(The Knight on the Grid)

Thank you for your continued interest in my stories. I appreciate it.

I don't own Bones.

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When the package came, Booth had been the one to retrieve the mail. After carefully sorting the mail he had two piles, a small one of mostly bills and ads for him and a larger pile of who knew what for Brennan.

Brennan arrived an hour later to find Booth cooking dinner. "We still haven't ID'd the victim yet." Tired from a long day, Brennan entered the kitchen and poured a glass of wine for herself and one for her mate. Handing him the glass, she kissed Booth and smiled. "It's nice coming home and not having to cook. Thank you."

Returning the kiss, Booth turned back to the stove to check on the lamb chops he was frying for himself. "I have a quinoa black bean burger in the oven baking. I've already put a salad together. It's in the fridge."

"It sounds delicious." Brennan was impressed that Booth was getting so adept at cooking vegetarian dishes for her. He didn't eat them, but he wanted to learn how to cook for her, which Brennan found a sweet thing to do.

The sudden sound of someone knocking on the door diverted Brennan to the front door while Booth stayed in the kitchen tending his meal. Out of curiosity, Booth peered into the living room once the door was open to see who Brennan was talking to, but didn't recognize the woman and went back to cooking duty. As he moved across the room, he glanced at the mail on the counter and noticed one of the envelopes in Brennan's pile of mail was oozing what looked like blood. "What the hell?"

Cautiously, Booth grabbed a paper towel and used it to move the envelope away from the rest of the mail. The sound of sizzling and the smoke rising from the skillet reminded him that he was seconds from turning his lamb chops into charcoal. After removing the skillet from the eye of the stove, he turned off the eye and turned back to look at the envelope.

As he was using a knife to turn the envelope over, Brennan came back into the kitchen. "That was Amy, Russ's girlfriend at the door. She wants to know where he is. I told her I . . ." Booth's odd behavior had caught her attention. "What are you doing?"

The front of the envelope was so saturated with the bloody looking fluid that it completely covered Brennan's name and address. "One of your letters is bleeding, I think."

That pronouncement rather surprising, Brennan stepped closer and took the knife from Booth. With the additional aid of a steak knife, she slit the envelope open and found two human patellas inside.

"What the hell, Bones." Booth was shocked and that emotion quickly turned to anger. ""Those kind of look like knee caps."

"They are." Brennan studied them without touching them. "I wouldn't be surprised if they belonged to the victim that was found in the garbage."

A chill running down his spine, Booth turned to look at his girlfriend. "Someone is playing games with you, the sick bastard."

"I need to go back to the Lab." Brennan grabbed a gallon storage bag and placed the patellas and the bloody envelope into it. "There is something special about these patellas and I'm going to find out what it is."

A quick glance at the lamb chops and Booth decided that Brennan wasn't going anywhere without him. "Let me get the burger out of the oven and I'll go with you. Some psycho knows where you live and there is no way you're going to the Lab by yourself."

"I can take care of myself, Booth." Brennan shook her head in annoyance. "Stop being so protective. If this person wanted to harm me I'm sure they would have done it by now."

The vegetarian burger out of the oven and the oven turned off, Booth snorted. "I've already been through you being kidnapped once and being buried alive. I'm not going through that again and that's a fact."

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Trying to draw out the murderer of Father Doug Cooper, Booth and Brennan had the silver skeleton that had been found in the bank vault a few weeks earlier moved to Bethesda with enough agents following the truck to insure the demented murderer's capture if he tried to steal it back. Except the murderer didn't intend to intercept the skeleton, he tried to kill Booth and Brennan who were following in a taxi and almost succeeded. If Booth hadn't been quick and backed the taxi away from the bomb thrown in the street, the partners would probably have been killed.

After the taxi rolled over and landed on its wheels, Booth was momentarily stunned. The sight of Brennan bleeding in the seat next to him galvanized him to move. After he found he couldn't get the doors open, he pulled himself from the seat, fell out of the window and rushed around the taxi. Silently praying as he reached her, Booth was grateful to find that Brennan was conscious. Since she was stunned Booth realized that he would have to pull her out of the car. With blood streaming down her face, Booth's heart rate beat wildly as he struggled to free her from the cab. He didn't know how badly his girlfriend was hurt and once she was out of the taxi he placed her gently on the sidewalk next to the totaled cab. After a quick inspection, they both realized that she had just suffered a laceration on her forehead and a tooth was embedded in her arm. It had been part of the bomb and that fact infuriated Booth to no end.

