He doesn't know how much time she has on him. Where she would go. What she would do.

He throws everything into the duffle bag except her rings, which he slides into his pocket. He stupidly, sentimentally leaves his on his finger. He stumbles out of the motel, through the parking lot, moving blindly, automatically. When he gets to the car, he stops and stands there, stands there with his hands twitching and his arm burning and his legs shaking and his pulse still thumping hard enough to make his eyes water.

Would she – she wouldn't be dumb enough to hitchhike. Just the thought of it, of her standing by the road, her arm bent and her thumb out, waiting for a random truck, maybe driven by her sniper, maybe driven by a sociopath looking for a gorgeous woman by the side of the road. She wouldn't. But she didn't take the car.

Why wouldn't she at least have taken the damn car?

He takes the map out, spreads it across the hood, has to squint to see it in the gathering dawn light. He shouldn't be standing in the open like this.

He doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything but finding her.

The map is shaking. His hands can't hold it steady.

She must have left their bed in the middle of the night. Must have carefully disentangled her arms from his, stepped softly onto the thin and dirty carpet, dragged her clothes from the duffle bag and pulled them onto her body, taking care to move so quietly. Did she even sleep? She was so tired last night. Did she even get any rest at all before she walked out that door?

He groans, digs his palms into his eyelids until he sees lights dancing at the edges of the darkness, until he presses the questions out of his mind for a brief and blissful heartbeat. Cute trick, he can hear her saying, and before he knows it a moan is escaping him, low and visceral and scraping over the harsh burn in the back of his throat.

Okay. Okay.

He can do this.

She didn't want to hurt him. She did something horrible and harsh and so, so stupid, but she did it because she thought she was going to get him killed. Because he refused to go to the hospital last night. Because he tried to shield her from their bullets yesterday. And he would do it again, he would do it again without even a second thought. They both know it. They both know it, and this - this is her trying to shield him.

This is her throwing her body in front of his, the only way she knows how.

By leaving him behind.

It winds him, burns down his face as he stares at the vast and shaking map, at all the hopeless spaces she could be.

It's useless.

He folds the map. Gets in the car. Swipes at his cheeks.

Maybe she barely has a lead on him. Maybe she was so panicked that she decided to hitchhike. Maybe he can find her a mile down the road, standing, whole, waiting for a ride. The thought of it catches in his chest, flutters a desperate hope against his sternum. He hits the end of the parking lot, turns left – he'll drive five miles, maybe find her; if not, he'll turn around, drive the other way, and try again.

He finds it two hours later. Six miles from where he'd begun, down the first road he'd driven. The sun is up now, relentless already. He's been driving in circles, purposeful, at first, then aimless, hopeless, desperate patterns along the small chain of roads near the motel. His arm throbbing, heart racing, panic clawing at his chest.

When he sees the used car lot, he knows.

The man who steps out of the tiny tin-roofed building to greet him is older. His eyes are not unkind.

Castle resists the urge to run at him. Makes himself pause for one heartbeat, two, three. Inhale, exhale. Running around in a desperate panic won't help him, won't get him the answers he so urgently needs.

"Help ya?" the man asks.

"Steve," Castle says, grabbing the man's hand firmly.

"Tom," the man says, eyes raking quickly over Castle. He tries to look steady, dependable. Tries to still the desperate, vibrating panic that still rattles his bones.

"I'm actually looking for someone," Castle tries, hoping that he's read the man correctly, that honesty is his best approach. "A woman. Five nine, long brown hair, early thirties."

"Came to the wrong place," Tom says, turning and walking back toward the building before Castle can even begin to continue.

"Please," he chokes out, desperate, his voice cracking. He's close. He knows he's close. "I need your help."

Tom turns around, eyes Castle with a dark, angry suspicion. "Supposing I do see someone here. Nice-looking lady. Holding it together, but clearly unsettled. Trying to hide some bruises at her neck with a summer scarf. You think I'm gonna talk about her to the first guy to come asking after her?"

Tom's not walking away anymore, but he's squaring his feet, setting his jaw like he's getting ready for a fight. Castle doesn't need a fight. He just needs answers.

"Goodbye," Tom says, dismissive, the sharp edge of a threat in his voice.

Castle turns his palms up in supplication. This is not good. It's all too easy to see the situation through the car dealer's eyes: a desperate, battered woman on the run, a too-urgent man searching for her. "It's not like that."

"Right." Tom's voice is hard, harsh, unrelentingly unsympathetic.

"She is in trouble. But – please – I need to find her."

Tom just stares. One of his fists is tightly balled. "A girl like that – what're you thinking?"

"I swear, I would never hurt her," Castle says, feeling his pulse thudding frantically through his veins. "I'm just trying to protect her. "

"How about you protect yourself by getting the hell out of here," Tom growls, not a question at all, and then he's spinning on his heel, walking away.

Four years of sitting with Beckett in interrogations, four years of carefully pulling information out of unwilling people, and now, now when it matters so much, he's failing.

He lunges forward, wraps his fingers around Tom's wrist to draw him back. The man spins around, jaw clenched, arm tensed, ready to swing.

"There are men hunting her," Castle says, voice quiet, low, deathly honest. "One found her, a week ago. That's how she got those bruises. They found us again yesterday." He pulls the sleeve of his shirt up, enough to show the gauze wrapped around his arm, slightly stained with blood. It's not enough proof. He has no evidence that she didn't inflict this injury herself in a frenetic attempt to escape him. It's not enough. It's all he has. "We were lucky."

