his eyes. He was worried about him and spoke softly to him:

"Well Mac, we don't have any certain proof of it but... "

Mac turned to face the young detective.

"That is why he didn't kill me, either of the two times that he had the opportunity to do it. That is why he sent his zombie-son to the commercial center yesterday morning, he could have killed me but he just wanted to hurt me.

Like last night in my apartment, again he could have killed me, could have stayed to watch me bleed out, he had Stella's weapon, he could have shot me... but he didn't. "

"Do you think that he has some kind of plan? "

Mac focused his gaze on Flack for the first time.

"Yes… I think that she is still alive, because he needs Stella; he wants to prove us how clever and evil he is.

He said before "This is a game" and if she is dead…"

A chill ran down Mac's spine when he said it out loud.

-"…The game it is over." Flack finished in a cold voice. "Well, that's what it sounds like to me, but there is something that I don't understand yet. The son said yesterday that Stella was dead, why he would say that, I mean if you are right, and the plan of the bastard is that... Stella is useless if she is dead. "

Mac bit lower lip slowly while he tried to figure things out in his mind, he knew that there was something important he should remember, but he couldn't see it clearly...

"Maybe this wasn't his plan since the beginning... Maybe the son was convinced that he had killed Stella. "

"I can't keep up here Mac… What are you suggesting? "

Suddenly Flack saw how the pale and tired face of the man in front of him changed into something that he knew better: Determination.

"That maybe the son of a bitch got the wrong door. "

TBC…..