No excuse in the world can justify how long it's been since I updated … but to make up for it, I give you two chapters and a completed story! There's a warning for language in this chapter. Many thanks to Storyspindler for the beta and helping me work out those awkward scenes. Without her, as with Mea Culpa, this story would not be possible.

And so, without further ado…

CHAPTER IV

Just as another punch made its way in, Elyse threw herself against her husband's side. Though her weight barely made the man flinch, he paused a moment to swipe at her like an insect. She latched onto his arm, clutching it with nearly nerveless fingers. Her entire body was shaking. McHugh could feel it.

"Bob," she managed through her hysterical tears. "Stop it, stop it," she tugged helplessly on his arm. Her legs melted beneath her, and she sank to her knees. Violent sobs racked her body, collective mourning from the past several months she had been unable to release, terror from the fast few hours should could no longer contain. "Please, Bob!"

McHugh balled his fist. Glancing between his wife and his prey, he suddenly spit, as if a horrendous taste assaulted his senses. Rubbing the saliva into the carpet with his shoe he threw his arm half-heartedly in Charlie's direction and sighed.

"Why do you want to protect him, Elyse?"

Elyse released her husband's arm from her grasp—five white half-moons dented his arm on either side—and ran her hands down her face, pausing to wipe away her tears. For several seconds she sucked in shaky, thick breaths, trying to stabilize her shattered being, which would probably never be whole again.

"He's not one of them, Bob," she managed in a soggy voice, her gaze assuming the floor. "For pity's sake, Bob, he's been trying to help you!"

Her sobs began anew. She struggled to her knees like a person intoxicated and crawled to Charlie's side. The mathematician's face was tilted away from her own. He was utterly still.

"Charlie …" Elyse reached for him, getting as far as his shoulder before Charlie shuddered out of whatever state he had been in and turned to face her.

"I'm … I'm okay," he sputtered, though the room was spinning wildly before his eyes.

Elyse's arms fell to her sides. "Damn it, why didn't you just listen to him, Bob!"

"He's lying to you, Elyse."

"He's a mathematician, Bob!"

"World-class," Charlie offered from the floor, more to assure himself that his throbbing brain still functioned properly.

"And he proved to the FBI that you were innocent!"

Charlie rolled over onto his right side, facing in the direction where he thought McHugh stood—the room still swirled too violently for him to be one-hundred percent certain—and cleared his throat.

"We know that Graybridge sold you tainted antibiotics, McHugh."

"What difference does that make?" McHugh spat. "They still say I killed that fed."

"No … we know you didn't do that, either." As the world slowly came back into focus, so did Charlie's ambition and his reason. "There's a … bullet hole on the outside of your house. The way it's positioned, it's telling us that someone took a shot from outside the house. We have reason to believe it was Graybridge. They have good reason to want you dead, McHugh, and getting you tagged for killing a federal agent is a fairly easy way to do it."

McHugh chewed on Charlie's words for a moment, tracing the mathematician with his eyes.

"Lies," he spat.

"McHu—" Charlie hissed, only able to speak the first half of the name before its bearer landed a kick square to his already injured left side. Charlie bit down a savage curse as an acute pain rocketed through his shoulder. He dipped his forehead to the ground and released a weak sigh through his teeth—it was all he could do save screaming. This feeling, it was so severe, so real … it felt like getting shot all over again …

He fell still.

"Bob …" Elyse managed only as a slight gasp, seemingly lost to her own devices as she watched the mathematician struggle. "How could you do this, Bob…"

"Shut the hell up, Elyse!"

She flinched. The statement was not an unfamiliar one. For a moment she remained still, fearful, as she always did. But suddenly a change came over her eyes. A light. It may have been feeble, but it sparked with more determination than her husband could detect. Hope.

"You have a chance to make things right, Bob!"

He scoffed at her.

"Don't you see? You finally have the chance, Bob. To end this. No more hiding out, no more wondering if I'll ever see you again … I know you're innocent, Bob, and now the FBI does too! You know that you didn't do it … why are you running?"

McHugh grumbled something incoherent.

"Is it … your pride?"

Something that was not quite a gag escaped McHugh's lips.

"That's it, isn't it? You're too damn proud to give yourself up to them!"

She threw herself back on her haunches just as her husband's arm sailed over her head with a vengeance. His feral anger blinding him, McHugh stumbled like a man intoxicated and struggled to keep his footing. His enemy was no longer the younger man crumbled on the floor, or the agents outside his door, or the woman who defied him—it was this horrible feeling that tore him up inside. Anger. Regret. Fear.

That same feral instinct now drove Elyse. She crawled frantically on her hands and knees, stumbling over Charlie. Just beyond his head she found her husband's gun, lying where it had fallen. Clutching it in shaking hands she whirled to face her husband, still crouched on bended knee.

