Yay! This chapter is finally done. Sorry for the LONG wait for this update, but this is a long chapter to make up for it. It took me some time to figure out what to do and where I wanted to go with this. A big thanks to Laura Hardy for giving me ideas and suggestions. Hope you like what I did with this!

Shraddha: Nancy Drew won't be in this story. I mentioned her name in chapter one for contrast and said in the note to chapter two she wouldn't be in it. So sorry, and hope you liked the story anyway. I am thinking about a story with Nancy in it later, but no idea when it will be written.

Agnes: I've actually seen Aikido done, even though I've never done it.

LH: I wanted to make a super Vanessa. We have super Franks all the time, so I thought a super Vanessa would be nice  My original draft said explicitly that Vanessa was better than Frank, but I thought that would be too much.

Fandemonium, KCS, Cherylann and Whitetigers, thanks for your great reviews. Story is almost done! Updates should be quicker, as parts of other chapters are already written.

Disclaimer: Hardy Boys Characters belong to someone else.

Fenton knew where he was going. An inner sixth sense guided him through the corridors – two left turns, two right turns and then a left again. He didn't see anyone as he ran, and for that he was grateful. His breath came out in gasps and he doubted that he could put up a significant fight at this point. His ribs were still sore from the beating and he couldn't swear that he didn't have a concussion. But his wife needed him.

He wasn't sure what he feared if he didn't reach Laura. The last time Thomas had tried to kill her, she had tried to reason with him. Would she do that again and lose her life? Or would she kill him out of anger? If she did that, Fenton knew she would never been able to forgive herself.

The sheer shock that had rendered him catatonic for a while had passed. He had briefly feared that Laura would join Thomas again. Laura had given up so much over the years. Personality wise, she was the same person who had saved his life years ago. She had used her great qualities: kindness, quick-thinking, and keen intelligence, to be a good mother and a teacher. Her sons and a wide circle of friends were a living testament to her calm competence and good heart.

Fenton the husband and father had never been foolish enough to think that the adventures of motherhood and a steady job were a substitute for the life she had left before. For over 20 years, she had never complained. But every so often, he had caught a wistful look in her eyes and knew that she was thinking about the life that she had left behind and what could have been. In those moments, all he could do was quietly support her and be a constant reminder that what she had gained was much more than what she had lost.

As Frank and Joe had taken on more and more challenging cases, Laura had been faced with constant reminders of her past life. Despite her good heart and firm commitment to leaving the world she had inhabited before, there was still a consistent and underlying struggle. Consciously she had erected mental walls against her past life, but unconsciously, that life was still a part of her being. She automatically sought the exits and entrances of every museum that they had visited and could always pinpoint the cameras in any building without looking at them. Whenever Fenton had tried to get past her conscious resistance during their early years of marriage, she had always evaded those attempts or pretended that he had never tried.

He hadn't referred directly to her past in years, but within the last two or three years, he had noticed more and more of those moments where her actions reflected her uncommon knowledge. There had also been an increasing frequency of times when she was staring off into space. The last time had been one night when their alarm system malfunctioned and went off by accident during a quiet dinner. Laura had calmly gotten up from the kitchen table, unscrewed the cover and repaired the alarm system while Fenton had quickly telephoned the security company to assure them that everyone was under control. Laura had then picked up the dinner table conversation from where they had left off, seemingly unaware of what she had done. Fenton had known that a day would come when she would no longer be able to hide from her past, but he had never thought it would happen like this.

Laura had been toostudious in keeping herself separate from her past life. She never inquired about any of his cases and only assisted him after he had run into a blind end and needed her help figuring out how a crime might have been committed. But in those times, she refrained from asking about the names of any of his suspects or exactly what they were guilty of, what their lives had been like or, when the case was over, how he had caught them. This had some advantages and kept her occupied with the present instead of the past. But it also left her vulnerable and practically defenseless to anything Thomas might now say, especially if she faced him alone.