Tom watches him warily, but his fists slowly start to relax. "Why'd she come here on her own, then?"

Castle swallows. "She wanted to protect me. They're not a danger to me." The words scrape over his throat. "They – they just want her."

He can see the second the older man capitulates, the sigh that ripples through his body, the slight tilt forward of his torso. "Came here an hour ago, just as I was opening up. Said she wanted the cheapest thing that would run."

"What was it?"

"Black '83 Yamaha Virago bike."

Castle can't hide his flinch. "A motorcycle?"

"Cheapest thing we had that would start reliably," Tom says on a shrug. "Didn't know people were after her at the time."

"Did she –" he has to pause, clear his throat, take the rough edge of accusation off the words. "Did she have a helmet?"

"I had one in the back. Gave it to her with the bike. Didn't seem like she had one on her."

Castle closes his eyes, drags in a deep breath. "Do you know which way she turned?"

Tom shakes his head. "Sorry," he says, and he genuinely seems like he might be. "Luck to you." He turns and walks away. Castle doesn't try to stop him this time.

He lifts a hand, pinches the bridge of his nose. At least he has information now, at least he knows what to start looking for – but it's a motorcycle, a damn motorcycle, and the thought of her flying down the road, so exposed, so easy to target, has his breath stuttering from an oppressive kind of terror.

In the car, he pulls the map back out. It doesn't fit right when he's in the driver's seat; the paper crumples up against the steering wheel, folding in on itself. It's too big. Too much space, too many places to look, and she's out there, out there with not even the glass and metal cage of a car to protect her.

He'll never find her.

He closes his eyes, bows forward until his head hits the map. He aches from exhaustion, from the wound in his arm, from the jagged pain of her sudden absence.

There are so many roads, so many possibilities that lead her away from him. He doesn't know. He can't begin to predict her. If he could, then he'd have known she'd slink out of their bed in the middle of the night; he'd have known she'd leave him behind.

Except –

I don't know how much longer I can keep running away, she'd told him in the darkness of their room, one hand clenched around her gun. Without him – he lifts his head, eyes roving over the spindling roads of the map – without him, the country would no longer be full of endless possibilities. Without him, the vast network of potentials would contract, funnel to a single point. Without him, all roads would lead to Manhattan. To a place where she could make her stand.

Where she could die fighting instead of fleeing.

He stops at a diner an hour after he can't get the road to sharpen into focus, an hour after the lines of asphalt start swaying and doubling no matter how many times he blinks or reaches up a heavy hand to press against his eyes.

He wouldn't have stopped even then, but he knows that he'll miss her, miss some vital clue that will lead him to her, if he can't even get himself to see straight.

"Coffee," he rasps when he feels a presence at his side. He doesn't turn his eyes away from the map, a talisman, a constant invocation of her presence. He has two hundred miles left. There are three hundred miles of a most likely road, a straight shot towards Manhattan, before paths diverge, twist south and wind north in a separation that could draw him inexorably away from her.

There's still a shadow over the map. He manages to tear his eyes away. The waitress, an older woman with a worried twist to her lips, hovers. "How about some food?" she asks, a little too kindly.

Castle presses his lips together, swallows, can't find it in himself to feel anything but an empty, aching nausea. Yesterday, they ate granola bars and split a bag of chips from a gas station; they were both too keyed up, too ready to move, to eat any more.

He needs to eat. Needs to fix himself, to eat and drink and focus, so he can find her. "Midwest slammer," he says, the first thing on the menu that his eyes land on.

She won't have eaten.

He knows this with a sudden clarity, knows this as surely as he knows anything. Sneaking out of the room in the middle of the night, exhausted, not giving him a chance to convince her otherwise. Leaving the car. Buying a broken-down motorcycle. The sum of it is more than just a desperate flight.

She's punishing herself.

He closes his eyes, rests his elbows on the table and his head against his palms, pushes at the edges of his equation. The memory of the bullet hitting her chest, the leak of life out of her heart, into his hands. The sudden weight of his body driving her into the pavement, the soft crack of the sniper's rifle as he shot at them, the slick of his blood under her fingertips. The oppressive guilt, the consuming worry that next time, it won't be a graze on his arm. That next time, it will be him.

She won't get a room at a motel. She won't stop to eat at a diner. She'll push herself back to Manhattan as fast as she is able. Snack at gas stations. Rest by the side of the road when she must. Put as much distance between them as she possibly can.

She won't care as much about them finding her. Not with the memory of his blood constantly flowing through the back of her mind.

He flinches back from the thought, but it's there, lurking at the back of every calculation. She just needs it to be over. It doesn't matter how.

The clink of a plate against the Formica startles him out of his own thoughts. He opens his eyes, takes in the plate of eggs and cup of coffee, swallows against the nausea in his stomach that roils every time he pictures Beckett right now, riding a battered motorcycle down the road alone, Beckett, bleeding to death in a quiet field.

The waitress is hovering again, watching him with eyes that are narrowed in concern. "Can I get you something else?" she murmurs. The compassion in her face grates against him.

"No, thanks," he grits out, his teeth clenched. She walks away.

He drinks his coffee. Eats his food. Forces every last bite and every last sip down his throat, until his vision doesn't sway anymore when he moves his head, until the grey fog is almost gone from the edges of his vision.

His arm throbs and his head pounds when he stands, but every moment that he's slouched at the diner booth is another moment she draws further and further away.

He walks outside into the heat of the midday sun, gets into the car, and drives.