A horrible crack assaulted her senses as the metal flashed hot beneath her hands, and a violent force knocked her head back, causing her to topple sideways in pure shock. The gun wavered in her grip and toppled from her suddenly nerveless fingers, a pale wisp of smoke slithering out of the barrel's end.

Across the room, glass shattered as the stray bullet blasted through a hanging portrait of Elyse and her husband before embedding itself in the wall behind. The remains of the picture teetered and crashed down to the floor with an unbelievable explosion of sound.

Elyse choked on her very breath, terror of an unreal intensity assaulted her every synapse. She stared down at her hands aghast, jaw dropped nearly to her chin. She had pulled the trigger. Subconsciously, by accident, she had not even felt her fingers touch the cold metal. Had it been a slip or something more? Horrific images suddenly threw themselves against her eyes and her body went cold. Without thinking she buried her head in her hands and sobbed with a pain and fervor she had never known.

The sound of a bullet screaming past his ears diffused McHugh's rage in an instant. It took several more seconds for the cacophony within his brain to settle enough for him to take stock of this new situation. His eyes migrated from the fallen picture, where he and his wife had been separated by the horrid burn of a gunshot, to the offending weapon itself, motionless on the floor, to his wife, curled upon herself and shaking with agonizing terror.

Bile burned at the back of his throat. Cursing, he lashed out and kicked out at the gun, causing it to whirl with a loud clatter under the sofa a few feet away.

The sobs assaulted his ears, made them ache and bleed. He took a step closer to his wife, hesitant.

"Elyse …"

Elyse had doubled over, so fraught with tears that her sobs no longer made any noise; her body would simply jerk every few moments with a force that drove her nose closer to the floor. The culmination of years of fear finally exploded inside her, releasing a torrent of raw and primal emotion.

She had fired a gun.

No, it was deeper than that.

She had deliberately pointed a weapon at the man she loved.

That weapon had nearly put an end to him, to them both.

In wanting to stop him, she had suddenly become something foreign.

Something malignant.

Something … evil.

So absorbed was she in her turbulent thoughts that Elyse barely felt the arms suddenly wrap around her in a warm, if tentative, embrace. It was sensation that she had not felt for many months, a gentle fragment of the life that once was.

"I," she swallowed, leaning into her husband, relishing in the strength even his simple touch lent her. "I didn't mean it, Bob. I-it just went off."

She regarded her hands with a queasy expression, and McHugh felt her body spasm involuntarily, subconsciously remembering the recoil of the gun.

"I-I might have pulled it, I honestly don't know." Her voice was small, distant. "But if I did, so help me, I didn't mean it, Bob. That's the last thing I'd ever want, I—"

"Elyse. Elyse," McHugh's voice had lost its sharp intensity. He regarded his wife with a gentle expression, but one that was laced with uncertainty, irresolution.

She sputtered another sob. "I—I'm sorry."

McHugh groaned and struggled to his feet.

"Hell, Elyse, the last thing you need to do is be apologizing to me."

He threw one arm out to emphasize his sentence when a pained movement drew his attention to the floor, where his forgotten hostage flinched as the shadows of McHugh's gesticulations fell across his eyes.

McHugh's arms fell to his sides, heavy as lead.

"Shit."

Charlie had finally managed to settle his world from a violent whirling to a dull jerk at the corners of his eyes and struggled into a sitting position, his entire upper body protesting vehemently at the change in elevation. He raised his eyes to regard McHugh with a bleary expression.

"I thought I killed you!" McHugh sputtered, though his exclamation was more of surprised relief than hostile indignation.

"McHugh, calm down," Charlie struggled through teeth clenched against the aches assaulting his senses. "I'm alive, and I'd really appreciate it if well, I stayed that way."

He half-dragged his body onto his knees, hissing as nausea rendered his entire body useless. A sudden suspicion accosted his half-pulverized brain that this discovery of new hurts was only to become more and more interesting.

Hands still bound, Charlie leaned heavily against the arm of the couch for support and, with all the determination that a man who had been beaten, tossed around, and shot at could muster, drew himself clumsily to his feet. Not even a heartbeat had passed before he collapsed upon the cushions, his knees unable to support his body through fear or pain or fatigue. Or perhaps all three.

An awkward silence permeated the room, heavy and suffocating.

McHugh, positioned exactly between his wife and Charlie, debated heavily his next course of action. Glancing at Elyse, she regarded him with a distant expression, a glare in her eyes that plead, 'Please, just get it over with.'

McHugh sighed. Keeping his distance from the younger man, he extended only his voice.

