Castle's hand drifted across the center console and rose to dust his fingertips at her collarbone, migrating closer to her shoulder, slipping underneath the edge of her blouse, and lingering on the puckered skin there.
"What happened here?"
Kate batted his hand away, but his fingers were like gnats, flittering away at her touch only to return to pester her skin again after only a second.
"It's just a scar, Castle."
"From a bullet," he murmured, sweeping his thumb back and forth over the healed wound, memorizing the feel of it and eliciting an odd wave of self-consciousness from deep in her stomach. No one ever lingered on her scars, not even herself. No, she kept it all locked away in a box that resembled Pandora's, never to be opened without consequences. "I've done enough research for Derrick Storm to know what a gunshot wound looks like."
She shrugged her shoulder, dislodged his hand from her damaged skin.
"You could have chosen to do this some other time, you know, like when I'm not driving," she muttered.
"Like all the times we were in bed?"
She pursed her lips. "I'm trying to concentrate on the road, Castle."
"We've been on an empty highway for half an hour," he pointed out and she didn't have to look to know he was smirking. He thought he was so clever.
"I still don't want to crash the vehicle by getting distracted."
"I distract you, Agent?"
She rolled her eyes at the smug quality to his voice and tightened her hands on the steering wheel of the rental van. "You annoy me."
"Same thing."
"Not the same. Just shut up and stop touching me."
"Usually it's the other way around."
Kate clenched her teeth, but exhaled a sigh of relief when her phone interrupted the crackling silence between them.
"Don't say anything," she warned as she withdrew the phone from the cup holder between their two seats.
"Are you ashamed of me, Agent Beckett? Don't want the other agents to know of our tryst?"
She might kill him if she had to spend another hour in an enclosed space with him.
"Beckett," she answered the call, sparing a second from the road to glare at Castle in warning.
"Beckett, it's McCord. I have some bad news," her partner informed her and Kate scrubbed at her forehead, tried to brace herself.
"What else is new?"
"Keep your chin up, Kate. But yeah, that safe house you're heading to… it's unavailable."
"What do you mean it's unavailable?" she hissed, a cool strip of panic slithering down her spine, but she quickly reined it in as Rachel explained how they needed the home for another agent in a more pressing situation. She counted to ten in her head, scrambled for a solution.
There was her apartment in the city, in Harlem. It was secure, but not secure enough. She couldn't take him down to her place in DC either, it was way too far and she knew he wouldn't be happy venturing even further from his daughter. Her contemplative silence was beginning to stretch for too long when it hit her. She hesitated for only a moment before the decision in her head was made and she was assuring Rachel of her new plan. "It's fine, I have another place. Off the books."
"Do you want backup?" McCord asked in apologetic concern. "I could send another agent-"
"No, Rachel. I've got it under control." She stole a sideways glance at Castle, who was watching her with a twinge of nervousness in his wide blue eyes. She thoughtlessly reached for his knee, found her hand trapped there by his own a moment later.
"I'll call you as soon as we've got Cowell in custody."
"Thanks."
Kate reclaimed her hand again to remove the phone from between her ear and her shoulder, thumbing the device off and tucking it into the outer pocket of her leather jacket.
Castle waited a full three seconds before asking, "Where are we going?"
He had asked the question every hour since they had landed in Connecticut, but this time, there was an anxious uncertainty lacing through his voice.
"Someplace safe."
"I gathered that," he huffed, scrambling to grab the handle on the side of the passenger door when she made a sharp left turn.
"As you probably heard, the safe house I'd intended for us to use is occupied right now, so I'm taking us to a place of my own," she hedged, rolling her shoulders to alleviate some of the stiffness settling there. They had been driving for three hours, stopping only once for gas, and after a near six-hour flight, they were both growing stir crazy. Her new destination was luckily closer than the safe house would have been and for that, she was thankful.
They both needed out of this car.
"Mysterious. I like it."
"Is that why you seem to like me so much, Castle? A conquest with mysteries you've yet to figure out?" she joked around the lid of her gas station coffee that had already gone cold.
While he had slept through the fifth hour of their flight, she had come to the conclusion that a mysterious bedfellow was really all she would ever be to him; it was the only reason he had remained intrigued by her for this long. If he were to figure her out, peel away all the layers and learn all the secrets, he would lose interest. That is, if she didn't overwhelm him with all of her baggage first. Either way, he would move on, leave her with nothing but another crack in her heart and the stupid hope that still flared in her chest every time she looked at him.
He had talked of loving her, but she wasn't a fool. If anything, he was in love with the idea of her. Nothing more.
"I think you're more of a mystery I'll never solve," he countered, pulling her from her reverie but she refused to look at him, because if the tone of his voice was any indication, he would have sincerity etched into his eyes and she couldn't handle that right now.
