A/N: I apologize for the delay in posting this chapter. To make a long story very short: I was unexpectedly accepted into grad school back in September, and at the same time began working three part-time jobs. Then I had a major health crisis. Then spent some time in Israel and the West Bank. So I haven't really slept or done anything but homework and grain size analysis and plane-hopping for the last few months.

But I really wanted to continue this story, and I so appreciate the feedback I've gotten.

Fair warning about the Jenny Shephard bit: I don't know much of her backstory and have thusly taken many liberties.

And one last note: I have been to Chechnya accidentally and Georgia on purpose, and deliberately tooled this chapter to reflect what little knowledge I possess about the Black Sea/Caspian region. This leans quite heavily on the paradigm that "writers ought to write what they know." Suffice to say I never came across any great arms dealers – but may have skirted a land mine or two near Grozny.


The mission fell into her lap as if by some cosmic intervention. Later, she would remember it as a sign of kismet – that she had been destined to go. That this was the mission which would spark in her the very first embers of her own inner revolution. A large part of that would be owed to Jenny Shephard, and the people whom she knew. And Ziva thought she was meant to go, she would later reason with herself. It was the very first step in a series of events that would forever change her course in life.

She would later convince herself: it was preordained.

All because Ari was suddenly out of the picture, mourning for the death of his mother. She grieved for her brother's loss and his pain, and was secretly grateful for the opportunity that it presented her.

Before parting, they met at a tiny café in Nablus, where she offered her condolences and tactfully tried not to seem pleased by the turn of events.

"You get your wish," Ari had said, his eyes boring into her. "You get to take my mission from me."

She had been genuine and honest: "I didn't want it like this." And she tried to convince herself that he believed her.

And she would go to Chechnya in his place.

She would leave home – and a part of her would never quite return.


The briefing was a cold formality, and she sensed immediately that the commanding officer of the American operation held a distinct disinterest in the entire affair. He had been whittled down and smoothed by the gears of bureaucracy; just another man following his protocol. Cool and detached. Cynical toward the gains of war, and inexorably bound by its necessity.

His name was Peter Gaddis, and she met him first in Tbilisi.

She respected him and loathed him almost immediately.

"We've got a lead about an arms dealer distributing American manufactured weapons to rebels in the North Caucasus," he informed her, sitting straight-backed in his under-lavished office. "They've been used in several attacks by both Chechens and Abkhazians, against anyone who meddles with them, really, including our allies here in Georgia. We need to get this under control before the Georgians start to suspect that we're the ones doing the supplying."

She put her hands together on her lap and fixed him with a scrutinizing glare. She understood quite well how the Americans worked – she knew how intelligence could blind itself in favor of the principles of democracy.

"How do we know that the weapons are not being supplied by Georgians?" she had asked, and watched as the muscles in his jaw began to twitch. "They have reason to favor the will of the Chechens if it means weakening Russian forces."

"We don't know. But this is a good lead. We don't have a name, but we have a face."

He slid the open file across the desk. As she peered at the photo, Gaddis continued: "And we have a pseudonym. The Chechens call him Lisiy."

The man in the picture looked almost sickly; his face was drawn, his blue eyes milky and gleaming as if shrouded behind a thin membrane. A short white stubble puckered his chin, cheeks, and neck, and though his head was obscured by a dark wool cap, she suspected that he was bald or balding. He looked old and decrepit, she thought. He hardly seemed a menace – but she knew better than to trust appearances.

"Is he Chechen?" she asked. She laid the photo back down atop the file and met Gaddis's eyes.

He sighed.

"Hard to say. He may not be Chechen, Russian, or Georgian, for all we know."

She cut him a pointed look and he shook his head.

"But he's not American. And even if he was, I can assure you he's not operating under the approval of the U.S. government. He's living and doing business – the sordid kind – somewhere near Grozny. But he's been spotted on the Georgian side of the border, too."

Her mind flashed with the images of snow-capped mountains, rotting villages, guns knee-deep in pilfered Russian caravans.

"Where exactly are you sending me?" she asked.

"You and Shephard will be stationed in Grozny. There's a good chance that he'll go into the mountains to do business, so you need to be prepared to follow him there, too."

Utterly dissociated, Gaddis handed her a map of the Caucasian corridor, several sections pocked with small red circles which indicated possible rendezvous points.

Gaddis ran his hand across the surface of the map.

"You'll go where Lisiy goes. I've been promised that your skills are quite unmatched."

She smiled at the man and pocketed his map.