"I-I have no idea what to say." He chewed on his lip in concentration. "Hell, I'm sorry, kid. I know that probably won't do anything for you, but it's the best I can offer right now."

A metallic taste rolled over Charlie's tongue, and after a few heartbeats his sluggish brain eventually comprehended the gash in his lower lip. He swallowed, the bitter taste nearly choking him.

"No."

He peeled his forehead from his hands and raised his face to McHugh with a glare that could melt steel.

"You hold me hostage here, tie me up, use me for target practice, and get me more acquainted with the wall and the floor and your fists than I ever wanted to be. And for what? Your wife was right. Your pride … and your cowardice."

The words lit a fire under McHugh's feet, but a shrill cry from his wife stopped him cold. He eyed her askance and shuddered for her wan expression.

"No. Hear me out, McHugh," Charlie gasped. "You owe me that much."

His eyes returned to Charlie with a steely glare.

"The best you can offer me right now is to walk out there, hands raised, and surrender. No, no," he hissed as he watched McHugh open his mouth to resist. "It is the only option you have left if you want to return to any sort of normalcy after this situation is over. Right now you're walking the very fine line between resolving this entire situation without bloodshed and getting yourself shot."

He drew in a deep breath, cautious of the deadly stare aimed in his direction.

"You reacted, McHugh, and no one can blame you for that. You did instinctually what anyone would do in a similar situation. Pursued, you ran. Predator and prey. You saw me here and your anger took over. It was not the right thing to do, but you saw it as an easy way to finally get the FBI off your tail."

He paused, regarding McHugh silently. The older man had donned his best poker face, but even that could not conceal the slight twitch of his jaw, the voracious string of insults he was struggling to keep behind his teeth.

"Am I right?" Charlie asked.

McHugh snarled, something fierce and bestial. "They've been after me for too long. For something I didn't do. I shouldn't have had to suffer because of their mistake. It ain't right."

"That doesn't matter now, McHugh. That's in the past. Here and now, those charges don't exist. I can assure you that the agents outside care less about the charges against you as they do the fact that you have innocent people held up in here."

McHugh bit his tongue to stave off whatever reply had jumped to the forefront of his brain.

"Just hold on a minute, McHugh," Charlie panted. "I can get this situation to work in your favor. Trust me."

McHugh scoffed, hesitating.

Elyse's plaintive sigh drew her husband's attention.

"He's here to help, Bob … remember?"

McHugh regarded his wife in silence for several moments before dropping his arms to his side in defeat.

"Okay, professor," he accompanied his words with a vague expression. "I'm listening."

Charlie leaned back in perfect silence. For several moments both McHugh and Elyse vanished from the room. Alone in his own sphere of existence, Charlie contemplated his response with as much scrutiny as one of his mathematical equations.

"Look," he began. "They're going to have to charge you for something, McHugh. Evading arrest, something like that."

McHugh spat, folding his arms across his chest. He looked and sounded distant, a man defeated.

"I know."

"I can try and get you a lenient sentence."

McHugh whipped around as if he had been slapped.

"Why the hell would you want to do that?"

"This whole situation came about from a culmination of unfortunate events. I have no right to have you labeled as a dangerous man when you reacted out of pure instinct. Besides, you could have killed me. Twice. But you didn't. Why?"

McHugh averted his eyes and chewed on his lip. "Must just be a bad shot, I guess."

Charlie debated explaining to the man about the mathematical likelihood of such an event, but at the last moment he decided against it. He responded with a wry smile. "Lucky me."

"Now how do I know they won't shoot me the second I step out that door? Without a doubt they heard that third gunshot, and the head honcho up there wasn't too happy with me last time that happened."

Charlie winced. Don.

In order to make sure McHugh stayed safe, he would have to place himself in the shadow of a gun once again. The proposition weighed heavily on his limbs, but it had to be done. He had promised Elyse, and now he had promised McHugh.

"Leave that to me," he spoke woodenly. "But promise me, McHugh. Don't try anything stupid when we get out there. I'm making a big leap of faith by helping you out here, and if anything goes wrong, it'll be on your head."

McHugh held up his hands defensively, a scowl marring his features. "Hey, no gun. I want to get this over with as much as you do, professor."

Even McHugh's iron resolve could not hide the acidic edge to his words.

"Could you at least," Charlie hesitated, "untie me first?"

McHugh hesitated. He took a small step in Charlie's direction, but the action seemed to pain him.

He hesitated a moment more and then drew only close enough to reach Charlie with his fingertips. Silently he unwound the knot, and the rope curled onto the couch in a serpentine fashion. His objective completed, McHugh shied away from Charlie, widening the space between them with a nervous air.