This amazing woman had invested so much into being a good person and was too devoted to her family of the present to revert to dreams of the past. Fenton knew that, but he didn't know if Laura did. And he wasn't sure if he could convince her of that right now; if he could get her to see herself as he saw her: a smart and capable woman who was a great person and the best wife and mother anyone could ask for.

Laura was angry. Fenton had been a private investigator for too long to doubt what any good person was capable of when they were angry. He hoped with all his hear that she would not do anything she would later regret. If she killed him, she would take it as evidence that she was returning to her old ways and would blame herself for a long time. If she killed him, she would undo everything the two of them had worked together to build.

He sighed in relief as he rounded another corner and saw her familiar blonde hair in front of him. Spinning around, she gestured for him to be quiet and then regarded him with a mixture of apprehension and concern. He saw her mouth tighten as she looked at his tired eyes and assorted injuries. He also noticed the dangerous glint in her eye and could feel the anger coming off her in waves.

"I'm following him. He's up there somewhere," she whispered into his ear. "He did that to you?!" She was gingerly checking out his injuries and critically examining every part of him she could see. "He doesn't know you're free," she added as she satisfied herself that he would survive. "I'll go after him."

"Uh-uh" Fenton hissed fiercely. "This time, we do it together."

In the next glance, a thousand emotions and thoughts were exchanged. There was Fenton's silent admonition and warning to her, backed up by years of experience as a professional private investigator and personal experience as her husband. There was Laura's gratitude to him for giving her the opportunity to confront her enemy, even though he wanted nothing less than to do it by himself. There was his enduring faith in her to do the right thing even though she was furiously angry, and her desire to live up to the hopes of the man who had given her a second chance at life. There were memories of Frank and Joe, the life as a family they had all shared, the constant reminder of why they were here and what they were fighting for. All this, and much more.

The two partners determinedly and silently moved forward together.

After several embarrassing incidents as a young man, Fenton had learned to trust his instincts. When he strongly felt that they were being watched as they ventured down the corridor, he slowed their pace and subtly made sure that Laura was slightly behind him.

He was still taken by surprise when doors on both sides opened and he found himself faced with a silver knife. Laura fared slightly better. She ducked as a fist came swinging over her head and kicked the shin of her attacker. She blindly punched forward and was rewarded by an oof as she hit his midsection, but found herself being pushed back against the opposite wall by a hand on her throat. Looking behind the cold eyes of the man who was holding her, she saw Fenton standing very still with Thomas holding a knife to his neck.

"We're going to talk," Thomas said threateningly. "You will come along quietly and listen, or I will kill your husband here and now." Laura nodded as much as she could and the henchman who was holding her throat let it go and shoved her forward. Another shove encouraged her to get moving and she was aware of Thomas propelling Fenton in the same direction.

They entered a large room that was empty except for two side-by-side chairs in the center, about five feet apart. Fenton and Laura were forced to sit in them and instructed to only look ahead. Laura's guard walked behind Fenton's chair and put his heavy hands on Fenton's shoulders to prevent him from moving while Thomas approached her with the knife in his hand.

"I would have gotten you out later," he said softly. "You never gave me a chance. Instead you tried to kill me and went with him." He jerked his thumb at Fenton.

"Actually, you tried to kill me," Laura retorted . "And then you go through all this trouble to hurt my family instead of picking up the phone and wishing me the best."

"I love you Laura," he said, seeming not to notice the murderous glare she was giving him. "I'm saving you from your boring life as a housewife and giving you the opportunity to be who you are. In fact, I'm doing this all for you!"

Fenton couldn't repress a snort and Laura looked at him in disbelief. "For me?" she said sarcastically. "Let's see, you beat up my husband, plan to kill my sons, try to shoot my son's girlfriend, and I'm supposed to believe you have my happiness in mind."

"Of course!" he responded. "This is who you really are, this is who you were always meant to be. You don't need all these other people, especially not your husband…" As Thomas continued to rave, Laura saw her chance.