She chuckled instead and didn't startle when his fingers dusted over her nape yet again, pressing into her skin and kneading the knotted muscles lining her neck and shoulders.
"You're going to put me to sleep," she warned on a sigh, keeping her attention on the road but reveling in the soothing undoing of stress under her skin.
"How much longer?" he murmured, fingers traveling up to the soft hollow between her skull and her vertebrae.
She hummed, blinking to force her eyes from slipping shut. "Just one more hour. Have to take all the back roads, just to be safe."
Kate allowed herself to enjoy the massage he proceeded to give her scalp for only a few moments before shaking him off.
"How many years have you been looking over your shoulder, Beckett?"
She sighed, should have known that lulling touch of his would lead to an ulterior motive.
"Three."
That was how many years she had been on the job after leaving her place at the Twelfth Precinct in New York, but she knew she had been looking over her shoulder for many years before that. Ever since she was nineteen.
"Either you're a quick learner, or you're just a natural. Have you ever considered going into the CIA? Oh, that would be so cool," he gushed, the childlike glimmer of an excited little boy spreading in his eyes and warming the tired muscle in her chest. "I followed a CIA agent once, the inspiration for my character, Clara Strike, but she was nothing compared to you."
She rolled her eyes, ignored the subtle but striking flare of jealousy in her abdomen. "I'm content where I am."
He hummed a sound of acknowledgment. "What's your partner like?"
"Rachel? She's reliable, trustworthy." She shrugged, ticking off the qualities in her head. "I know she has my back."
"Does she know… everything?"
Kate sighed. She did feel a little guilty about keeping certain aspects of the situation to herself, about lying, but she didn't see it necessary to share the fact that she and Castle had a history, nor the fact that they had rekindled some of that history two nights ago.
"No."
"Did you ever tell anyone? Back then?"
"No. It was…" She searched her brain for the right way to describe it, knew she would never find anything adequate enough. "Why would I share that with anyone? Did you, Alex?"
He lowered his eyes from her, even flushed in what she was sure was embarrassment as he rubbed a hand along the back of his neck.
"I only gave you a fake name because I didn't want you to recognize me."
She scoffed. "You give your celebrity status too much credit. I didn't even know who Richard Castle was back then."
"Well, even so, maybe I didn't want to be Richard Castle that night. People, women, treat me a certain way, and I won't say it isn't flattering, that I haven't taken advantage of it, but that night, I just wanted to be me and you allowed me to do that."
She snuck a glance at him, saw he was staring down at his hands with his brow in a thoughtful crease. She wanted to tell him everything right then, profess every thought that had been running rampant through her head during that first night and how he had helped her find a piece of herself she had once believed would remain permanently dormant.
Instead, all she allowed to leave her lips was a quiet "Me too."
The silence that filtered into the car was awkward this time and he cleared his throat beside her, picked up the conversation she had figured they'd decided to drop.
"I did tell my daughter about it though, about you."
She nearly slammed on the brake.
"You told your daughter about us having sex in an alley?" she exclaimed, reaching over to twist his ear and making the car swerve on the empty road. "What kind of parent are you, what kind of man-"
He dodged her fingers and raised a mollifying hand to quiet her accusations. "I told her the fabricated, PG version," he defended before she could put them in a ditch. "You know - met a girl at a party, love at first sight, the one that got away?"
She shook her head, pressing harder on the accelerator. "I wish you would stop saying things like that."
"She was asking me about why I've stayed with Gina if she didn't make me happy and then wanted to know if there had ever been anyone who ever had made me happy. I was just… I was trying to show her that there's still magic to be found in others," he explained and she felt her vexation lessen, the winding tension in her shoulders loosen. "I don't want her to think that love equals the kind of relationship I had with Gina, or worse, her mother," he said with a dramatic shudder and she smothered the smirk toying with her lips.
"I read online that Meredith was quite the character," she stated, making an attempt to change the subject.
He lifted a hand to his chest. "You googled me?"
"Duh. Research is part of the job."
"I feel so violated. But I'll let it slide."
"Because you secretly like it."
"Only when you do it."
She cut a glance to him, saw him watching her with a sly smile, and she couldn't help it, she laughed.
Kate diverted off the main highway and onto a gravel road. It was dark and he couldn't study his surroundings as he would have liked, but the sheer amount of trees that lined the road gave him a sense of security, as if their branches could shield them from the dangers of the outside world. After fifteen minutes, they encountered a wide stretch of land that was home to a vast expanse of woods, a fishing lake that shimmered with the rising light of the moon, and what appeared to be a cabin shrouded in the midst of it all.
Kate parked the rented suburban in the middle of a cluster of trees and bushes off the side of the driveway. When she slipped out of the car, she began to work at maneuvering a few of the more flexible branches around the vehicle and he got out to help her. It didn't camouflage much, but it was generally safer than parking out in the open of the gravel driveway and it made the car look less noticeable, abandoned. Just like the rest of the property.