Once he figured out what was going on, Booth left Brennan behind to be taken care of by arriving paramedics and hurried to the lobbyist Ray Porter's house where he saved the man's life from the murderer of Father Cooper. It was a close call and the murderer had escaped leaving behind a shaken lobbyist, a crying child whom the murderer has used as pawn to escape capture and a very angry FBI Agent.

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It had been a long week and Booth was ready for the weekend. Brennan's brother had shown up and Booth had arrested him. Max had lied to Russ and had told him he could visit his step-daughter at the hospital and he would be fine. He wasn't fine and in the end, with Booth's behind the scenes manipulations, Russ was given some jail time for breaking parole and 18 months was added to his parole time, but all in all, it could have been a lot worse. Both Russ and Brennan were angry with their father for manipulating Russ, but for now Brennan decided to accept what Max had done and just move on.

Both Brennan and Booth had found that they had multiple bruises after being rolled in the taxi, but all in all their wounds were minor and they both knew that they had been lucky.

"You know Bones, our lives are a little too exciting sometimes. We have a serial killer we need to find. Because of your brother's gullibility he shows up at the Hoover when it was the last place he should be near so I had to arrest him. We get blown up in a taxi and walked away from that, then I have to rescue a corrupt lobbyist from Gorgonzola and to top it off when I tried to capture that maniac he tried to drown a kid and I had to rescue the boy. Oh and the bomb Gorgonzola used had teeth in it and you got one of them stuck in your arm. I feel like we're living in an action movie sometimes and Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to walk through our door and say he's back."

"It's Gormogon not Gorgonzola, Booth." As Brennan removed her jewelry and placed it in a jewelry box, Brennan stared at her boyfriend in the dresser mirror. "Gorgonzola is a type of cheese."

Booth sat down on the bed and removed his shoes. "I don't believe in giving killers cute names so Gorgonzola makes as much sense as Gormogon. The man is dangerous and giving him a nickname just makes him seem more benign than he really is. You can call him Gormogon all you want, but don't count on me doing it. We need to catch him as soon as we can. He's too dangerous."

"We will Booth." Brennan was confident that she and her team at the Lab would be successful. Now that they knew more about Gormogon, Brennan was certain that they would eventually track the man down and get him off the streets. "We have the clues from the bank vault. We can link him to his mentor Arthur Graves and the younger man that killed himself, his apprentice. All of these things will lead us to him eventually."

Confident in his partner, Booth smiled. "Yeah, that guy made a big mistake coming after us. We will get him." Watching Brennan remove her blouse and slacks to get ready to bathe, Booth frowned at the sight of the many bruises on her body. "When that taxi rolled, I was scarred shitless that you might have been seriously hurt. I can't believe we didn't break something or get killed."

Brennan removed a t-shirt and shorts from the dresser and turned to face her boyfriend. "We were hurt, but it was due to your vigilance that we weren't killed. Throwing a satchel bomb at our cab was totally unexpected. You're quick reflexes is what saved us."

The large purple bruise across her chest was worrisome, but Booth knew it had been caused by her seat belt holding her in place. Standing he moved over to where she was standing and gently placed his finger next to the dark bruise. "Are you in pain?"

"Not really." Brennan was sore and she had a slight headache, but she didn't really consider her aches to be worth worrying about. They were more annoying than anything. "It's just bruises and cuts, Booth. I'm not any worse off than you are."

Booth leaned over and kissed her. "If I had lost you . . ."

His words were spoken so softly that Brennan wasn't sure she was meant to hear them, but she had heard them and she understood the meaning behind them. "I'm fine Booth. Don't worry so much. The bruises will fade in a few weeks and the cuts are minor. The laceration just needed a few stitches and I don't think it will leave a scar."

Afraid to hold her because of the bruising on her arms and chest, Booth kissed her once more and stepped back. "Hey worrying is what I do, you know that. I love you, Bones. Go get a bath and I'll go make sure the place is locked up and I'll bring you a glass of juice. No wine or beer while you're taking meds, that's what your doctor said."

"I know." Brennan moved over to the bathroom door as Booth walked into the hallway. "Instead of juice a bottle of water would be better."

"You got it Bones." Booth left the bedroom, stepped into the living room and after making sure the front door was locked, he paused and said a prayer. "Thank you for looking out for my Bones, God. I can't lose her, so thank you."

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