"I'm okay," she says as soon as Maddox steps outside, but the hoarse rasp of her voice betrays her words.
"No you're not." His throat aches. He sounds like he's been screaming for hours.
She swallows thickly, sinks her teeth into her lower lip, doesn't even bother to contradict him. "You?"
His only response is a harsh, dismissive laugh. He closes his eyes for the space of a breath, tries to center himself, tries to find anything to focus on other than the image of her body bowing in pain, jerking against her cuffs.
Her chest heaves as she drags in a breath. He can see the effort it takes to force her clenched jaw to loosen, to make herself exhale slowly through the pain. "Your arm. Your stomach. Hell of a hit you took."
"Christ, Kate." He can't get out anything else, can't stop his brain from imagining the jagged gash of agony that's somehow not yet rending her apart. Her arms and shoulders will have long since slid from pins and needles to a painful, aching numbness, her wrists will have started pulsing from the cut of the cuffs into her bones, and the throbbing lack of blood flow will have made the ache in her two broken fingers utterly unbearable.
"It's okay," she says, and the weight behind her words, the depth of her absolution, rolls through him in a great wave of grief.
"No. It's not," he chokes out, their conversation twisting in on itself, the loop of words reflecting their entrapment.
She watches him silently, her eyes dark, her throat working through a convulsive swallow.
"I don't know where the file is," he whispers. "I'd tell him if I did." It wouldn't matter that Maddox would kill them both, once he knew. It wouldn't matter that it could empower her mother's killer, that it could doom countless others to the tyranny of this shadowed man. He wouldn't be able to keep the burning knowledge contained within himself, wouldn't be able to do anything but spit out the words if their release could stop her pain.
"I know you don't. It's good that you don't know." The golden beams that haze in through the crooked roofing catch her hair, her cheek, the shaded edge of her jawbone, set off the murky swirl of pain in her pupils, the smudged shadows beneath her eyes; the play of the aureate light over her body is suddenly heart-stopping, suddenly utterly impossible for him to breathe through.
Oh God.
Oh God, he cannot watch Maddox torture her. He cannot watch her die.
"Kate," he chokes out, not sure what he wants to say, anything from We'll be fine to I love you to Don't leave me, but he swallows the words back. There's nothing he can give her right now, nothing that will make any sense in the face of what Maddox will put her through.
"It's okay," she murmurs again, her eyes finally focused, glinting with a ferocious kind of love that tugs at his chest.
"No," he says, a sudden, fierce determination clenching his muscles, quickening his breath. It's not okay, but it will be. He will fix this. There's another ending. There's another way to tell this story.
The door creaks and then swings open violently, slamming into the wall with a crack that jolts through him. Maddox strides back into the room, moving quickly, his steps too fast compared to his earlier cool and measured pace. His brow is slightly furrowed. One of his fists is clenched.
Not a good phone call, then.
Maddox doesn't pause, doesn't utter a sound as he stalks up to Beckett, grabs her thumb, and jerks it back, slamming it into the rafter at an impossible angle.
"What the fuck was that for?" he hears himself yell, but over the raw sound of his words is the agony of her short, strangled scream. He yanks again and again against the cuffs, but the old wood catches at the metal and he still can't get any purchase, can't move any closer to her. He doesn't even register his wrists are bleeding until he feels the sharp sting, then the tickle of blood trickling down his forearms.
Beckett's chest heaves as she gulps in frantic lungfuls of air, her eyes clouded with pain, her teeth clenched tight. Maddox doesn't even look at her as he moves back to the door, reaches into a small canvas bag, and yanks out a large, serrated knife. His eyes flick over her body with a cold spark of urgency that wasn't there before. "You seem like you'll last. You seem like you'll last a long while," he says, stopping in front of her, an eerie kind of hunger inscribed into the twist of his mouth. Castle jerks ever harder against the cuffs. "But when you're done, there's always his daughter." He turns and regards Castle. "Malibu, right? Bluewater Road."
The strangled noise that escapes his throat is almost inhuman.
Maddox steps back, grabs the hem of Beckett's shirt, and lifts it up, exposing the smooth stretch of her abdomen. Castle's chest clenches as Beckett twists away, lashing out desperately with her legs. Maddox's gaze shifts over to Castle. "I'll give you a choice. You want her to lose a finger or get a gut wound?"
