A/N: All right don't say you haven't been warned. Y'all know how I get when the plot twists hit!

10

Peter Kelly knew the meaning of grief all too well. When Savannah was just 6 years old they had lost her mother to a rare type of breast cancer, leaving him a single father raising a small child alone.

Now going through the stages a second time, he realized what a powerful motivator grief could be. Oh, he tried to tell himself that justice had been done when Chris informed him that the man who had put a bullet into his little girl's chest was dead.

He had also whole heartedly believed that Chris LaSalle genuinely loved his daughter and intended to start a life with her until that fateful night when evil had entered their lives and stolen her from both of them.

Chris LaSalle was a good man, the type that any father would be happy to have his only daughter marry. That was until a month or so back when he'd come to New Orleans on business and had seen the Federal Agent who had gotten his daughter killed, about to fornicate with a woman he'd met at one of the local bars.

Peter would never forget the sense of betrayal he felt towards his daughter's memory when he saw LaSalle outright kissing some blonde only weeks after Savannah had been put into the ground.

From that moment on, he began to look at the events of his daughter's death differently, casting blame on the grieving agent. If LaSalle had been home that night, he would have stopped Savannah's killer from using her to send a message to the younger man's boss. If he hadn't worked for a man who flaunted himself as King of the city then his daughter would still alive. If only Christopher LaSalle had never reentered Savannah's life.

Up until this point, Peter considered himself a benevolent man, a good law abiding citizen who tried to do right by others, but after seeing Chris LaSalle disrespect his only child, and throw away the beautiful love he thought the two of them had, something just snapped.

Cade took in a huge gulp of air filling his lungs as the duct tape and sock were removed from his mouth. When he had a chance to catch his breath, he glanced at Peter.

"Why are ya doin' this?"

Peter leaned over placing his hands on his knees. "Because that brother of yours, the one that asked me to give you job, disrespected my daughter."

Cade's brown eyes narrowed slightly, as he shook his head. "No… Mr. Kelly, ya got it all wrong. Chris, he loved Savannah!

"He has a funny way of showing it." Peter rose to his feet signaling to the scary looking man beside him.

The man nodded back to Peter and then reached into the pocket of his jacket pulling out two vials of medication.

"Ya gotta take these," Peter said, uneasily giving Cade's shoulder a squeeze "its yer medication. You're gonna need it."

Cade looked the older man perplexed before recognizing the brown vials as his own. They kidnapped him in hopes of killing his baby brother and would probably kill him too, yet they were worried about him taking his medication?

Peter looked at the hired mercenary he had found on the Internet, via a shady childhood friend, giving him the okay to give the bound man his medication.

"Open your mouth."

Cade did as he told, knowing that whatever they had in store for he and Chris, he needed to stay lucid. The capsules went down hard, making him cough against the dryness in his throat. "Please don't hurt, Chris." He choked lifting a pair of defeated eyes to his captor. "He's all that I have." That wasn't exactly true, he had his mom and his sister but they didn't hold a candle to his baby brother.

"Savannah was all I had." At the sound of approaching footsteps, Peter turned around. His guest of honor had finally arrived.

The team stood silent as Loretta's team loaded the body bag carrying Rachel Davenport's body into the back of the coroner's wagon.

"Something on your mind Brody?" Pride noticed the junior agent seemed distant, distracted. She was staring pensively past the coroner's wagon into the street.

Brody blew out a tense breath before turning to her superior. "It's the Quaaludes. It doesn't make sense to me that a 28 year old woman would go to the trouble of purchasing an antiquated recreational party drug that can only be found in Africa just so that she could drug Chris. There are so many other choices right here in the city that are readily available."

Quaaludes were popular in the 70's and 80's so it stood to reason that the person who assaulted Chris would be older and although it appeared that Rachel Davenport had been both meticulous and methodical, in stalking the grieving agent so that she could essentially torment him the brightly colored pills in the bag just didn't seem to add up. There had to be someone else, a partner, pulling her strings.

"Dust the bag and the packing materials for prints," Pride said calmly, "Then send them over to Sebastian and see if there's anything in them that could be making LaSalle sick. In the meantime, I'm gonna take a ride up to Alabama and see if I can't catch up with Chris. "

Brody's mouth twitched slightly. "I'm coming with you."