Ziva met Jenny Shephard for the very first time on a blustery autumn morning in Grozny. She had seen photos of the woman in her briefing: tall and unflinching, the woman demanded her respect without any preamble and left Ziva with a sense of morbid curiosity. Was this woman a killer, she wondered? Was that kind and open face the same façade she'd seen on the faces of so many soldiers back in Israel?

Could this woman be trusted with her life or with the lives of those around her?

Picking her from a crowd wasn't hard – though in Grozny there was not a crowd to speak of – and she slipped into the booth across from Shephard and fixed her with a cool and analytical gaze.

"This place is nice," Ziva commented. A waiter hustled by and placed a glass of water on the table between the two women. Outside, the noise of ramshackle cars squealing up and down the main road mingled with a constant hum of wind against paper and plastic bags in the street. Someone was shouting in broken Russian. Stray dogs wandered up the sidewalks, peering into store fronts with milky eyes and muddy noses, searching for scraps of food.

Jenny smiled.

"It's strange, right? A little café in the heart of Chechnya, surrounded by all this clutter. If you look out the back door, you can actually see the mountains smoldering. And our accommodations are so grand – did you know that there's a pool up on the roof?"

"Smoldering?"

"From the Chechens laying land mines at the border. They don't seem to be very good at remembering where they left them."

Ziva eyed the woman. She placed her hands atop the table and took note of the woman's demeanor, intensely prepared to distrust her.

"Have you been to Grozny before?"

"Never," Shepherd replied. "Maybe that's why I notice all the clutter."

"You get used to the smoke."

Shepherd furrowed her brow, leaning forward.

"Yes," she said. "You're Israeli. I imagine you'd know."

Of course, Ziva thought, Jenny Shepherd could not even begin to imagine.


As they prepared a van to trail the brother of the legendary Lisiy, Shepherd turned to Ziva with a smile and remarked: "You're his daughter."

Ziva frowned.

"Whose?"

"The Director of Mossad. Director David. You have the same name, and…that same look on your face."

"What look?"

Shepherd smiled, then looked away and continued loading arms into the open back of the van. Neither woman seemed the least bit phased by the fact that their load of weapons did not draw a single curious glance from passersby.

"The look that's telling me that I should stop talking," she said.

Ziva very nearly laughed.


Something went wrong. They trailed the wrong man – the right man, actually, though his demeanor suggested that he ought not be trifled with, period.

Nearly as soon as the van began tailing the little black sedan, shots began to ricochet all across the street. Ziva worked her way into a calculated frenzy; veered, gained full control of the steering wheel, and put all her weight against the gas pedal. They sped through the winding streets of Grozny as a wave of bullets exploded against the windshield.

There was blood in her eyes. She was stricken by the urge to swipe at it but kept her hands gripped tightly to the steering wheel, gaze fixed forward as buildings, cars, and civilians flickered by in her periphery. As long as there was nothing in her path, she'd be fine; as long as they kept moving.

"Ziva, for the love of God."

Somewhere in the back of the van, Shepherd was falling to pieces.

Her voice was almost comically alarmed. Ziva felt a bubbling urge to laugh at it but stifled that, too. She just had to keep moving. Whatever had compelled Shepherd to be more panicked by Ziva's driving than she apparently was by the people who were pursuing them was a topic she'd have to save for later reflection.

She slammed across a speed bump that couldn't be avoided and the car pitched briefly up and then down again. The bumper shrieked noisily against the pavement as it reconnected. Ziva groped for control over the steering wheel as Shepherd started swearing.

"Tishar lematah!" Ziva shouted, and then immediately corrected herself: "Keep your head down!"

The voice that reached her from the back seat sounded entirely unamused.

"What did you think I was doing?"

"Why don't you go back to swearing. Distract yourself. Keep your head down."

She swung around a corner and narrowly avoided a panicked wave of oncoming traffic.

"We will be there shortly."

She could hear Jenny retching in the back seat.


Somewhere near the foot of the mountains, their pursuers lost the battle, and Ziva swung the van into the driveway of an old and seemingly abandoned cabin. Just beyond the drive, an old Soviet tank half-buried in straw gleamed against the night. It seemed like a terrible hideout on the face of it, but they were strapped for time, Ziva was injured, and there were so few other options. Night had fallen by then. They slipped into the darkness of the cabin and bolted the doors.

Ziva ransacked the cupboards, brushing away several years of dust and cobwebs as she searched for medical supplies and food. Somewhere in the crevices of her mind, she wondered if this cabin had seen any human life in twenty years. She wondered if this was a relic of the Second World War or a relic of the Soviet era.

Shepherd watched her move and after a moment attempted to lighten the mood.

