She should have headed home after leaving the prison. She was too shaken up, too emotional. Too scared.

Richard Castle had a meltdown right before her eyes and it was her fault. It was all her fault.

She was in no condition to go back to work, to keep her head in the game and focused on a case, but she couldn't bring herself to sit alone in her empty apartment, replaying the events over and over again in her head, either.

It was like a movie reel. A horrific, endless loop.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this.

This. This wasn't supposed to happen.

She'd intended to break him in the first few months. Get her answer, be done with him. Move on with her life.

But she didn't. She'd never moved on. She'd stubbornly refused to give up for years.

It was never supposed to progress the way it had. Five years of staring contests. Of listening to him talk until, finally, she couldn't hold herself back any longer. She never meant to spend a whole year truly getting to know the man. Sharing coffees and stories. Learning about his family, even trying to pull strings to have his daughter allowed a visit in which he could actually hold her, kiss her, unrestrained by the shackles at his wrists; the shackles of his new life. He'd never looked happier than he did that day, when she'd told him she'd do whatever she could to make it happen.

And now she'd ruined everything. He was right. She'd been denying it to herself for nearly a year, but she'd fallen for him, hard. Inexplicably and without consent. She didn't have to keep coming back to him. She'd wanted to. Needed to.

She'd made it a personal mission in the past year to prove him innocent. To see him exonerated.

But the proof was never there. Hard as she'd tried, it was nothing more than a rabbit hole. Down, down she'd fallen, obsessed with finding the truth, the answers. The deeper she got, the harder it was to pull herself out.

She couldn't be falling in love with the man who murdered her mother. She couldn't possibly.

But the feelings were there, growing, festering, eating her alive, so down and down she went some more. And now she'd let her deepest fears override them. Her feelings, and everything she knew to be true in her heart.

She'd let her fears and doubts single-handedly destroy them.

"Damn it!" she cried out, after hours of the reels behind her eyes looping endlessly in her mind. She threw her folder down onto her desk in a fit of frustration and anger. Only, she'd thrown it at the wrong angle. Instead of landing straight down, the black folder she kept her case notes in went sliding across the desktop, careening into her mother's parade of elephants that adorned her workspace.

She didn't react quickly enough to save them.

Her mother's beloved decorative pachyderms went flying off her desk, crashing onto the hardwood flooring with a sickening crack.

Kate held her breath at the sound of the shattering ceramic. The noise startled the only other two detectives still around so late in the evening - her teammates one desk over from hers. They stood up and did what they were trained to do: investigate.

"Hey, Beckett," the new guy approached. Ryan. Nice guy. He'd only recently transferred to homicide. She didn't know him that well yet. "Are you - "

The tears were flowing freely down her cheeks again. There was no stopping them. She didn't even care that her teammates were about to witness her emotional breakdown. She was only afraid to walk around her desk and survey the wreckage. She knew what she'd find. Her mother's elephants, shattered into pieces by her own hand, just like the rest of her life.

"What's - hey, is that a tape?" she heard someone say. Not Ryan's voice. Esposito, then. They'd been working together a couple years now. He was the only other cop in the precinct that she felt particularly close to besides her captain. He was easy to get along with and they'd developed a wonderful camaraderie as coworkers. A brother-sister bond of sorts.

"What?" she asked him, forcing out the words as she'd registered the ones she just heard. A tape?

"There's a tape in there," Esposito replied, pointing, then kneeling down to pick it up. Both guys seemed reluctant to comment on the fact that she appeared to be crying her eyes out for reasons unknown to them, and so focused on the elephants instead. He stood back up and handed it to her, Ryan glancing over his shoulder with curiosity. "It was in the broken part."

"Huh. Secret compartment?" Ryan mused.

Kate stared down at the small microcassette in her hand with wide eyes.

The evidence isn't the whole story.

"Do we have audio equipment available that can play these things?" she asked, frantic, directing the question to Ryan. He had fast become their go-to media guy in investigations.

"Uh, yeah. Of course. We're mostly moving towards digital now but some people still use those for things. Tape recorders, old answering machines, etcetera."

The evidence isn't the whole story.

She felt nauseous. Physically ill. She knew in her gut, instantaneously, that the tape held all the answers she'd been seeking.

It just had to.

"Bring it to me. Now."

The contents of the microcassette were a bombshell Kate Beckett never expected to ever come across while investigating her mother's murder.

The former assistant district attorney, William H. Bracken. Captain Montgomery. Officer John Raglan and his partner Gary McCallister. Cover ups and contract killers. A tangled mess so deep, it would probably take months, if not years to unravel it all.

It was hard enough wrapping her head around the conspiracy regarding her mother's death, and dealing with the fallout of it.

It was another thing entirely when the realization hit that Richard Castle had been telling her the truth for six years.

He didn't kill her mother. He had been framed.

And she'd spent the better part of six years treating him like a monster. Calling him a monster, amongst other vicious words she'd unleashed on him in the past. She sat before him, staring him down with cold eyes when all he'd dared to do was assert his innocence and beg for her to believe him.

