"Cause they got the cages, they got the boxes
And guns
They are the hunters, we are the foxes
And we run"
They stay cooped up in their apartment until the lacerations lining her head have scarred over and he's sure it's safe for her to dye her hair. The headaches still lance through her skull and her body is still painted in a mosaic of bruises, but the three days of sleep and recovery in an actual bed has brought them both back to acceptable health and it's time to move whether they want to or not.
"You're beautiful," he says from behind her, lacing his arms around her waist, pressing her back to his chest as he meets her frowning eyes in the bathroom mirror.
"I don't like it," she sighs, tangling her fingers with his over her stomach nonetheless.
"I do. But then again, I think you'd look good with purple hair," he muses, shrugging against her and receiving a forced quirk of her lips in reply. "Honestly, Kate, you make it work."
"It's not even important," she mutters, shaking her head and stepping out of his arms. "I just - I wanted to feel... I wanted to be myself when I married you."
"Bleaching your hair hasn't changed you," he reasons, following her out into the bedroom.
"It's not just my hair, Rick. It's my name and the location and our life. You - you're the only thing that's staying the same."
"Is that not enough?" he asks softly, watching the painful expression on her face crumple.
"It's more than enough. You just deserved better," she whispers, but he denies it as soon as the words leave her lips.
"I want you," he states, watching her eyes flare with memory. "Any life with you is more than I could have asked for. It's hectic right now and we're still not in the clear yet, but we will be, and when we are I'm going to marry you. You, Kate, not Sara. And we'll find a place that will work as a home and my daughter will come stay with us and we'll work on the case with Ryan and Esposito over the phone and-"
She hushes him with the press of her lips, desperation and gratitude streaming from her mouth as she kisses him hard enough to bruise.
"I love you," she chokes out, kissing him again and again, coiling her arms around his neck and winding her fingers in his hair. "Too much, Castle, I can't-"
He silences her this time, pushes her back towards the bed and eases her down onto the comforter.
"It's enough," he swears, sucking her bottom lip into his mouth, nipping the tender flesh with his teeth and feeling her body arc beneath him. "You're enough."
Kate hands him her neatly folded hoodie, the neck of the grey fabric still stained with blood, but he stuffs it in the duffel bag nonetheless. He only managed to grab maybe a week's worth of clothing for her from the loft and he reminds himself to stop by the local Target on the way out of town. It'll be a shift from the designer brands she's used to, but he knows the change of her clothing quality will be the least of her worries.
She passes him a ziplock back next and his brow furrows questioningly at the sight of her father's watch trapped inside, along with both her mother's and her own engagement ring.
"It'll be easier at the airport," she murmurs in reply. "And makes me less vulnerable to recognition."
Castle sighs, zips up the shared suitcase that took them a matter of minutes to pack up, and drops the bag on the bed, making one final sweep of the apartment before they head out.
"Ready?" he asks as he emerges from the bathroom with an almost forgotten travel bottle of shampoo, but Kate doesn't answer him, her attention riveted to the crack in the blinds of the bedroom window.
"There's a black escalade outside. It's been parked there all morning and no one's gotten out," she murmurs, but when she meets his eyes, it's with spreading panic in her own.
Any other time and he would have feared she was being paranoid, but the dead weight of dread in his stomach tells him the paranoia holds truth. They've been hunted since they left New York and now they're trapped.
"Back door," he whispers, hauling the large duffle over his shoulder while she snatches the satchel with their money and IDs inside, slinging it across her chest and protecting it with the cover of her leather jacket.
"Castle," she breathes before he can start for their best chance at an escape.
A fleeting glance is all it takes when he meets her gaze, everything he doesn't want her to feel clouding her troubled eyes, and he hauls her against him in the doorway of a foreign bedroom they shared for three days.
"Partners," he growls, kissing her hard when her lips form around a response.
She moans, a sorrowful sound that has him gripping her too tightly.
"I love you," she rasps, clutching the collar of his shirt before pushing him towards the door, and he hates how she says it as if it could be the last time.
Kate forces him to get in position behind the door rather than letting him charge through their only exit. He doesn't like it, doesn't like hiding while she opens a door to her potential death, but he knows it's smarter so he waits on her count.
Her backup piece is holstered at his ankle and he withdraws it as her steady fingers unlock the door, silently easing it open.
For a moment, all is quiet, and he hears the soft intake of her breath, ready to tell him the coast is clear, but the click of a gun's safety being turned off shatters all prior hopes of a clean getaway.
"Detective Beckett, I presume," an unfamiliar voice fills the doorway and he tries not to move, tries to listen past the roar of blood in his ears and represses the urge to tackle the man he can hear standing directly in front of her. "You're a hard woman to find."