"We've gone from ritzy to rustic in under 24 hours," she said. "I'm getting whiplash."

Ziva seemed not to hear her.

"Not many supplies," Ziva reported. "…unless you'd count liquor."

Shepherd perked up.

"Anything good?"

"It's all vodka."

"That will do."

As Ziva turned to clear a table to treat her wounds, she caught sight of Shepherd in her periphery and paused.

"You are shaking," Ziva observed.

Jenny let out a breath and pressed her hands together to steady them.

"Near death experience," she breathed.

Ziva smiled non-menacingly at her.

"Not so near. Calm down. Relax. We are out of trouble."

"For the moment."

Ziva nodded idly, blotting a rag with vodka. "For the moment," she agreed.

"Do you need any help with that?"

Ziva considered for a moment and then shook her head. She immediately tried to mask the sudden wave of nausea that accompanied the movement and reminded herself not to do that again. "No," she answered, "I think it will be fine."

With the rag in hand, she quietly went to work patting down the wounds at her scalp. She stared deliberately forward, at a plank in the wall, to distract herself from how much it actually hurt, and was quietly ashamed of how rapidly her eyes began to water. Jenny, to her credit, had the decency to look away as Ziva worked, sparing her the embarrassment and allowing her to cling to her pride.

When the cut was about as clean as it would get, Ziva finally let the rag fall to her lap. She lifted the bottle of vodka and took a swig for good measure.

"You've had worse, I take it," Shepherd said, at length.

Ziva wanted to grimace at how patronizing that sounded, but tried to remind herself that Shepherd meant well.

"Yes," Ziva answered simply. And took another sip of vodka.

"Me too," Jenny muttered.

Ziva cocked a smile and offered her the bottle of vodka.

Shepherd declined.

"They'll probably come looking for us," she said.

Ziva shrugged.

"Of course they will. That's why I am drinking."

"Drink as much as you want. Get some sleep. I'll be on guard tonight."

Ziva shook her head and had to grind her teeth together to fight back the second wave of nausea; the liquor certainly wasn't helping. "That was not the arrangement," she said, setting the bottle on the ground and getting to her feet. "I am escorting you."

"You're wounded, Ziva. You did your job, you saved both of our asses. Now let me make it up to you. Sleep. We'll regroup in the morning."

Undaunted, Ziva lifted her Berretta and slipped across the room, kneeling just beside an open window which overlooked the field and the carcass of the felled tank. She shifted so that her gun was steady and level across one knee.

"I am escorting you," she repeated. "Get some sleep."


The shadows crept in at the darkest hour of the morning, just before dawn. She had seen them coming; had sensed them. Quickly, silently, she roused Jenny from her sleep and pressed a gun into her hand.

The gunmen were inside.

The night was about to turn bloody.


"Jenny." She could taste blood at the back of her throat. Speaking required lot of effort, and every breath she took elicited a jolt of pain which traveled up her belly. She winced, trying to draw closer to her.

"Jen…?" One syllable was easier than two.

But Jenny wasn't moving.

Suddenly, there was a phone cupped in the palm of her hand, and she pressed it shakily up to one ear.

"Vashe situatsiya?" What is your emergency? Crisp, lilting Russian. She knew this language. It took her a moment to recall the words.

"Ambulance," she blurted in English. Blood and saliva bubbled at the corner of her mouth. She swallowed hard and her vision flared. "Medamem." Hebrew. Finally, she grit her teeth and tried again: "Skoraya."

"Vy raneny?" Are you hurt?

She furrowed her brow and tried to kick-start the part of her brain that normally did the translating. "Moy drug zastrelen...krovotecheniye…" My friend is shot…bleeding…

"Vy raneny?" the operator repeated.

Ziva nodded. Then remembered that the operator couldn't see her.

"Da," she said.

There was a momentary pause on the other line. It was only a second, but it felt like such a long time that her eyelids began to droop. When the voice returned it startled her so badly that her heart skipped a beat.

"Can you give me your location?"

Ziva stared at the ceiling.

She couldn't remember the right words.

She couldn't remember any words.

"Can't…" she ground out. The taste of blood had gotten stronger. "Hurts."

The operator began to speak again, but Ziva didn't hear him. She rolled painfully onto her side, leaving the phone on the ground behind her, and began dragging herself back to Jenny. She prayed the operator would figure out their location. She needed to see that Jenny was still breathing.

When she finally got to her side, Ziva slumped down next to her and pressed one feeble hand against her jugular. The pulse was weak, but there. She let out a breath.