"Do you remember when we first met?" she asked. "I was sitting in a coffee shop reading The Fountainhead and you were reading Atlas Shrugged?" The painful memory threatened to overwhelm her and she forced herself to think of Frank's cool logic instead.

"You were drinking coffee black with two sugars," Thomas remembered. "And then we argued about if the state of the world mirrored the novels…"

"Look," Laura said rising from her chair. "If you really care about me, let him go." She gestured to Fenton. "Let both of us go."

"Will you come with me if I do?" Thomas inquired.

"No," she said calmly. "You know that I'd be lying if I said yes."

"How would you like it if everyone woke up tomorrow morning and read about you in the papers? The entire world will know that Laura Hardy is really Laura Basden and they'll read about every single job you've ever pulled, even ones that dear husband here doesn't know about."

"Don't care about that, anymore," she said, but couldn't keep the uncertainty out of her voice. "We'll deal with it together."

"Like we have everything else," Fenton interjected, and was rewarded by a slap in the face.

"We?" said Thomas noticing Laura's flinch. "There will be no we."

"What do you mean?" Laura asked worriedly.

"In addition to the history of Laura Basden, readers will also read about her master plan. The plan to seduce the famous private investigator Fenton Hardy. Until one day when he found out about her past and her evil schemes. And then she killed him." He brandished the knife at Laura who took a step back and hit the chair.

"Airtight case. Documents will be found in your house and the murder weapon will be by his side with your fingerprints on it." He grabbed her hand and pressed her fingers firmly around the hilt of the knife and gripped her hand and her arm tightly. "You can say you are innocent, but who will believe you? Your sons? The bumbling Chief Collig? Sam Radley?"

Laura's heart sank. Would they believe her? She had never explained her history before, had never even tried. Would that ultimately hurt her more than she had imagined could be possible?

"Frank and Joe would believe her," Fenton broke in. "Especially now that they know you are alive, and I told them who you are. And they'd never rest until they cleared her name."

"Really?" Thomas interjected. "I think they'd just believe that she became so furiously angry at what her life had become, how worthless it was, that she had to get away from it all and kill the man who was responsible for putting her in a cage!"

"Never," Laura and Fenton said together.

"Eventually they'd figure it out," said Fenton. "We both taught them well. And besides, what are they supposed to think, that the past three days were a dream?"

"Doesn't matter, they won't be alive long enough," Thomas countered, looking at him, but keeping his hand over Laura's. "I spent a long time in a hospital thinking only of her. Tis only fair that she spends years in prison with no visitors, thinking only for me after her sons die in a tragic accident."

He forced Laura over to Fenton, never letting go of her arm and keeping his hand over hers on the knife. As Fenton attempted to struggle, the guard behind him simply put his entire arm around his neck and used his superior strength to force Fenton to remain seated.

"Kill him," Thomas commanded. "If you don't, then I will. If I kill him, you will watch as he slowly dies."

Laura gritted her teeth and rounded on Thomas. "You are so dumb," she spat. "No wonder your father and the rest of us barely tolerated you."

"That's it," Thomas growled. "Give me your gun," he said to the guard who was now forcibly restraining Fenton with two hands. "I –"

"Don't you know anything about forensics?" Laura demanded. "If I kill him here, you'll have to move the body and it'll be a bloody mess. Any competent CSI tech will know I didn't kill him at the location and they'll start looking for it. Unless you want the cops crawling all over here, we need to move somewhere else."

As much as a suspicious Thomas wanted to argue with her, he couldn't dispute her logic and took the knife back. "Fine," he said curtly. "We're leaving. You can kill him outside or back in Bayport. Doesn't matter."

Fenton's guard released him and he slowly stood up from the chair and stepped to the side. As his guard started to draw his gun, Fenton rammed an elbow into his solar plexus as Laura half turned and grappled with Thomas, hitting, kicking and clawing everything she could reach to get the knife back. She heard a shot behind her, but she couldn't divert her attention from the man in front of her.

