Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".

A/N: Thanks to everyone who has left a review or read and enjoyed the story. Let me know what you like, hate, or want more of!

Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY; all song lyrics are from The Beatles.

Chapter 11: Chains of Love

Please believe me when I tell you,

Your lips are sweet.

I'd like to kiss them,

But I can't break away from all of these

Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains.

Danny felt like a shit, which was only fair, seeing as he had acted like one. Flack and Hawkes were just trying to help, and he knew it. He would have done the same for either of them in the same circumstance.

Except that neither of them had ever been in the same circumstance. Flack had girlfriends galore, usually several at the same time, and was very careful to keep them all casual and sort of interconnected. He would introduce them to each other at bars and clubs. He always said no one girl could bust your balls if she knew she was just one of a crowd, and a full one at that. So far, Don had managed to keep both his balls and his heart intact, in spite of all the work of scheming, matchmaking mamas in his neighbourhood, including his own.

If Danny suspected that Don's feelings were becoming invested in a certain co-worker, he had long ago decided to play three monkeys on that one: see, hear, speak nothing.

And Hawkes. He was the gentlest and most self-contained person Danny had ever met. Danny couldn't think of another way to describe him. He would never treat a woman the way Danny had treated Lindsay the night before. He would tear himself open before abusing someone like that. Danny couldn't imagine talking Hawkes through a broken heart; it was like deliberately envisioning a tortured puppy.

Danny dug his hands deeper in his pockets and walked a little faster down the dark street. Although he seemed to be completely absorbed in his own thoughts, he wore the city like a cloak slung over his shoulders, always aware of who and what was moving around him.

Let's face it, he was experienced. Street kid, handball player, gang-banger, beat cop: in his time he had been all of those people and more, sometimes several people at a time. When he was a kid, the street had been his playground. He had been one of the bad guys before he put on the shiny badge and the white hat. There wasn't a corner of the city he hadn't been in; not a scent or taste he hadn't sought out.

Not a woman who offered or could be coaxed that he hadn't taken, and enjoyed, and left satisfied too.

And Lindsay? She was smart, and determined, and a match for him in many ways. What she wasn't was experienced. Every time he had touched her last night, that fact had been shoved down his throat. She hadn't been a virgin, thank God – that really would have put him outside of any hope of forgiveness – but she hadn't had sex with many different men either. A few maybe, before last night. Her responses, her surprise, once her utter, heart-stopped shock, had told him that.

"And did you stop? Did you even slow down? Did you teach her, help her? No way; you just banged her good and got what you wanted. No wonder she didn't know where to look this morning." That hateful voice was back in his head, taunting him.

"I made sure she felt good too. I didn't hurt her." The defense was feeble, even to Danny's ears.

"Naw, you didn't hurt her, just bruised her up a little. You took a kid who had only paddled in streams and tossed her into the goddamned Atlantic Ocean. But you didn't actually hold her head underwater, did you? You let her come up for air when you were finished."

Danny tried to hold on to the feeling of Lindsay convulsing around him, whispering his name, not once or twice but several times during the night. But all he could hear was her desperate sobs as he held her in his arms.

Innocence. She'd tasted of innocence. She wouldn't any more.

"Ah, that's what she gets for getting involved with a punk. No matter how far you think you've come, Messer, you're still a mook from Staten Island. Maybe she wanted a bit of rough trade: a little walk on the wild side before she goes home to the country and marries some milky-mouthed farm boy."

He turned in to the first bar he saw, determined, in spite of Hawkes' earlier advice to go easy on the alcohol, to drown the voice in his head. He ordered a whiskey with a beer chaser and downed the shot, sipping the beer to clear the taste. He hadn't been sitting on the stool for more than ten minutes before a woman who had been sitting on the other side of the room slipped onto the stool beside him, wriggling a little to show off a well-toned rear clad in skin-tight jeans.

As she moved into her practiced lines, and he knocked back the conversational ball and his beer with equal ease, he experienced an odd sensation. He could hear his own voice, see his own hands wrapped around the beer glass, feel the stool beneath his ass and her hand on his thigh, moving up fast, it had to be noted.

At the same time, he could see himself sitting on the barstool, flirting with the artistically painted, chemically enhanced blonde, drinking his beer with a kind of grim determination, acting the "player" role to perfection. And he heard a voice in his head, but not the usual voice, not the cruel, bitter voice that made him squirm and curl up as if around a fist to his gut.

This voice said, "You are more than this."

That's all it said, but it said it so loud, Danny turned his head over his shoulder to see who had spoken. For a moment, he thought Flack or Hawkes or, God and all his little angels forbid, Mac, had followed him after all. He looked around a little wildly, but there was no one in the bar he recognized, no one looking at him, no one near enough to have spoken to him without everyone else in the room looking at him too.

He heard it again, "You are more than this."

He slid off the stool, dislodging the blonde's hand, which she ran up his thigh to connect with the hard on she was sure he would be sporting by now. Her face showed only minimal disappointment at his lack of interest, though; she was confident in her own powers. He stepped back deliberately, peeled off another couple of bills and tossed them on the bar, signaling the bartender that he was paying for his drink and his companion's.

"Where are we going in such a hurry?" she purred into his ear.

"Have one on me, then I wish you luck for another one on someone else," he said bluntly. "I'm leaving, alone."

She flushed a little angrily, "You wasted my time tonight, buddy. Are you sure what you're going home to is worth it?"

Danny laughed in honest amusement, "What I'm going home to? I guess you could say it's the only worthwhile thing I have left in my life."

He started to walk back to the lab.

He was only a few blocks away when his cell began to ring.