Sorry it's taken me so long to upload the final chapter, I've been overseas for a month. But here you go, the final chapter to my fic; enjoy!

Carlos' face swam in and out of Spike's mind's eye, wearing a leering, taunting grin, a glint in his eyes challenging Spike's resolve. A thrill of hatred ran up his spine as the cool glass doors slid open and his heels clicked over the stone floor of the atrium.

'Are you sure she's here?' Jet asked, raising his eyebrows slightly at the crystal chandelier that hung glittering over a marble fountain that was situated in the middle of the room. 'I mean, holding her in their headquarters is a little obvious, don't you think?'

'It's supposed to be,' Spike replied shortly.

Jet didn't need an explanation. He merely watched the businessmen and women, clad in their crisp suits and carrying briefcases and mingling around the fountain and atrium front desks with mild contempt. Telephone rings echoed off the tiled surfaces. The water babbled against its stone enclosure but Spike's eyes did not shift from the lift doors as he made his way across the floor, hands buried in his pockets.

'We'll leave none alive,' he said, as soon as the lift doors had closed and they were rising slowly up towards the top of the building. 'I'm fucking sick of Carlos.'

'You left Red Dragon years ago,' Jet noted, unable to keep the scepticism from his tone.

'Don't even,' Spike suggested, but there was no threat in it. 'It's just what I have to do.'

Jet shrugged and let it go.

'It'll be better without them anyway,' he said carelessly. 'No one wants the syndicate getting any bigger. Bob called and said they'd had more trouble on Ganymede with some kids who called themselves gangsters.' He shook his head in dismay. 'I don't know what this solar system has come to.'

'Level 30,' a cool female voice told them from the lift speakers, and they were out as soon as the steel doors had opened.

The entire right wall was made of glass, revealing the sprawling urban metropolis skittering along the roads and lake below. Spike cast it one disinterested eye before focussing upon the more pressing issue at hand: the white-tiled corridor was deserted, as he had expected, and he and Jet strode down and around the corner to see a woman clothed in white sitting behind a secretary's desk. Her eyes were upon them immediately and something in her face betrayed that she was not surprised to see them.

'Can I help you?' she inquired formally, putting down a file of papers she had been pretending to peruse while she awaited their arrival.

'Just open the door,' said Spike wearily, gesturing to the stainless steel door behind which he knew White Tiger's headquarters lay. 'We both know Carlos is expecting visitors.'

'I'm sorry but I cannot allow you entry,' said the woman firmly. 'I have no inclination to believe –'

But her words were dissolved in a gasp as Spike pointed his Jericho at her.

'I don't know if you're playing dumb or actually clueless,' he said impatiently, 'but you ought to get out of here if you're not going to open the door.'

'Level 30.'

The cool female voice from the lift drifted down the corridor and Spike and Jet both whipped around to face the corner. Jet's Walther was at the ready.

'Get out of here,' Spike repeated urgently to the woman, not relinquishing his gaze from the corner.

Rapid footsteps echoed on the tiles. Jet moved to press his back against the wall. Two men burst around the corner into plain view. Duck, punch, uppercut, weave, Spike was dancing a murder-waltz with the man on the right, the pair of them moving and gliding over the floor in response to the other's actions. Move, like water, use your opponent's energy against them. Punch back aaand WHACK! The man was thrown back as Spike's hand absorbed the energy from his hit and shoved back with a precise and slicing cut.

'Whooaaa!' SMASH.

The entire pane of glass, three square metres of it, shattered as the man was thrown back into it, and soon his wail had dissolved into the general city hubbub that was drifting up from thirty storeys below. Spike couldn't keep the smirk off his face as he turned around to see Jet standing characteristically over his opponent, who was crouched on the floor, groaning and clutching his middle. The secretary had watched with a look of horror upon her face. Her eyes flicked between Spike and Jet as she got to her feet and moved around them to disappear down the corner in a terrified sprint towards the lift.

'Idiots,' Jet said in an almost disappointed voice, shaking his head. 'What are White Tiger playing at eh? Sending dunderheads like this to hold us up?'

'Let's just pretend it's a ruse to lull us into a false sense of security,' said Spike, still grinning. 'Move back,' he said, 'Let's blow open this door.'

As you needed to key in a password and employ fingerprint identification to enter, Spike and Jet mutually understood that the only way in was by using bombs.

'Three, two, one,' muttered Spike from where they crouched around the corner, and he lobbed a grenade around at their overbearing metal barricade.

