As promised, I give you more ... Enjoy!

If Chris died there and then in that very instant and never had to follow through with what he was about to, he would count himself lucky. He was engaged to be married to a beautiful woman whom he loved very much, he'd straightened out his life, and managed to find himself a job that not only paid the bills but was fulfilling. He would throw it all away to never have to go through the experience of identifying the body of his best friend and partner.

Nothing could have prepared him for this. Sure, he'd said countless times that Nicky was heading toward self-destruction fast. The idea of finding Nicky dead somewhere was never far from his mind. It was a terrifying truth that kept him up at night. He'd been expecting something like this. He'd called it even. But he wasn't prepared. Nothing could have prepared him for this. It was a reality that he never wanted to experience. He didn't think he could get through this.

Chris stood in the doorway of Nicky's bedroom sobbing. He supposed that he was standing in the same spot as Carlo when he found the body not just an hour ago.

The body. It hung in the centre of the room. It was dressed in a grey t-shirt and blue jeans. The feet were bare, toes skimming the top of the stool beneath them as the body swayed faintly. The arms dangled loosely from slackened shoulders. It just hung there and Chris just stood there.

Where there should've been a sense of urgency in him, there wasn't. He should be confirming that he was dead and didn't need medical attention for God's sake. He should've been there. For him. For Nicky.

Finally, he felt his feet take a step into the room. There was blood on the floor as in the living room. His brain wasn't asking what went on here. His mind couldn't render what he was looking at any more logical if he tried. He stepped out to the right to avoid a dark, wet smear on the floor. It could've been black from what he could tell of the dim room. Then he stepped inward, moving close enough that he was in line with the body and slowly he turned in its direction.

He hadn't raised his gaze yet. He couldn't find within himself what he needed. Whether it be courage, strength, or hope, he didn't have it. All he knew is what he didn't want to see and that kept his eyes glued to the legs of the stool, helplessly listening to the soft rocking of the body before him as he tried to muster up something that he could use to get the job done.

He wasn't one for praying, but he said one then. Crossing himself, he heard a buzz, felt a slight rush of air before him, and instead of finally taking a look at the body as he'd been trying to, his eyes shot back toward the door where he found one of the uniformed officers leaning on the light switch, causing the ceiling fan to begin to turn.

"What the fuck?" Chris sputtered in surprise. "Shut that off!" He barked against the whir and screech of rusted metal blades.

The body of course also began to spin and Chris seized it in his arms, determined not to let it come to harm – or more harm than it had already sustained.

By the time the officer had realized his mistake and flicked the switch back to off, the body had made one and a half full rotations with Chris clinging to its waist. As the fan slowed and the body seemed steady enough, Chris took a step back and keeping out his hands in case he needed to catch it, looked at it in the face.

He wasn't breathing. He realized he hadn't been since he entered the room, but now he released a long gust of wind as he spit out the words: "What the fuck?"

It wasn't his friend. It wasn't Nicky. Hanging from the ceiling in the bedroom of his friend's apartment was not Detective Nicky Adams of the Special Victims Unit. Whoever the fuck it was, he had not the slightest idea. But it wasn't Nicky. Thank God it wasn't Nicky.

Suddenly spilling through the door along with Chris' good sense was the familiar fuming face of his Captain.

"You. Get the fuck out of here! What do you think you're doing? Get out!" Captain O'Neil roared at the officer, jabbing a meaty finger into the air. "What the fuck is this?"

Chris was muttering the same phrase as he scanned over the body, his fingers on the neck, feeling no pulse or sign of life.

He was looking at a man in his early to mid-thirties. He was white, of average height, but a bit thicker than Nicky around the middle. His hair was dark like Nicky's but straight and chopped off short. His eyes – also dark – were wide open. A blood vessel appeared to have burst in one of them to the extent that the white of the eye was little more than a milky pool of blood. There was a belt strung around his neck. It was thick and brown, unlike the black one on the man's waist holding his pants up.

