Chapter 10

When Emma woke again, a couple of hours after most of the five O team filtered out of the hospital, she woke to find Steve McGarrett sitting in a chair on the side of her bed, torso slumped over and arms crossed. She blinked slowly and stared at him as she tried to sort out the fuzz in her mind. She was obviously in a hospital, but couldn't quite figure out why...gazing at Steve, she tried to place him in the memory timeline that was sluggishly rebuilding. Laying flat on her back, she could see her toes under the covers at the end of the bed, and an IV inserted in her left hand that rested at her side.

Taking a deep breath, she pulled her head a couple inches off the pillow. There wasn't pain, exactly, but the muscles in her abdomen felt abstractly like they had been shredded into ribbons, a sensation that made her briefly nauseous. She gently relaxed her neck and nestled into the pillow, letting her eyes drift closed. She remembered the shooting now, but the fear she probably should have felt was buried under sedatives and the blanket feeling of comfort that the man at her bedside provided.

Hearing footsteps, she opened her eyes again, focusing on the white-coated doctor that walked in. However, her insides turned to ice when she recognized the man. "Hello again, Carli. It's been a while." His soft voice was barely more than a whisper, but it carried poison in its tone.

"Scott," she croaked, struggling to sit up. Her mind was spinning and couldn't coordinate her arms and torso, so trying to sit up was like a black out drunk trying to walk.

Scott quickly stepped over to the bed and gently coaxed her shoulders back down to the mattress. His hands dwarfed her shoulders and she could do nothing to resist. "Oh, no, Carli, please try and relax. Your body has been through a lot these past couple of days."

"Scott, no!" Her rough voice, through quiet, had a pleading tone that made McGarret's gut clench, waking him abruptly. "Please," she added, too scared to continue.

Steve took in the scene before him quickly before standing and moving between Emma and the man. "Doctor, is there a problem?"

"And who are you?" Scott asked imperiously. The man was taller than Steve, but had sinewy muscles wrapping around his bones, taut against his skin.

"Steve McGarret, Five O," he glanced back at Emma and saw the fear that was choking her, depriving her mind of anything other than panic. His hand twitched to the sidearm at his hip. "Doctor, can I see your credentials please?"

"Oh, I must have left them in my office. I just need to give Carli a quick check."

"Then please got and get them from your office, this room is for authorized personnel only."

"Of course. I'll be back in a snap." He turned and walked out the door, Steve watching as he disappeared down the hallway before returning to Emma. "Hey, what's wrong? What happened? Did he hurt you?"

As soon as Scott had left she had shut her eyes tightly, and tears had worked their way out and down her cheeks. Steve tried again, setting his hand on hers. "Did you know that doctor?"

He could see her chest moving in a controlled inhale-exhale, and imagined she was counting to ten in her head. "Not a doctor," she finally murmured. "Scott."

Steve's breath hitched, "He called you Carli. We didn't tell the doctors your real name…" As this registered, Steve took off after the man adrenaline climbing as he ran the length the corridor. He caught a glimpse of Scott turning down the stairway at the end of the hall, and had a second to register Chin Ho jump from his chair. "Stay with Emma," Steve commanded tersely as he continued his sprint.

People in the hallway pressed themselves against the walls as Steve passed; but his focus was only on the stairway door that swung close. A thought entered his mind as he looked down the stairs: he wasn't nearly as young as he was when he started the job, and the adrenaline rush of today was pulling on already-depleted stores. But as soon as the thought had crossed his mind, another, more driven thought propelled him forward, through the stairway doors and down. He took a moment to check Scott's position, then began his full-on chase.

As Scott exited the stairwell on the first floor, Steve felt his age again. He felt himself pulling further behind, and once he exited the main doors of the hospital, he had lost the man. Security had been alerted and were just steps behind him and were looking to Steve to lead the chase, but all McGarrett could do was star across the wide parking lot before him and wish that Scott would appear.

"Alright," he said, collecting himself. He turned to the hospital security guards, "Monitor parking lot exits; check IDs. The man we're looking for likely has a California drivers' license, brown hair, somewhere around 6 foot. We'll get a picture out and get HPD back up as soon as possible. Who's in charge?"

A guard only a couple years older than Steve stepped up, speaking to the other men. "This is a level 2 lockdown, with additional security on egress options. Officer, can we assume the patients are safe from this threat?"

"We need more information to make a better assessment of the threat and will share what we can, when we can." Steve called Chin Ho quickly and confirmed that Emma was okay, then remained downstairs.