Very slowly, with strength and focus that came from anger and desperation, she forced Thomas's knife hand away from his body and twisted it, trying to get him to drop it. She blocked out the pain from blows that Thomas was giving her and sweat poured down her forehead as she tried to blink it out of her eyes. She finally got him to drop the knife and then kicked him away with one massive kick and bent down to pick it up and straightened up again.

Thomas started to advance toward her, but stopped, seemingly frozen by the anger flashing in her eyes and the knife that was pointed steadily at his heart. But she was hurt as well, and much of the rage she was directing at him was also directed at herself. How could she have been so stupid? Why had she spent any part of her life at all with this jerk? He had done so much to hurt both her and those she cared about, and if she had never bothered to ask him if he had preferred the character of John Gault or Howard Roark, none of this would have happened.

But she never would have met Fenton either…

"I should kill you," she said looking at him directly in the eye. "But you're not worth going to jail over." She lowered the knife half way and gestured to the door. "Get out," she said. "There's a jail cell where you're going to be staying for a LONG time."

"You don't want to do that," he said. "There will be a long, drawn out, public trial. I go down, I take you with me."

"I meant what I said before. I don't care if the whole world knows. It's about time my sons knew the truth anyway."

Thomas started toward the door. Moving with a speed Laura would not believed possible, he lunged toward her and grabbed the knife and pointed it directly at her, all in the space of a second. As she stared into his eyes, she knew that she was going to die. Nothing she could say would convince him otherwise, and she refused to give him any satisfaction by trying. Her silence was her greatest weapon, a refusal to play his game.

Laura stood her ground as he raised the knife. A second shot fired and he fell sideways. As he fell, his head hit the wall, depressing a lever and the door slammed shut. Laura turned and saw Fenton aiming the guard's gun steadily at where Thomas had just been standing. He was uninjured as the bullet from the shot she had heard before was in the wall behind him, and the guard was out cold on the floor.

Fenton had shot Thomas in the head. He had died instantly.

Turning away from her ex-boyfriend's body, Laura moved toward Fenton as he moved toward her and they embraced for a long moment.

"I couldn't kill him," she said with her head buried in his chest. "I wanted to…"

"He'll never bother us again," said Fenton firmly. They both heard a hiss, and turned toward the door.

"He must have triggered something when his head hit the wall," Fenton said running his hands over the locked and practically invisible door as Laura checked the walls. "No opening here."

"None here either," she said. "The door opens from the other side. And it's carbon monoxide. We'll have a couple minutes before we pass out and then…" her voice trailed off.

"How did you know that I never…you know," she asked after a few seconds.

"I worried about that for a while," he answered honestly. He owed her the truth after all. " But I've known you for 20 years. You are not who you were before."

She laughed bitterly. "Pulling off that robbery earlier tonight was the most fun I've had in years," she admitted. "I called the police as soon as we got here to make sure I wouldn't change my mind. And involving Callie and Vanessa was awful and I feel –"

"Which you never would have done if you had a choice," Fenton interjected before she could blame herself even more. "And I bet they didn't give you much of a choice, and you didn't force them to do anything. That was what really made me realize that you were working against him. You never would have involved them if you planned to join Thomas at all. He knew it too. It was at that point that he tried too hard to convince Frank and Joe to join him."

"Which they refused to," she smiled.

"And he got more unhinged and desperate," Fenton finished. "And I just kept remembering how you came through for me before and knew you would somehow find a way again. You're nothing like him. I never would have fallen in love with you if you were."

Fenton had trusted her. Despite whatever doubts he had, he had still trusted her. "I'm sorry I never reached this point before," she said regretfully. "If I had been ready to face who I was before, admit it to Frank and Joe, and joined you in your practice, what we could have done…"

"It took some time, that's all," Fenton answered. "I was happy to wait. And now you know you are better than him; you didn't kill him."