In her periphery, she could see the trail of dark red that had followed her movement across the carpet, and she knew it wasn't a good sign that her hands and her fingers were beginning to go numb. She laid her palm across Jenny's wound again, pressing with the strength she had left, knowing that it probably wouldn't do much good, but needing to do something. She tried not to think about her own wound – which was becoming increasingly difficult.

But she was a soldier, and Jenny was her charge. She had to be sure that Jenny was alright.

"Jen…" she slurred. She could hear her own heartbeat thrumming in her ears. She pressed her fingers into the torn and blood-drenched fabric of Jenny's shirt, her ear against her cheek, sticky with blood. "Ze be'seder."

Her eyes drifted shut. She listened to the sound of her own heartbeat, curled like a dog at Jenny's side. Behind her eyelids came the memory of a flash of white, the hood of the car barreling down the street in Grozny; smoke in Ramallah; her sister's small, sweet voice singing up to her.

Time lurched back into the present with a jolt of pain and she grimaced, the ache of her own wound white-hot, before promptly losing consciousness.


She awoke some time later. The sky beyond the window of the cottage had gone a lighter shade of gray, thick with rain clouds. Ziva found that she could hardly move – it felt as though her body had been sapped of everything. She suspected that she'd lost a dangerous amount of blood already, and the ambulance, if it ever came, would not come in time to save them. Gagging against the taste of stale blood thick on her tongue, she forced herself onto her hands and knees, woozily peering around the darkened cottage. She had supplies. She could do this. She would do whatever could be done. She dared not spare a glance at Jenny, too afraid to find that her charge had already bled out.

Shivering, dazed, and sick with pain, Ziva scooted toward the corner where they'd left their meager packs. After a foot of progress, she found that she was able to crouch, and then to stand supporting herself heavily against the edge of a table. Maybe her wound wasn't so bad, after all; or maybe this was the infamous last push of a body drawn too close to death. She shook her head. Somewhere outside, the echoing chatter of morning birds foretold the coming dawn, and she was briefly stricken with the strange desire to shoot them.

When finally she made it to the packs, she tried to work quickly, though her hands were numb and trembling violently. She felt around for anything useful, knowing somewhere in the back of her mind that she had emergency medical supplies in there somewhere. When her hand closed around two air-tight aluminum packages, she remembered that this was precisely what she needed, clutched it against her chest and made her way back to Jenny – or Jenny's body – emboldened with fear and adrenaline.

As she passed the table, she swiped the bottle of vodka, too.

She fell to Jenny's side and tore open the first package, a compact clotting sponge falling into her hand. She'd used these before on the battlefield, in the worst case scenarios, both on herself and on her comrades. Sometimes it worked. She could make it work.

She didn't even bother to check for a pulse before she unwrapped the sponge and pressed it firmly to the wound at Jenny's side, some logic breaking through in Ziva's mind telling her that of course it was too late, if Jenny had been in danger of bleeding out, it would have happened already. But she hadn't been unconscious very long…had she? The night had been approaching dawn already when they'd been shot…maybe, it was only moments. Maybe this wasn't so futile.

In the darkness of the cottage, she could see a deep, hot liquid pooling up between her hand and the sponge. She flexed her fingers and more of the blood oozed out, but she pressed more firmly, undaunted, nearing desperation. She moved her index finger directly into the bullet wound and began packing the sponge in as tightly as she could, her hands already slick with blood, the movement eliciting a horrific squelching sound as she moved. The blood still seemed to leak at an alarming rate, which was a good sign: it meant the heart was still pumping, the artery still hemorrhaging. With one hand firm against the wound, Ziva reached for the second package and tore it open with her teeth to expose a neatly wrapped pressure bandage. Wasting no time, she left the sponge in and unwrapped the bandage, tightly twisting it around Jenny's abdomen and securing one end through the pressure loop. Bits and pieces of memories flitted in the back of Ziva's mind – all the gnarled soldiers for whom she'd done this service. How many had survived? She tried and failed to count them all.

She proceeded to wrap the wound meticulously, as tightly as she could, her heart still thrumming painfully inside her chest and blood still smeared across her hands and wrists. She tacked the bandage and then let out a breath.

Falling back into her ankles, she stared silently at the work she'd done, nearly out of breath. Only then did she dare to peer at Jenny's chest. After several heart-stopping moments, she saw it: the ragged, weak little rise and fall that indicated Jenny was still breathing.

Exhausted, Ziva buried her face in her bloodied hands. Then she took a swig from the bottle of vodka, coughed, and closed her eyes.