HPD arrived in minutes, and Steve left the most senior HPD officer to reorganize a security detail that had left hours earlier. He rejoined Chin Ho in Emma's room and questioned her about Scott. Anger grew as Emma gave details: Scott Carrey was a LAPD detective and had been her training officer in her rookie year. After that, Emma had transferred to the LAPD's undercover unit, using her computer science background to create backstories for deep-cover agents, and bring their fake identities to life in social media, financial history, and reputation. It was an isolating job, as no one could know what she did, and she found herself counting on her only work friend, Scott. A working relationship developed into friendship, then romance.

Emma paused at this, leaning back into the pillow and closing her eyes. "We moved in together, and that's where it got…dicey."

Steve's hand found its way to her shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly. "Do you need to take a break? We can start looking for Scott with what you gave us."

She took a deep breath to center herself. "I've just…never told anyone this part. I've been Emma for so long now, and that's…that's who I want to be."

"I don't know you as anything else, Emma," Steve said, taking her hand in his. "And I know that you, Emma, are strong."

Her fingers played out on the blanket, grounding herself as she closed her eyes, then launched into the story with a sense of detachment, like she was reading it from a book. "We moved in together about three months after we started dating. And we did everything together, especially if we worked the same shifts. Scott switched between day and night shifts, and worked crazy overtime hours. We tried to spend every second we could together, so we would eat meals together, and go out with Scott's friends, who, you know…were mostly other cops. It changed about a year ago…LAPD was preparing for some big undercover cases and needed me to work overtime, and Scott got promoted to detective in charge of the night shift, so we hardly ever saw each other, and he got jealous. It didn't seem weird at the time, I just thought he missed me, and that's why he wanted to know who I was with, what I did that day, what I ate. We were just sharing details."

She took a sip of water and Steve met Chin's worried eyes. This was a story they had heard before, and it never had a happy ending. Emma rubbed her eyes before starting again. "And then one day he showed up at work, out of the blue, while I was having lunch with some coworkers. Male coworkers, of course. He pulled me into my office and shut the door so no one could see, then he grabbed my arms and just…held me there, a foot from his face, as he accused me of cheating on him.

He only stopped because one of the guys I was eating lunch with wanted to check on a project we were working on. Scott didn't have clearance, so I had to ask him to leave as we talked. Then, once we were done, he had just…disappeared. I was freaking out on the way home; he had never acted like that and I didn't know what would happen when I got home. I was ready to leave him if he grabbed me again; I wasn't an idiot, and I said those exact words to him when I walked into our apartment and saw him sitting at the kitchen counter. I thought he would get angry again, but he was just…calm. He told me he had checked out my work logs and had checked the jackets of the guys I worked with, and he believed that I wasn't cheating."

She stopped to take a sip of water, and the men waited silently for her to continue. "I was just…so happy that I didn't have to leave him that I didn't see how controlling it was. He kept checking up on me at my office when he was off shift, or when he was on shift, he would 'go for patrol' so he could stop in to our apartment and give me a quick kiss. It all seemed normal until one day I was coming out of the grocery store and I saw him in someone else's car in the parking lot. He said he was grabbing lunch and that he had loaned his car to a buddy and was in the buddy's car, but it just didn't feel right. A few weeks after that, I found a keystroke tracker on our home computer. His check-ins went from being cute and romantic to just…annoying, and then creepy. I left for a weekend to get my mind right and went home to Nevada, and he followed me all the way there, to my friend's house. He said he was just making sure I as alright, and that I had scared him, and that he wasn't mad at me. But…it scared the hell out of me, the fact that he followed me for hours, and then sat and watched me at my friend's house until he decided to come in. That Monday morning at work, I started building a cover profile for myself, erasing records here and there, and starting a new identity. I told myself it was an option, just in case one of the undercover cases went bad, and I convinced myself that it had nothing to do with Scott. I found out he tracked my cell phone and I would become paranoid that he was following me, so I just added more layers to the cover. I went on the offensive, and logged into his computer to see what he was doing, and found that he had run backgrounds on my friends and even family members I had not spoken to since my parents' funeral, and so I added another level to my new identity. And then one day, I realized that it was completely airtight, probably the best undercover identity I ever made, and that the real Carli Foster barely existed on paper anymore. The only thing keeping me in LA with Scott was my own denial of the danger I was in. So, I ran."

Her story finally finished, Emma leaned back in bed, looking at the ceiling. "I just didn't run far enough."