Castle clenches his fingers around the gun, cradling the Glock in his palms.
"This can go one of two ways, darlin'. You can get in the car quietly, ride back to us with New York without causing a ruckus," the man offers, his voice gruff, Southern, and menacing. "Or I will find your boyfriend, because we both know he ain't far off, put a bullet in his spine and make you watch as he dies a very painful death. Your choice."
"He's not here," Kate growls, not sounding the least bit intimidated. "And you're not taking me alive."
Rick bites his cheek at that. She's goading this man, buying time and probably trying to draw out whoever else may be in the car – the cowboy said us – but the thought of Kate dead is becoming an all too reoccurring nightmare.
The man sighs, loud and dramatic. "I figured you'd choose option two. Jacobs, bring the chloroform and the tape."
Kate backs her way into the apartment, keeping her eyes on the giant of a man following after her, and Castle waits until he hears the second set of footsteps to aim at the man going after Kate.
It's all so fast then. The leader of the two has Kate shoved into the wall, a hand around her throat, and she's screaming, gasping for air, scraping her nails over the backs of her captor's hands, catching skin, and for the first time in a long time, Castle sees red.
He fires, the bullet piercing straight between the shoulder blades, sending the man to his knees, dragging Kate down with him
"Behind you!"
Castle spins at her gasp of a warning, hits the man with the rifle center of mass before he can make it through the doorway. The echo of gunshots ring through his ears as he races for her, shoving the dead body from atop her, fluttering his fingers across the skin of her throat.
"More," she coughs, pointing towards the door. "Check for more."
Shit, he didn't even think – he scrambles to his feet, traipsing over the dead bodies covering their bedroom floor and peering around the doorway. He can see the black escalade from here; the windows are tinted, but the passenger door is ajar, a roll of duct tape on the sidewalk, and as he listens, he hears no signs of cavalry coming for their lost men.
"I think we're good," he decides, jogging back inside. Kate is checking the men's pockets, going through their phones with unsteady fingers.
"Bracken wanted me alive," she mumbles, reading over a text from the cowboy's phone. "He wanted them to bring me back so he could - could see the execution himself."
Castle snatches the phone from her hand, drops it to the ground and stomps hard enough to shatter the iPhone's screen.
"Rick," she whispers, encasing one of his hands in both of hers, the one with the gun. "Castle, look at me."
He can't. He can't look at her; he just killed two men, killed two people, to protect the woman he loves, to protect himself, to protect their life and everyone in it. And he's terrified that he'll have to do it again if Bracken wants her badly enough to have two men travel this far just to find her.
Castle allows her to ease the gun from his stiff fingers, allows her to clutch his hand and grab their bag, leading him out of the apartment that's been turned into a tomb.
Kate forces him to ride in the passenger seat of their newly purchased vehicle, a used sedan similar to the last, but an older model and with different plates, and he can't fight her on it when his hands are still trembling.
They make it to the airport without issue, Kate's speeding getting them there in half the time despite the traffic they encounter along the way, and Castle stares down at the tickets in his hands with scrutiny once they're parked in the airport's lot.
"Maybe we should change our course," he murmurs, more to himself than her.
The place he had bought for them in the south of France is private, secluded and not an easy place to find. He had made sure of that during his five hours of researching real estate. The stone house in the rural land outside one of the villages had not been for sale, only for rent, but Castle had managed to buy the owner out after offering him twice what the place was worth. But now he's worried it wasn't enough.
"Rick," she murmurs, reaching across the console to squeeze his bouncing knee. "We'll be here for about an hour, yeah?" He nods, reluctantly, and tries to regain his sense of composure, but every time he takes a deep breath, he smells the blood, the smoking gun- "We'll keep our eyes open, make sure we're not being followed by anyone else, and if we are, then we redirect our course. But for now, let's just stick to your plan."
"What if my plan isn't safe enough?" he grits out, his knee starting to tremble under her palm again. "They found us here, Kate. What's going to stop them from finding us anywhere else?"
She sighs and releases his knee. He listens to the click of her seatbelt, the shift of her body on the leather seat as she turns towards him.
"There are no guarantees, you know that just as well as I do," she says quietly and all he can do is nod, words crumbling like dust on his tongue. "But you gave us a chance, Castle. A better chance than we had in New York, and I believe in us. I believe that we can make it."
The unwavering confidence in her voice has him meeting her gaze, so fierce and determined, and he cups her jaw in his hand, cranes his neck to taste the power on her lips.
"Ready?" she murmurs, curling her fingers at his ear, stroking her thumb along the shell, and for a second, he can almost pretend that they're just going away for a vacation he never got to take her on. As if they're just headed on an adventure for the summer, or for their honeymoon.
Castle nods, kissing her one last time before reaching for the door.
"Ready."