Charlie had to bite his tongue to stifle a groan as the life rushed back into his arms. The throb in his left shoulder became a furious agony so intense that his earlier pains paled in comparison. Subconsciously he raised his right arm, softly massaging the offending extremity with a gentle circular motion.

The young Eppes leaned heavily on the arm of the couch and pushed himself to his feet. Thankfully, the world only went spinning for a few precious moments before his vision snapped back to relative normalcy again. He took a tentative step to assure his knees would support his weight, and they did so without much protest. The thought of finally escaping this prison, blissful adrenaline, had erased all traces of his hurts.

His heart thundered in his ears as he moved toward the door.

Elyse had risen, latching comfortingly to her husband's arm.

"Bob…" she trailed off, uncertain.

"Don't worry, Elyse."

Charlie glanced over his shoulder, regarding Elyse with a placid expression. Elyse remembered the words the mathematician had spoken to her just hours before.

Suddenly, she did not know whether to be relieved, exalted, worried, or terrified.

She gave her husband's arm a gentle squeeze and released it.

Charlie nodded. "They're probably going to search the house, Mrs. McHugh. Just simple protocol. They know you're here, but just remain calm and cooperate with them. They'll help you."

Elyse could not contain the scoff that parted her lips in a bittersweet expression.

"Help me by taking my husband off to be arrested," she snapped almost without thinking.

"Elyse…" McHugh began.

Elyse shook her head, dismissing her husband's remark with a wave of her hand. She sighed. "I … I know. I'm sorry, Charlie. And … thank you. Thank you for everything."

Charlie nodded. He was beginning a reply when McHugh took a giant step toward the door, anguish fraying at his patience.

"Let's just get this over with, kid."

It was blatantly obvious that the prospect of surrendering terrified McHugh toward the very bounds of his sanity. Charlie likened the older man's expression to one of a man being led to his own execution.


The echoing of the third gunshot had sent Don Eppes into a fury. Not being able to stand the notion of his brother being locked in that cabin any longer, he had deployed all available men to encircle the cabin and barked orders to Edgerton to fire at will as soon McHugh dared to show himself.

That had been nearly thirty minutes ago, and McHugh had not yet emerged from the house. Only Megan's presence beside Don had kept him from ordering a mass invasion of McHugh's cabin ten times in the past half hour.

Therefore, when the door slammed open, the tension outside the cabin instantly multiplied.

The threshold stood empty for several seconds. Don watched it with dread weighing heavily on his features. A scuffling sound echoed from inside the house. The whole of nature suddenly froze.

And McHugh appeared.

The fugitive took a tentative step outside the door, glancing over his shoulder with an uncharacteristic trepidation.

The crosshairs never wavered.

Don watched him with the gaze of a feline predator.

One more step…

McHugh cleared the cover of the threshold.

Skin met cold steel.

A white-knuckled grip encased the walkie-talkie in Don's hand.

The crosshairs found their mark.

Don's jaw clenched as he lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth.

McHugh slowly lifted his hands and placed them behind his head, face lowered.

Don faltered, McHugh's sudden gesture throwing off his concentration.

"Edgerton, wait."

The crosshairs hesitated, lowered their mark to the foliage below.

Suddenly, and to the utter shock of everyone that could see the cabin's door, Charlie Eppes, standing on two feet and otherwise unharmed, appeared behind his captor.

His presence brought the chaos to a sudden standstill as Don's mind reeled, struggling to coordinate his thoughts with coherent expression.

"Go, go!" Don heard an agonizing scream, realizing only in retrospect that the voice was his own.

Agents and officers swarmed around the house from all directions, appearing from places that a moment before had been empty, converging in a chaotic circle of guns and uniforms.

McHugh did as he had been told. He offered no resistance. David had been the first to reach the fugitive, with Colby and his team soon behind. The two agents forced McHugh to his knees and then prostrate on the ground. Together they forced his hands into handcuffs, wrenching the limbs forcibly behind McHugh's back. He barely flinched. Officers rushed into the house. Elyse did not even make a sound.

Resolution. Their response was one of a mutual breeding of uncertainty and despair.

The last Elyse saw of her husband through the open door, he had been dragged to his feet by two FBI agents she had never seen before, and escorted away amid a swath of uniformed officers.

She wondered bitterly if she would ever see him again.

As the chaos slowly settled, she saw Charlie standing alone, watching McHugh's retreat with one eye and his approaching brother with the other.

The events of the past six hours rushed passed her as if carried on a fierce wind.

But even a hurricane's destruction could promote the seeds of a new hope.

She managed a dull smile. Her trust in the young mathematician had not wavered since the moment he stepped through her door. He had brought them this far already, and she had no reason for doubting him now.

To Be Continued…