As much as Tony had tried to deny it in the past, he now had to admit it. The possibility of losing her had showed him just how much she meant to him. He, Anthony DiNozzo, NCIS Special Agent was in love with Mossad Officer Ziva David. But that wasn't what scared him so much. It was the fact that for the first time in his life, he loved a woman more than anything else in the world. And he couldn't imagine living without her ever again. Not to be able to hear her beautiful voice, or see her radiating smile, to experience the way her presence could light up the entire room, or scare suspects into admitting their crimes. The way she was tough and vulnerable at the same times had often left him mesmerized. He wanted to know everything about her, her dreams and desires, her hopes for her future and the shadows of her past. And if she felt the same way about him that he felt about her.
What he knew already, though, was that he couldn't leave her to face this alone. He may not be able to understand why she couldn't kill Kadira when she had been able to kill her half-brother, her own blood. He may not be able to understand why she was willing to die for her. But it was something that was important to Ziva, something she needed to do. And he found that she shouldn't be in this all by herself.
Sneaking away from NCIS had been easier than he thought. He had just said that he was going to get himself a coffee and asked Gibbs, McGee and Jen if they wanted anything before leaving with their orders, his gun safely at his hip, his badge in his top drawer.
It had taken him a lot of effort to come up with a place Ziva could be staying at. But then he had remembered a house just outside of D.C. that she had told him about. One she had mentioned to have set up for Ari, unofficially, off the record. Their private place if everything went downhill, a chance to sit out the worst and then flee the country if even Mossad decided that he was too much of a risk for them to take. Actually, Tony mused, that action alone already showed how much Ziva had cared for her family. That, along with the fact that even though she was not on the best of terms with her father, she had never actually said that she hated him, or anything to that extent. Because in her heart, she was still his daughter and Ari's sister, and she loved both Eli and Ari, despite the people they were.
Tracking down the safehouse had been a different matter. Ziva hadn't provided him with an address, but he remembered a few details from her stories, and had fed the computer with them. It came up with two possible locations, and Tony had decided to check out the nearer one first. When he drove down the narrow path to the house in the woods, he turned off the lights on his car and maneuvered carefully through the darkness. Turning the ignition off a good distance away, he got out, and walked a few steps, his eyes on the house. The light was on inside, and when he got a look at the door, or rather, what was left of it, he knew he had the right place. He drew his gun and crept forward as silently and fast as he could.
TBC