Believe in him.

In them.

And she'd failed him so spectacularly. They'd grown closer with each passing day, and she let her mind betray her heart, and so betrayed him. It would be a miracle if he could ever look at her the same way again after this, much less breathe a word in her direction. She wouldn't blame him for it if he didn't. After all she'd said and done, his silence would be a light sentence for her to suffer through. Having to bear the brunt of his pain and his anger would be more deserved.

She had to fix it somehow. Even if she'd ruined their budding friendship and forsaken any future they might have had, she could at least do this for him. One final thing. She could get him out of prison. She'd make sure of it. He had no connection to the conspiracy, and she would find a way to prove it. He was a sweet man convicted of a heinous crime he'd never committed, and it was time the world knew who Richard Castle really was. Not her mother's murderer, but an innocent man.

A man she'd grown to love, and whose freedom was a long time coming.

"Where are we going?" Castle asked, his voice gruff and displeased. "I was in the middle of writing."

"Warden's office," Johnson replied, leading the way. "You'll have plenty of time to write later."

"No offense, Johnson, but this is why you're a C.O., not a writer. You can't just wait for the best time to write. You have to write when the mood strikes and the ideas hit you. If I always waited for the perfect time to write a novel, I'd maybe have one best seller, if I'm lucky. Not eight."

Johnson let out a short laugh, but kept on walking.

Castle continued to drag his feet as they approached the door. "Why the warden's office? I passed my psych eval over a week ago. I'm fine."

The C.O. hesitated at first, but finally said, "Got a visitor."

Castle froze in place.

"No," he shuddered, a chill going through his veins. Johnson opened the door anyway, despite his escalating protest.

"No, I already told you. I'm done with her. No more. I can't take it anymore. You can't make me go in there."

"Trust me, Mr. Castle," came the voice of the warden inside. He approached slowly, stopping just shy of the doorway. The older man looked over his inmate appraisingly. "This is one meeting you don't want to miss. Officer Johnson." He turned his attention to Castle's escort. "Please remove the handcuffs from the inmate."

Castle stared dubiously at the man. Johnson was uncuffing him and motioning for him to go through the door. What in the hell -

"Come inside, Mr. Castle. Please, have a seat."

But he couldn't. One step through the door and he saw her. All gorgeous eyes and perfect skin, hair pulled back on the top with mid-length curls cascading about her shoulders. She'd been growing it out again, her hair. He'd found it adorable when she cut it short, but something about her hair longer, especially like this, was highly attractive. It made her look younger. Softer. Softer still as she looked at him, then quickly shifted her attention, her eyes downcast.

It made him even more angry. Surely she knew how he felt. Or did she not realize the extent of the damage she'd inflicted upon him? Could she possibly think that he was going to ignore what happened and let her keep hounding him for answers he couldn't give? And going through the warden for it. She was something else.

And yet - and yet it was that tenacity in her that drew him in from the start. That devotion to her cause. The fierce loyalty for her loved ones.

Oh, he was doomed. Doomed to a life sentence in prison, and doomed to be in love with a woman he could never have, never be with, and never turn his feelings off for, no matter how hard he tried.

"Mr. Castle," the warden called out again. He gestured for him to take a seat beside her in front of his desk.

"I'll stand, thanks," he asserted, steadfastly not looking at Kate Beckett. "What do you want?"

"Suit yourself." The warden moved around his desk, taking a seat in his own chair. "It would appear there's been a break in your case, Mr. Castle."

"A break," Castle parroted back dryly. "Let me guess. More evidence to incriminate me with?" He glared daggers across the room at the detective, his fury with her on full display now. "Pray tell," he asked her, voice dripping with venom. "Whom did I murder this time?" he laughed cynically.

His laughter broke off when Kate got up from her seat and stood facing him. Her face was unreadable. So many emotions playing across her expression. Scared? Nervous? But - hopeful?

What the hell was going on?

"Castle, I - I found something," she murmured, cautiously, as if afraid that her words or her forward motion stepping towards him would spook him, set him off in some way again. "It's huge. It - it changes everything."

"W-what," he stammered. His mouth was cotton. He had to work his jaw, flick his tongue around his mouth to get the words loosened. Get them going. "What are you talking about?"

She was still coming toward him, her lips curling up, if only slightly. The smell of her - cherries, her lip gloss - was steadily reaching intoxicating levels. He loved that scent on her. Spent years longing to embrace her, breathe her in, his nose dipped into her neck, her hair. Pipe dreams. Hopeless longing. She was drugging, effortlessly so, and he couldn't move away if he tried.

"Castle, I can prove you were framed. I know who's responsible."

She -

"What," one word. It's all he had. The rest of them had left him. He stood frozen in front of her, his eyes, his ears, disbelieving. Was he dreaming? He must be dreaming.

"Rick," she took his right hand in both of hers. She was trembling. Her thumb stroked over the rough, calloused flesh of his hands but still, she trembled.

Castle gulped down air.

"I'm getting you out of here. You're going home. Soon. I promise."