"What is this place?" he asked her once they had retrieved their bags from the trunk of the SUV.
She didn't answer and he followed closely in the darkness as she led him up the driveway's path, to the front porch steps, where she located a key in a hanging potted plant.
"It was my dad's," she murmured, barely audible as she unlocked the door, and the past tense of her words immediately caused his heart to begin a steady descent to his stomach.
Kate ushered him inside and wasted no time in locking the door behind him. She used the glow of her phone to guide herself into the living room, where she switched a lamp on, and then an overhead light in the modest kitchen, casting a dim illumination throughout the space.
Castle kept his gaze on her face, watched the way her mouth fell into a tight frown and her eyes turned a dull amber as they assessed the inside of the cabin in a periodic sweep. Her entire posture changed, the line of her body growing more rigid the longer she looked around.
This place brought her pain.
"I'll show you around in the morning," she said, her eyes roaming to the living room – the sliding glass doors along the far wall, the fireplace across from the couch, the pictures on the coffee table in the middle of the room.
He nodded and placed his bag at his feet because she had yet to direct him to where he would be sleeping. She seemed to be deciding something as she stood unmoving in the living room, her arms crossed tightly over her chest and her eyebrows drawn together in thought. He didn't want to disturb her, but he felt like an intruder just standing there.
"Uh, well-"
"It was my mother."
He stilled. The whispered words echoed through the silence of the secluded cabin and made his spine stiffen. She opened her mouth to continue and part of him wanted to stop her, to tell her he didn't need to know, but he said nothing because he did, he craved to know everything about her, and he felt like an utterly selfish bastard for it.
"I was nineteen. We were supposed to go to dinner - my mom, my dad, and I. But she never showed. I didn't think anything of it at first. She tended to overwork."
She stepped forward and dropped her duffel bag onto the couch, curled her fingers over the worn fabric once her hands were free, used the furniture as an anchor while she told a story he wished he had never asked for.
"A cop was waiting for us when we got home," she continued, clearing her throat to fight the way it closed up around the words. "She had been stabbed."
Kate's throat bobbed as she swallowed, a correlation of unshed tears glittered in her eyes, but the line of her mouth was strict, her eyes fierce even through the rebellion of moisture.
"They attributed it to gang violence, but I never believed it. After some investigation, years, I learned someone hired a man to kill her. I thought maybe if I found a way into their world…"
She paused, her fingers clenching hard around the couch, the skin covering her knuckles blanching ivory, and it took every ounce of control he possessed not to go to her, to wrap her in his arms and hold her until the defeated look left her face, the broken anguish left her eyes. All he allowed himself was an inch of a step closer to her stone-like figure.
"It's been three years," she rasped, shaking her head. "I have nothing."
There was nothing to say to that.
"My dad took her death hard, started drinking heavily. I lost him about four years ago when I was still a detective." She dug her teeth into her bottom lip and he followed her gaze to a picture of an older man with his arm around a younger version of the woman standing before him. "I'd always been hesitant to leave the NYPD, but after he died… I had nothing left to lose. I still have nothing."
Fuck, he couldn't handle this.
He moved to stand beside her and brushed a tentative hand between the wings of her shoulder blades, bringing her back to the present she had momentarily abandoned to bring him the darkness of her past.
"Debt paid in full?" she asked with a weary quirk of her lips, but the tears were still in her eyes and he gave in. He bundled her snugly in his arms and she let him, her body melting into his embrace, her arms locking around his back.
She released a ragged breath against his clavicle, a broken piece of a sob she refused to let free. "I let her down. I let them both down."
"No, no, you didn't," he argued fervently, strengthening his grip on her and moving a hand to her nape, brushing his thumb over the fine hairs at the base of her skull. "No, Kate. You could never let them down."
She buried her face deeper into his chest, trying to quell the tears and the strangled sounds he could hear rallying in her throat. Her nails snared in his shirt and she fisted her hands at his waist.
"You'll find whoever did this. I know you will."
She reluctantly lifted her head, stared up at him with unfathomably dark eyes that rivaled the night sky. Her bottom lip quivered and he cupped her chin in his fingers, swept his thumb over the trembling flesh.
"Is there a guest bedroom?"
She inclined her head towards the hallway. "Yeah."
"Should I stay there for the night?"
"Yeah," she murmured, walking him backwards, in the opposite direction of the hallway, towards a closed door just off the living room. She reached around to turn the knob before his back could hit the hardwood.
"Am I staying in the guest room, Kate?"
She slanted her mouth over his, breathed her answer into his lungs as she kicked the door shut and guided him towards the bed that rested in the middle of the room.
"No."