"What the hell's going on here, Peter?" Chris pulled his weapon at the sight of Mercenary Mike holding a gun to Cade's head. Obviously, LaSalle knew to some degree just by looking at the key player, that the man had obviously suffered some sort of psychotic break.

He thought his own grief and actions were just about the worst thing anyone could be driven to but obviously judging by the look on Peter Kelly's face he was wrong. Disbelief toyed with his mind, Savannah's father was a good person, her dad the man responsible for bringing such a good, kind soul, the love of his life, into this world was holding a gun to his brother head? He almost couldn't comprehend it but yet here they were.

"Put the gun down, Chris and I promise you no harm will come to Cade," Peter said, calmly shoving his hands into his pockets as sign of good faith.

For a split second, Chris thought about trying to take out Mercenary Mike and then Peter, but underneath the material of Peter's jacket, Chris could see the outline of a gun. From what Savannah had told him about the man, he was a hunter, so he knew how to use a gun.

What if he wasn't fast enough and Peter managed to get a shot off at him or worse, Cade? He couldn't take the risk. Placing one hand in the air, Chris lowered his weapon, setting it on the ground before kicking it away and putting the opposite hand up.

He flicked his gaze to Cade, missing the subtle nod Peter had given Mercenary Mike to lower his weapon.

"Ya, still ain't tol' me what this all about." Chris growled, when the weapon was removed from Cade's head and subsequently pointed at him.

Against his will Peter Kelly's voice started to betray him, his voice cracking as he spoke. "I saw you, disrespecting my daughter. You told me when Savannah was killed that you loved her."

Still do. Chris lowered his eyes to the concrete, he didn't know what Peter Kelly had seen, but he could guess. The rest of Peter's accusatory words fell on deaf ears as Chris' own thoughts of his betrayal of Savannah filled his ears.

"So what's this got to do with Cade?" He asked suddenly his head snapped up, willing the unwanted, self-loathing thoughts away.

"You have my word that when this is over, Cade will be released unharmed to your boss, Dwayne Pride" Despite the body count it had taken to get Chris here, there was something about Cade LaSalle that Peter Kelly genuinely liked, making him see the older LaSalle brother as an innocent.

Chris heard Cade make a soft, emotional protest and glanced at him briefly before giving Peter a consensual nod, hoping that his willingness to cooperate would take their focus off of his older brother. "All right then do what ya gotta do."

"Turn around," Mercenary Mike growled, "Put your hands on your head."

"Chris! No!" Cade let out a desperate plea as his baby brother turned his back on him.

Closing his eyes, Chris held his breath thinking that they were going to shoot him in front of Cade. God he hoped not, with Cade's already fragile state of mind there was no way he would ever recover.

He waited for the sensation of barrel being pressed against the side of his head, but it never came. Instead, he was met with agonizing pain of the butt of the gun as it came down on his skull, sending his entire world into darkness.

If God was to take any pity Chris LaSalle's soul, he would never wake up and have to live through what was about to happen him.

Peter Kelly, a simple man with just a high school diploma, had planned everything brilliantly, down to the last detail: right down to exhuming his own dead daughter's coffin.

If Chris LaSalle loved her so damn much then he could spend eternity in the ground beneath her rotting corpse, as punishment for betraying the beautiful memory of what a loving and deserving person she had been.

Peter had made sure that the specificity was such that two coffins could be placed one on top of the other, like they did with spouses who wanted to be buried together in Military cemeteries.

For LaSalle, he had constructed a simple rectangular box that he and Mercenary Mike where now nailing shut with the semi-conscious agent inside. He'd chosen the rectangular shape so that the concrete vault that Savannah's coffin was entombed in would sit perfectly on top, eventually crushing the thin wood underneath as the Earth settled.

He'd even paid the best landscaper he could find to make certain that the turf looked as if it had never been disturbed, raking the soil flat and placing a new piece of grassy filled sod on top.

When all was said and done, Peter reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a fat envelope for Mercenary Mike. "You can go now." He said, "I'd prefer to do this last part on my own."

Mike nodded, quickly turning on one heel before jogging away.

When he was certain that Mike was out of sight, Peter knelt at Savannah's monument, running a finger through the beveled letters of her name. "I'm sorry baby girl, this is only way to end the pain…for all of us."

Rising to his feet, Peter slipped his hand to the small of his back and pulled out his 22, placing it underneath his chin, pulling the trigger.