Another update... Sorry it took so long! I am finally on vacation - back in Italy - and I think I might be able to update more regularly during the next 10 days. It's 4.23 AM here, and I am about to go to bed. I might edit this chapter properly as I wake up tomorrow, but I wanted to post it now because it's been sitting on my desktop for a few days already and I realized just now that I had not posted it here yet.

Please let me know what you think, if you're still reading! :)

An insistent knocking on the door woke Tony up. Stretching in the bed, he was surprised to notice that Kate wasn't there. Sighing he reached for the bottle of water on the bedside table, trying to shake off the disappointment of waking up and not finding her sleeping next to him, without a warning, for the second time during the same night. As he put the bottle back on the bedside table, he noticed an unfolded piece of paper that read: "I'm getting breakfast. Be back soon." He smiled tracing with his thumb the outline of the smiley face that Kate had drawn feeling for some unknown reason his heart beating faster, and stood up to open the door.

"Katie, why didn't you take the keys with…"

Before he could finish the sentence he was silenced by a wet cloth that was violently placed onto his mouth, while two strong arms, that had taken him by surprise, held him firmly and prevented him to defend himself. After a brief struggle, the chloroform started to kick in and he lost consciousness.

Kate walked back to the crappy motel room carrying a bag with some junk food in one hand and trying to balance two cups of scalding hot coffee in the other. She was surprised to find the door unlocked. She took her knife out of its holster cursing under her breath for not bringing along her gun. She carefully opened the door and looked around the room. There was no sign of Tony. Being as quiet as possible she headed towards the bathroom slamming the door open and looking around. Not noticing anything out of the ordinary she frowned, heading back to the bedroom. It was then that she noticed a piece of wet cloth right next to the door. She carefully picked it up and brought it closer to her face to examine it; the strong and bitter smell of chloroform pervaded her nostrils.

"Dammit!"

With growing frustration she gathered hers and Tony's stuff as quickly as she could and then headed towards Tony's car, throwing everything in the trunk with anger. She sat behind the wheel but soon realized that she had absolutely no leads, so she walked defeated towards the reception.

"Hello."

A sleepy receptionist nodded at her as she approached his desk.

"I am staying in room 14."

The man nodded again.

"My friend told me he was coming by to see me this morning. Any chance anyone came asking for Rebecca Falk? You know, I was out getting breakfast…"

"A man came before."

Kate waited for the man to add something, which he didn't."

"Can you tell me how he looked like? Did he have an accent?"

"He was wearing a cap."

"Anything more specific?"

The man shook his head and got back to his crosswords.

"Listen, I need to watch the recordings from the security cameras."

"Are you a police officer?"

"Yes. Yes I am."

The man looked at her suspiciously.

"Can I see your badge?"

Kate rolled her eyes and grabbed Tony's badge from his bag, and after skillfully covering the picture with her thumb, quickly showed it to the man, who seemed convinced enough.

"You can watch the footage in the backroom."

Kate nodded and followed the direction the man was pointing at, with her eyes. She then walked suspiciously towards the small door and glanced at her watch. It was 8.30AM. After making sure there was nothing out of the ordinary in the small room, she sat down in an old chair and re-winded the three tapes with the footage from the three different cameras placed outside the motel and the gas station adjacent to it, back to about 7.30 AM. She looked at the three screens. She saw herself leaving the room at 7.42 and heading towards the small diner on the other side of the street; she saw a black sedan parking right in front of the motel and a man, whose face was hidden by the baseball cap that he was wearing, getting into the reception, only to exit very few seconds later to walk towards hers and Tony's room. She saw the suspicious guy standing in front of the door for a while before finally knocking on it for quite a few times; she saw Tony opening the door only to be assaulted by the other man and getting knocked unconscious by the chloroform soaked cloth that had been pressed on his mouth and nose. She then witnessed the man, easily picking up her partner's sleeping body, carrying it and placing it in the trunk of his sedan and then driving off, apparently heading back north-east. She quickly wrote down on her hand the license plate number of the car, unsure of how to track it down by herself.

Sighting loudly, she took her head in her hands biting her lower lip until she felt the taste of blood in her mouth. She didn't know what to do, and she hated that Tony was in danger because of her. Composing herself, she left the motel and got into the car. She started driving towards the same direction the man in the black sedan had gone, hoping that Tony was still in one piece.

Ziva glanced at her boss as he drove in silence the. They were driving from the airport in Indianapolis to the Todds' house to talk to Kate's mother. After listening to the phone conversation between her and Tony, they decided to hop on the first flight to Indiana to question the woman and get a hold of the tape that had started it all.

Ziva broke the heavy silence turning to the backseat to look at McGee who was absently staring at the scenery outside of the car window.

"Were they close?"

McGee looked at his colleague frowning his brows. She explained.

"Tony and Kate. Were they close?"