When her strength began to return, Ziva figured it was time to assess her own wound. She scooted back against the wall and rolled up her blouse, exposing a dark mess of blood beneath, and the darker, slicker circle of marred flesh where surely the bullet had entered her. Taking a breath to steady herself, she let one feeble hand wander around her side and to her back, and it didn't take long for her to detect the puckered flesh of the exit wound. That was excellent news: through and through. She was still breathing, and still moving, and it seemed as though the bullet had gone in only inches from her side and had exited not far below. It had likely managed to miss any major organs. And if it had hit an artery, she'd already be dead.

Relief washed over her. Not yet out of the woods, so to speak, but this was a joyfully manageable wound. She tried not to dwell on the fact that this life and her training had somehow tempered her to find gross injuries actually exciting when they proved non-fatal. Gripping the bottle of vodka again, smearing its long glass neck with blood, she let out a hiss and poured some of the liquid onto her wound. This time, the tears came freely, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from crying out.


By the time she'd sewn her own wound shut to the best of her abilities, given the circumstances, Jenny had begun to stir. Another excellent sign. Perhaps this awful night was finally coming to a close.

Ziva scooted back toward her charge and placed her hand against Jenny's shoulder.

"Jenny?"

The woman's eyes fluttered. A low, strangled moan tried to escape from deep in her throat.

"I know this hurts. Do you remember what happened? Can you open your eyes?"

After several quiet minutes of trying, Jenny's eyes finally opened half-way, the lids swollen and red. She coughed, winced violently, and turned her eyes toward Ziva.

"Got shot," she said.

"Yes."

"Not dead?"

"Not dead."

"It's bad?"

Ziva glanced at the wrappings on Jenny's wound, then met her eyes again.

"I have seen worse."

Jenny grimaced. It may have been a smile.

"That's a small comfort."

Ziva smiled down at her.

"I dressed the wound. We need to get to a hospital. Soon."

"Where are the rats that did this?"

Ziva's brow furrowed.

"Rats?"

"The thugs. The guys with the big guns. They still around?"

Ziva looked pointedly to one corner of the room, and then to another, and again to a heap beneath the window.

"They are here. But they are no longer a threat."

Jenny sighed.

"Excellent." Then she glanced at Ziva's shirt, at the blood that had stained it from an olive green to a dark, wet burgundy. "You hurt?"

Ziva followed her gaze.

"Most of this is yours."

"Didn't answer my question."

"Yes, but my wounds are not bad."

"You wouldn't lie to me?"

"Not at the moment, no."

There was a beat of silence. Then, still trembling, Ziva rose onto her knees, forced herself into a standing position, and peered far out the window at the rainy morning light.

"We should start moving," she said.

Jenny nodded feebly, her eyes falling shut once again.


It happened suddenly.

She couldn't bring herself to move. The warm, coppery haze of the diner stifled her lungs and made her eyes ache, and somewhere to her right Tony was staring bleakly down at the phone in his hand, but Ziva couldn't move. Couldn't take her eyes away from the bloodied body on the ground. Dust swirled on the floorboards in a draft.

She was overcome with a feeling that was at once exhausting and heartbreakingly childish: the urge to wrap up Jenny's body. To tend to her. Treat her. Because she could make that work…couldn't she? Hadn't they been through worse?

"Come on," Tony gently coaxed, sensing her distress and wanting to get away from the carnage. But Ziva remained.


She thought of the cottage in Chechnya with the ridiculous burned out tank in the front lawn and the gunfight and the gunmen huddled in their corners, beneath the window. How she and this woman had once leaned shoulder-to-shoulder and somehow…somehow it hadn't come to this.


Concern for Tony drove her to subtlety, but the urge to let this latest grief consume her proved too strong. At home with a bottle of Khortytsa silver vodka, she thought of the bright white car pitching up and down in Grozny; the blood on her hands and that quiet, terrifying night in the cottage. They had left that place as comrades. She had seen so much of herself in Jenny Shepard after that – they'd both been warriors of a sort, bound together in strange and foreign places with gunmen lurking like snakes in the mountains.

And she had known her life would end like that: bullet-ridden, bloodied, and alone in a strange place.

But to see that end on this friend, this person with whom she'd nearly died. The helplessness and grief consumed her.

This was the end of the road for a soldier.

This was how warriors died.

She took a swig of vodka, said a prayer, and cried herself to sleep.


A/N: I'm leaving to do research in Britain, Spain, Morocco, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Israel, and the West Bank late next month, and for every review you offer up I promise to leave a pebble in your name in some important place. Come on. You know you want a rock with your name on it floating somewhere on the Andalusian coast. Don'tcha?