Castle can't imagine what face he's making for Maddox to laugh so harshly.
"Don't worry, Mr. Castle," He reaches out, trails the blade of the knife lightly over the narrow taper of muscles at her pelvis before finally releasing her shirt. "I don't intend on letting her die too soon. I think I can manage not to strike anything vital."
"I remember," Castle chokes out. He thinks he might be crying, but he's too disconnected from his own body to tell. "I remember something Smith –" he breaks off, swallowing, his throat clogged in terror.
Maddox pivots slightly, his hand still clutching the knife but his face attentive. "Remember faster."
Castle sucks in a breath with burning lungs. He can do this. He can do this. It's just another theory, another story to tangle into the air, to weave into the morning light. He fixes his eyes on a beam of sun that spills over an old pile of hay. Strains to ignore the pained rasp of Beckett's breathing. "In January, Laura Cambridge was found strangled in the back of a sedan. The car was part of the motor pool at City Hall. Mayor Robert Weldon was the last one to use it."
"I sincerely hope you're going somewhere with this," Maddox growls, but he's angling away from Beckett, turning to face Castle.
He doesn't know where he's going, what he's doing. He only knows that every second he spends talking, every word that he can thread into a story, is another moment that Maddox isn't touching Beckett. "He wasn't a strong suspect at first, but the evidence quickly started accumulating. Laura had asked someone to secretly film the mayor. We found a video of her just prior to her death, standing next to Mayor Weldon, who was wearing the same type of clothing as her killer."
Maddox is utterly fixed on him now, tense, impatient. "I know this story, Mr. Castle."
"Then you know Mayor Weldon wasn't the killer, that it was his assistant, Jordan Norris. But you're not usually so up-to-date on local New York City politics, are you? There's a reason you know this story."
"Find your point," Maddox tells him, but his eyes are sharp, intent, calculating.
"I met Mr. Smith at a parking garage up on West 150th, near Convent. He told me he was involved because if Mayor Weldon was indicted and no longer in office, I would no longer be welcome at the 12th. And without my presence at the Precinct, Beckett would be left unprotected." He wants to look over at her, but he won't. He knows she hears the awful truth in this part of his story. He doesn't want to see the accusation, or, even worse, the forgiveness in her eyes. There is no absolution for this confession, not when every choice he's made has led them to this place.
Maddox gestures with the knife for him to continue.
Castle breathes deeply, hopes that he has a strong enough foundation of truth that Maddox won't sense his lies now. "I wasn't thinking about it at the time – I cared more about keeping Beckett safe. I wasn't trying to find the file. But Smith told me to watch my back. That my presence at the 12th was helpful in keeping Beckett from her 'untimely demise,' but that the papers in that file were the only things standing in the way of her death, and that they were closer than I might think." He swallows, tries to drag some moisture into his parched throat. "I remember driving out of there, and a hundred feet away passing Home Storage Company, a run-down six story that for some reason stuck in my head." He's never been so thankful for the nonlinear way his brain works. He still remembers leaving the garage, getting stuck behind an accident next to the old brick building with the fading gold letters on the front of it, occupying his time by imagining the various objects contained inside, unspooling the stories of an imaginary vintage pair of eyeglasses and a hypothetical unused typewriter. If Maddox has someone check it, this building will exist; this story could give them an extra four, five hours. Maybe even a day.
Maddox is smirking at him, a wry twist to his lips that makes Castle's stomach flip. "You think the file's at Home Storage Company on 150th."
"Between Convent and Amsterdam," Castle supplies.
Maddox pulls his phone out of his pocket, taps at the buttons with one thumb, his other hand still clutching the knife. "That's nice," he says, lifting his eyes from the screen to meet Castle's gaze, the eerie smile still twisted across his face as he slides the phone back into his pocket. "But I don't believe you."
It's funny, what his brain chooses to notice, as time slows down and every frantic thud of his heart suspends in heavy space:
The slight whisper of the black canvass of Maddox's pants as he shifts his weight, preparing to pivot back toward Beckett.
The salty, vibrant tang of blood in his mouth from where his teeth have sunk into his tongue.
The clench and flex of Maddox's fingers around the handle of the knife.
The swirl of dust through the golden beams of light, the soft and quiet comfort of a morning that, for a brief and selfish heartbeat, he hopes will be his last.