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Sorry for the wait, but with finals and papers and stuff, I've been preoccupied.

NCIS

Ziva didn't understand why, but Lexi had just asked her to come see her, without Tony. In the little time she had known the girl she had never been around her without Tony in sight.

Why did Lexi want to talk to her anyway?

More importantly, she had faced down terrorists, so why did her stomach feel so strange talking to a 14 year old girl?

Ziva stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. The room was fairly bare, considering it was a safe house, but Lexi was still hooked to an IV, and stuck in a hospital bed.

The day before Abby had helped her get up and get to the bathroom on her own, for the first time since the surgery.

Lexi held out a whiteboard, while there was a marker and eraser on the bed next to her. "Uncle Tim gave me this until Abby and Gibbs can teach everyone how to speak in sign language. Everyone talks too fast for me to read lips forever."

Ziva took the board from the girl, staring intently, "What did you want to talk about, Lexi?"

"You love Tony, right?" Ziva was taken aback by the question. Did she love Tony? She loved him before Vance separated them all. She loved him when they spent that night together so many months ago. She had been hurt when he hadn't sent anything to her.

"Yes," Ziva whispered while nodding.

"Ask him to marry you." There weren't a lot of things that shocked the Mossad assassin, but Tony's

daughter, a lot like Tony, kept her guessing. She had never expected that. In fact, she had expected her to say something along the lines of stay away from my dad.

"Men are supposed to ask women, yes?" she wrote on the board.

"He won't set himself up to be hurt again. You have to do it."

"What do you mean?"

"You don't know what happened between him and mom, Ziva."

Ziva had no idea how to tell the girl that she did not really want to know. It was painful to think that he had ever loved anyone but her. She knew it was ridiculous. She had watched quietly while Jeanne crushed his heart. Jeanne had been hurt. Ziva could understand that, but it still hurt watching Tony go through that.

Her silence was all the answer Lexi needed to begin the story, "Mom and dad dated for three years, when mom got pregnant. Mom knew that dad was not exactly one to commit. She knew his family had never been there for him and had never seen a truly functional relationship. Mom left one night, pregnant, and didn't tell him anything.

After Grandma refused to help and she'd had time to digest that she was pregnant, she went back to Ohio State to find dad. She couldn't find him, only talked to one of his frat brothers. Apparently, the night mom left, dad had been planning to ask her to marry him.

She never went to him, but eventually found out that he had become the man you met when you met him, the skirt-chaser. My mom wasn't perfect. She hurt him badly.

"You are really grown up Lexi."

"I had to grow up quick Ziva. I had to take care of my mom when my step-father beat her so badly she ended up in the hospital."

Ziva couldn't help but notice that Lexi didn't mention what the man had done for her, only what the bastard had done to her mom.

She looked up when Lexi started talking again, "Dad will take care of you and the baby."

Ziva finally understood, "No one is going to let this child get hurt. I will not let anyone hurt my baby."

"My mom said that too, at 2 a.m. in a hospital, after he had beaten the crap out of her because I got in trouble at school."

Ziva did not even know how to respond to that. She was almost happy when Abby burst through the doors.

"I come bearing gifts!" Abby exclaimed, holding up a present in black gift wrap and a skull sticker on the side. She looked between the woman and teenager, "Did I interrupt something?"

Ziva shook her head, eager to get out. She needed to think. Some part of her knew she should tell Tony about the conversation, but she did not know how to tell Tony this.

Ziva was about to leave, when she heard Tony's daughter yell, "Just think about it, Ziva, please."

She turned back and nodded her head, before leaving. Ziva knew she had been in love with Tony for years, but she still was not sure she was not just another of Tony's conquests.

She looked back into the room to see Abby working with Lexi on sign language again. They had spent a few hours a day on it since they had gotten her to the safe house.

Ziva walked out into the living room, hoping Tony was still at work with Gibbs and McGee, even if she sincerely doubted. Tony had been on heightened alert ever since, the men had taken Lexi.

She wanted to believe that this had nothing to do with Mossad, and that her father was not desperate enough to kidnap and torture a child to get to her.

Everything pointed to Mossad, and Ziva was not as naive as she had been with Ari. Sometimes, even now, her heart ached for the brother who had been more of a father to her than her own father, but she knew that would never happen.

Ari had been a terrorist, and she never knew just how much he hated their father.

Yet now, she was beginning to see why he hated him so much.

She had come from a family of what Tony would call monsters.

What did that make her?

Should she even have come back here?

Ziva was starting to wonder if she was putting her friends in too much danger. Ziva David was scared, not for herself, but for Tony, McGee, Abby, even Gibbs and Ducky.

For all she knew, they'd go after Palmer next.

All she knew for sure was that she had to protect this baby, one way or another.

She flipped open her throw away payphone, "Shalom, Michael. I need your help, without my father hearing about this."

He was the only person within Mossad she still trusted.