This does not have a happy ending, so don't expect one. In fact, it's sort of dark. If you're disturbed by violent deaths, particularly the kind that are self-inflicted, just don't read it.

The cell was large, but crowded. Dingy white-ish walls surrounded a series of rickety wooden benches, easily enough room to hold twenty people comfortably. Through the bars, out on the jail floor, their Gendarmerie jailers yelled in their native tongues at the unruly dissidents that filled every cell, each of them hollering angrily back in protest, still filled and fueled by hopeless rage after hours of incarceration.

Each one of them had simply lost their minds, mad for the sake of being mad, and in the process of demonstrating their rage had harmed someone or something without justification. Without hope, however, their worlds had turned grey, and without the colors of right and wrong to stop them from acting out, the roughly two hundred inmates were each rushing the bars, anxious for escape.

Only a solitary prisoner remained in her seat, away from the protesters. Her face bore marks of a scuffle – of a bad one. Her neck was bruised as if someone – or, rather, something, as the patterns looked more like robe burns than fingers - had tried to crush her windpipe, and the side of her head was nearly black with a deep, angry gash just visible at her hairline. Back straight, hands folded across her lap, her green eyes were fixed on the clock on the wall outside her cell and nothing else as the minutes ticked away, as if she were waiting for something to happen.

As if she were waiting for the hour of a miracle to strike.

And then, suddenly, she closed her eyes, tucked her head into her hands, and began to cry.

Twenty four hours had passed. Their time was up.

She was still there.

They had lost.

It wasn't long after that the jailers started making their own noise, shouting not in anger, but in disbelief. She picked up a few words: cripta di San Pietro, morto, Americani, sacerdote. She translated them, familiar enough with French and just enough Spanish to make fair guesses.

A dead American and a dead priest walk into St. Peter's tomb.

It sounded like the beginning of one of Pete's bad jokes. And maybe it was.

The sound of shouting resumed just in front of her cell door, and within moments the Vatican's security force had an aisle cleared. The same officer that had booked her, the same officer she had showed her elbow to after breaking the window at Giancarlo's Ristorante, walked up to her with an angry black eye and a mean-spirited glare, took her by the elbow, and pulled her out of the room.

She offered no resistance. It was all the confirmation she needed to know she had translated correctly, but they would give her more. They would show her the pictures, uploaded directly from the crime scene. They would show her Pete's face, lifeless and bloodied. And then she couldn't see anymore – tears blurred the shapes in the room, the lines of Pete's face.

"Miss," the officer started in heavily-accented English, refusing to use her more professional title despite the fact that he knew she was an American federal agent. "Why would you try to break into St. Peter's Tomb? What could you possibly want down there?"

She didn't answer – her voice would have cracked if she tried – but more than that, he wouldn't understand. None of them would have.

They took her back to the jail floor, but decided to place her in a small, solitary cell. Maybe it was meant to be some small kindness for the one prisoner that wasn't actively screaming obscenities at them, but Myka would have preferred to be in the general population, even if it meant putting up with the yelling and the strangers and their anger. Alone, in private and without purpose, she could break apart. She could lose it.

By the time Leena had finally found her and made arrangements for her release, twelve hours later, it had been only the need to get to Claudia that had kept her from doing just that.

Just over twenty four hours had passed since she'd last seen Claudia when she arrived back at the Barbosa wine cellar. There was no sign of the monks, for some reason, and even though she didn't have Pete's vibes, she knew instantly that couldn't be good. She found the gate to the small crypt still shut, the rocks still between her and the last tie to her sanity.

"Claudia! Claudia, answer me!"

Myka tried not to let the silence she received as an answer scare her.

She'd come prepared – there was a hardware store just outside the city, far enough away from town that no watchful bodyguards would see her. She was through the bars within ten minutes and, yanking away the iron gate, began to pull the stones away by hand until she finally got through to the small pocket of darkness beyond.

"Claudia!"

Her hand reached in, groping for any sign of her friend. At last, her hand landed on Claudia's hair, and she reached around to find her neck, to find a pulse as she sent a desperate prayer to whatever god would listen.

She found cold, still skin. In that moment, she lost the only shred of hope she had left.

Three days.

In three days, she'd been to Hong Kong, to France, to Italy, and back to France, all while coming back home to South Dakota twice.

Home, she thought. What was that, anymore?

In three days, she'd failed to stop the most dangerous man on the planet from achieving his goals. In three days, she'd lost her home and everything that made it home. She'd lost Mrs. Frederic, Steve, Artie, Claudia. She'd lost Pete, her brother, partner, friend. She'd lost Helena, someone that might have, under certain circumstances, filled all the gaps the rest of them couldn't.

She'd failed.

And now, all that remained of home were empty rooms at Leena's, and a hollow-eyed caretaker whose life purpose seemed gone. They were in different places, separated by the wide chasm of grief and loss their world had fallen into.

There was no refuge in sleep. All she saw behind her eyelids were images of death and destruction. She would see the lifeless bodies of her friends, or – more often – Helena's final moments, filled with fire and tears. She would wake up screaming, hoping it was all a dream until her headache returned, and she would gently feel around the edges of the jagged scab at her left temple that she simply didn't care enough about to get fixed. It was a reminder in the darkness of night, in the half-moment after waking from her nightmares when she could convince herself that none of it had been real. It was a painful reminder of the truth of her situation, of a world destroyed, of her happiness shattered, and of her own broken soul.

There was no sign of Artie, and that was perhaps the most disturbing part. They had assumed that the most horrible day any of them had experienced would simply be erased, that none of them would remember a thing and the entire world would simply be reset.

But things were never so simple, were they? Not when it comes to the Warehouse.

How naïve they'd been to assume that setting things right would go according to plan. In their world of endless wonder, why wouldn't alternate universes exist? If Artie travelled back in time, he'd create a paradox. Of course there needed to be an original timeline – a bad timeline. One so terrible that even the strictest of rule-followers among them would break every rule in the book to change it.

This is what it felt like to lose. This is what it felt like to lose everything.

Maybe Artie had succeeded, wherever he was. And in that place, Pete was alive, the Warehouse was intact, and Mrs. Frederic would continue to glare them all into submission.

Maybe in that universe, Helena was still alive. Maybe she would have the courage in that place to say all the things she never had a chance to say to her own displaced Victorian. Maybe in that world…

But what did it matter? She would never see her friends again. She would never know for sure if that other place even existed.

She cleaned her sidearm, seated in the overstuffed chair in the corner next to her bookshelf, fighting off the tears she knew would come, knew would destroy her. She knew this was her limit – she would never recover from the last three days. Steve and Helena, Mrs. Frederic, Claudia, Artie and Pete…they had all taken a piece of her with them, and what remained of Myka Bering was made to drown in endless sorrow.

Finished with her task, she prepped it for another day of service, but then thought better of it.

She would never recover from the last three days, and she didn't wish to live through the pain of trying.

With a quick movement of her arm, she ensured she wouldn't have to.