It was definitely not Nicky. The question was who the hell was he looking at?

O'Neil was beside him, hands on his hips as the forensic team came pouring into the room behind him.

"It's not Adams." Surprised to hear the softness of the Captain's tone, Chris glanced up at him. He ran a hand over his mouth and let out a rough breath. "Thank God."

"This –" Chris started, but O'Neil in typical fashion interrupted.

"You should still get your ass out of here, kid."

"Sir?"

O'Neil turned away from the body and toward Chris. He spoke low as a tech approached with a duffel bag of supplies.

"I don't know about you, but I can't explain how this poor son of a bitch got here in Adams' apartment. Or where Adams is. Somehow, he's tied to Adams and to the missing kid and you better not get yourself more messed up in it than you already are. Get your ass home, Rivera."

Chris watched the eyes of the dead man. They weren't blank or expressionless like how you read in books. Sherlock and Miss Marple got that wrong. The eyes were set on the space immediately before them with urgency and contempt like his death had captured his final moment of terror and frozen it there in his expression.

"Sir, with all due respect, I have to stay with this." The Captain had raised a very important question: where the fuck was Nick? "He's my partner. I've gotta find him."

O'Neil then raised a hand to Chris' shoulder and guided him back several paces out of the way of a tech pointing a camera at the body. "Don't be an idiot. Look around here. A dead body found in a cop's house? Cop's nowhere to be found? That'd cause a media shitstorm on any ordinary goddamn day. But then I find out the perp we've been after for picking up a kid is related to the piece of shit that raped that cop when he was a boy. I don't know what the fuck went on here, detective, but you're not gonna touch it with a ten-foot pole. You got me?"

Chris felt a vein in his forehead throbbing. "You're not seriously saying Nicky's gonna get pegged for this!"

"There's a very good chance he's getting dragged through the mud before we find out what the fuck happened here."

The relief that Chris had just briefly felt upon discovering that Nicky was not hanging from the ceiling had dissipated. The panic rising in his chest returned his mind to Carlo who was likely still falling apart with grief in the hallway. Informing Nick's family of his demise was the very last thing that Chris would ever want to do and the worst thing he could think of doing. Telling them he was missing in action and wanted for murder was a close second.

Nicky lay there, motionless, choking on his breath. A thought flitted through his mind and then it was all he could think about. He was thinking about Carlo.

Carlo didn't like confined spaces. Not since he was seven and the brothers got trapped in the trunk of their father's car. It only took an hour for Pop to realize they were in there and let them out, but that hour felt like an eternity stuck in there with his little brother. Carlo had asthma as a kid and Nicky spent the experience holding the younger boy to his chest, attempting to calm him, with little space and even less air to make his job easy.

He was ten years old and he thought they were going to die. He felt around the trunk but knew he would find no levers to release them from the enclosure. They shouldn't have been playing in the trunk and he should've known better.

"It's okay, Carlo. Pop's gonna find us. It's okay." Despite his own terror and that he didn't believe it, he kept saying the words.

And Pop did find them. And it was okay.

"It's okay. It's okay." He now told himself.

His fingers grazed the rough carpet lining the interior of the trunk, but he had little hope in moving much more than that. His shoulders remained dislocated and a burning numbness had set in from his neck to his fingertips. His ankles were tied together and again to his wrists as before. His mouth was duct-taped. Only his eyes were free, but he didn't have any desire to see what was coming next.

The car stopped hard and sent him crashing face-first into the rear of the trunk. He yelped loudly, paused, and instead of pulling himself together, he released a long roar. It was primitive. It was desperate and he was. If there was any chance that the car had stopped at a traffic light or anywhere public with people around, he had to take it. Someone could hear him. Someone might call for help. Someone might find him.

Alright, I felt terrible about the cliffhanger on Christmas. I was worried I'd lose some of you so I quickly got this out. I hope no one is disappointed. I'll try to post again soon but just in case, hope this ties you over while you're ringing in the new year! -Meg