At this point, both of them had huge headaches and were getting dizzy. They slid down with their backs against the wall and put their arms around each other.

"I love you, Fenton," Laura said sleepily.

"I love you too, Laura," he answered. "We raised good sons, didn't we?"

"The best," she answered. "And they'll never have to deal with him in their lives."

With their arms around each other and thinking of their children, Fenton and Laura drifted off into another world, oblivious to the footsteps that were growing closer to them every minute.

To Joe, it had seemed like forever since Frank had started working on the door. Although he was the faster runner of the two, he could not keep up with Frank as he had barged through corridor after corridor and checked all the side rooms for their parents with lightning speed. They had left Callie and Vanessa far behind. But this was the door. It had to be. Besides having no standard lock on it, it was controlled by a panel of complicated buttons and wiring that made no sense to Joe. He could only wait as Frank desperately tried different combinations to get the door open. But it had been at least a couple minutes now, and Joe hated waiting.

He took a deep breath and started counting his heartbeats. When he had complained about waiting as a little kid, that's what his mother told him to do. Empty your mind, she had said. Just concentrate on breathing. And despite his anxiety, he was calmer, although he should probably resign from being a detective, never having noticed before that his mother was not all that she had seemed.

Hearing Frank curse, Joe walked over and put a calming hand on his arm. "You can do it," he said softly. "Just one thing at a time." Frank's eyes filled with renewed determination and he worked even faster as he crossed the red wire with the green wire then the blue wire with the orange wire then tore them all apart to try yet a different combination.

And finally the door opened. Both Frank and Joe immediately felt lightheaded and were forced to back away from the door to get some fresh air. But then they took a deep breath and plunged in. Frank picked his mother up and carried her outside the small room. Joe half carried half dragged his father and neither of them stopped until they were well away from the door.

"Carbon monoxide," Frank gasped. He immediately started CPR on Laura and Joe quickly followed suit with Fenton.

I'm sorry Mom Frank thought while he was counting. How could I have ever doubted that you loved all of us… 13,14,15 that you're a good person. 4,5,6… I need to talk to you, to apologize 23, 24, 25… Please don't let it be too late…don't let it…

Laura started coughing and sputtering as Frank sighed in relief. She then tried to sit up, but was too weak. "Lie still a moment," he murmured. "You'll be ok." Glancing up, he saw that his father's eyes were fluttering and saw his chest rise up and down. Thankful that Fenton was breathing, he glanced down at Laura.

"Frank," she mumbled looking hazily up at him. "So glad… so glad you came."

As the eyes of mother and son met, they were both filled with apology and remorse. Even though Frank was living proof of his mother's goodness, he had doubted her. And she was sorry that he ever had cause to doubt it, that she had never explained the situation to him before. As the shared feeling passed between both of them, there was also a commitment to reconcile, to try, to understand and to love without judgment.

When Laura was finally able to sit up, they shared a long hug and then looked to Joe and Fenton who had silently observed, grateful that two people they loved would be able to work out their own issues. Both Frank and Joe noticed the renewed sparkle in their father's eye and were relieved that although Fenton was still weak, he was finally back to his normal self.

They had always known that their parents loved each other, but had never seen the depths of it until now. For now looking at their parents was like looking at two halves of the same whole, two pieces of a puzzle that fit perfectly together. Fenton and Laura Hardy were just as much of a team in their own way as Frank and Joe were in theirs.

Joe hauled Laura to her feet and Frank extended a hand to Fenton. The foursome made their way back through the corridors and finally met Callie and Vanessa before making their way outside. Although they wanted nothing more than to spend time together, they all knew that the sooner they got the police formalities out of the way, the sooner they could have a long overdue talk.

"The feds," Fenton remarked, seeing black SUVs scattered throughout the swarm of police cars. "That will make everything so much easier to explain."

Callie blanched as she saw another figure exiting a black sedan.

"And Sam Radley."

Note: Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were published in the 1940s and 50s. So they would have been around during the time Laura and Thomas met.