A wall-shuddering boom pounded through the building but Spike and Jet didn't wait for a response. They immediately lunged around the corner and through the haze of plaster dust, stepping between the two fragmented steel doors, and into the open room that was White Tiger's HQ. Their entrance was met by immediate gunfire. Spike threw himself behind a large hunk of door and leaned around to fire back at the four figures who stood in the middle of the tiled room. Jet cut to the chase and tossed a bomb over his shoulder which exploded with another resounding boom and snuffed the sound of gunshots.

When they looked over into the room, all was dust, debris and blood. Spike knew there weren't many gangsters left in the building – these cronies were all small-time newbies, probably instructed to attack them as a distraction or perhaps stationed purely to amuse Carlos. Spike just wanted to get in, get Faye, kill Carlos and get out.

'What did Ed say again?' Jet asked quickly as the sound of movement echoed through the dust from the depths of the building.

'Upstairs, third door on the – ARGH!'

A bullet pinged off the steel door fragment beside Spike yet he didn't pause as Jet fired back. Shouts from behind told him more had come from the lift. As the dust settled, the stairwell was revealed to be a few metres ahead to the left of the room. The right was all doors and office quarters. Spike ran for the staircase and dived over the railing to fire from between the spokes, downing a man by the ruined doorway they had entered from, but Spike didn't hesitate. Carlos and Faye were upstairs and Jet could handle this distraction himself.

Spike hurried up the stairs and threw himself aside as a bearded face, and pistol, appeared over the banister above. Bullets pinged off the marble steps and Spike fired round after round until they stopped. A silver bullet grazed his shoulder and he dived down again under the first steps, firing his gun haphazardly. He could feel that Faye was close. He could almost taste the heat radiating from her skin and a desperate need overwhelmed him where he crouched. The door was right there, right there just ahead of the stairs. Some idiot was still shooting at him. Spike stood and fired a single shot into the face of the man who barely had time to realise what was happening.

His legs burning, a searing pain throbbing in his wounded shoulder, Spike threw himself over the banisters and dived at the silver door behind which he knew the jewel of his destiny was situated alongside the obstacle of his own progress as a human being. His shoulder collided, the door banged open against the wall and Spike's gun was raised, his finger tingling on the trigger. His jaw dropped.

Faye was sitting with her legs crossed on a chintz armchair in the middle of the room, smoking a leisurely cigarette amid an array of six bodies that lay scattered randomly over the tiled floor. She looked up in mild surprise at Spike's dramatic entrance and their eyes connected in a moment of silent unexpected reunion. Then, she smiled and butted her cigarette.

'You made it,' she noted, the smile evident in her voice.

Spike exhaled long and slow, letting his gun-hand drop limply at his side. His eyes roved over the six men on the floor. All were lying contorted in little pools of their own congealed blood. He didn't understand.

'Carlos –'

'Is dead,' Faye finished for him, gesturing at where the man lay face down, unremarkable from the other men. 'Sorry if you wanted to do the honours but I didn't really have a choice. Cigarette?'

She offered her pack. Spike walked forwards and took one mutely, lighting up and taking a very, very deep drag. He frowned. One thought seemed to penetrate through his haze of complete and utter confusion.

'It's not like the door was locked,' he pointed out, a slight edge to his voice. 'Why didn't you just leave? The guards they had stationed down there were pathetic. Disappointing, even.'

'Oh, I was testing you,' Faye said lightly, getting to her feet and brushing down flecks of ash from her hot pants. 'You know, just making sure you weren't gonna get cold feet on me or anything.'

She flashed him her alluring, slightly triumphant eye and he stared back, shocked beyond words.

'You thought I was gonna get cold feet?' He managed to splutter. 'But – I thought –'

'I thought you knew me better.' An eyebrow was raised and yet the smirk that lingered on her lips told him she was satisfied.

He was too shocked to be angry. In fact, he was even a little impressed though he wasn't about to admit it.

'So, you killed two birds with one stone,' Faye summarised, unable to suppress the wide smile that glittered the corners of her eyes as she moved over to press her hand against his hot, sticky neck. 'White Tiger's finished and I might even trust you a little now.'

Spike shook his head in disbelief before smirking crookedly himself.

'I am in awe of you, Faye Valentine,' he told her, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her into him, the butt of his Jericho pressed cold against her hip. 'Complete and utter awe.'

Her smile pressed a familiar kiss to his lips and all the pain and confusion and doubt was wiped clean from Spike's mind. He couldn't feel his shoulder anymore. In fact, he couldn't feel anything but the shape of Faye's body in his arms.