The young agent shrugged his shoulders, unsure of how to answer.

"They argued a lot, but you could tell they cared about each other."

"Tony never talked about her…"

McGee found himself once again short of words and shrugged his shoulders, not knowing what to say about that. Gibbs exhaled loudly.

"You never get over the death of your partner."

Ziva ran a hand through her hair feeling slightly guilty for trusting Ari many years back. McGee sensed how hard it still was for Ziva to deal with the fact that her half brother had brought such pain into the lives of the people she now considered her family, and rubbed her shoulder affectionately, smiling.

"You would have liked Kate. She knew how to keep Tony in place."

Ziva smiled back at him, thankful for making her understand that he didn't have any hard feelings towards what the Israeli intelligence had caused.

"She must have been quite a girl."

"She was… is…"

"Abby told me that Kate stayed with Tony when he got the plague."

McGee nodded, his mind going back to the day when Tony had opened that damn letter back in those fateful days of pre-summer 2005.

"She did. She could have got infected, but she stayed… That was Kate, you know?"

"Tell me something about her."

"She was caring and stubborn and professional and a damn good agent and hundreds of other things that I will never get. One minute she was crazy worried about Tony, the next she was threatening to castrate him."

Ziva gave him a small smile, catching the slight melancholic tone in his voice.

"Well, apparently she's still alive, so I might even get to meet her. As Kate, not as a Mossad officer."

"Do you really think it's her?"

Gibbs grunted from the driver's seat and the two agents exchanged confused looks.

Ziva noticed the freeway exit and pointed it to the older agent.

"We are almost there."

McGee tilted his head and handed the case file on his lap to Ziva who opened and went through it once again.

"Kate had listed Tony as her emergency contact, back in 2004."

Gibbs explained.

"It's not uncommon to list a co-worker as an emergency contact, especially if your family lives out of state."

"Tony never mentioned that?"

McGee shook his head, wondering how close his two colleagues used to be and if he hadn't been observant enough to notice something that could indicate more than a simple work partnership. Kate and Tony had always been a mystery to him, and even thought he always thought that their banter was just a façade to cover the fact that they deeply cared about each other he really had bought Tony's act. He really thought Tony had completely moved on, but the recent events showed him that that really wasn't the case.

Gibbs stopped at a red light and allowed himself to get lost in thought. He felt slightly guilty for imposing on Kate's family like he was about to do, but he knew that Tony and Kate – especially Kate, wouldn't have taken unnecessarily risks, if there was a safer way and he was determined to find what had brought Kate to fake her own death and kept her away for over 4 years and why DiNozzo had decided to take off and follow her in whatever crazy thing she was planning on doing.

Not too far from the NCIS team, Kate had stopped driving and was now parked in front of another motel in the middle of nowhere, blankly staring at a pay phone. After giving it some more minutes of thought, she finally grabbed the receiver and dialed a number and an extension that once used to be, oh so familiar to her.

The chipper voice of a woman greeted her.

"NCIS, Abby's lab."

She took one deep breath, gathering the courage to speak.

"Abby…"

The pause following that one word she had said seemed to last forever to her.

"Kate?"

She could feel the emotions in her friend's voice and that brought tears to her eyes.

"It's me, Abby."

Unable to hold it together any longer, she broke down and started sobbing. On the other side of the phone, the goth lab rat listened full of worries her friend crying.

"Kate… What happened? What's wrong? Where are you?"

The ex NCIS agent had to bite the inside of her mouth to stop shaking so violently and controlling the emotions that had recently been under display way too often, according to the standards she'd had in the past four years.

"I need your help… I know I have no right to ask for it now, but they took Tony and I don't know where to start and I would never forgive myself if he'd get hurt because of me…"

Abby listened to the other woman, feeling her pain and not even bothering to trace the phone call.

"What do you need, Kate?"

Kate felt extremely grateful in that moment and realized that she had been an idiot not to ask her friends' help before. Even thought years had gone by and even thought she lacked a proper explanation, Abby was still there for her. Glancing to her hand, she quickly read the license plate's number to Abby, who ran it through the database.

"I am sorry, Abby."

The lab tech smiled, just happy to hear her friend's voice again.

"You are alive, Kate. That's all that matters."

Kate cracked a small smile. A noise in the background informed her that Abby had run into the information she needed.

"I have an address and a name. I can try to see if the car has a GPS system, but it's gonna take a little longer. If you call me in about 3 or 4 hours I might be able to give you some coordinates."

Kate thanked her friend and wrote down the information she provided.

"Thank you, Abby. You are the best friend I could ever ask for…"

"I miss you, Kate… Promise me you and Tony will be back her unharmed."

Kate sighed.

"I promise Tony will be back there unharmed in no time. I miss you too, Abs."

Before the goth could reply, Kate hung up the phone, not wanting to make promises she could not keep.

R&R, please!