Things had been difficult at work all week and left Boyd feeling like every new lead ended at a brick wall. Still, creepy Lovecraftian cult murders weren't the sort that got solved over night as Grace kept reminding him. Well, Lovecraft didn't really enter into it at this stage of their investigation. Beyond the Necronomicon which had clearly been planted later, the deaths had no tangible connection to said author or the Cthulhu mythos. Grace had called it a smokescreen and Boyd was inclined to agree. No, their killer had relied on police assuming crazy cult members did crazy things that led to crazy deaths – and it had worked. Boyd couldn't abide lazy policing, it almost literally had his blood boiling, but he'd had to accept that, without the bloody receipt, police hadn't had anywhere to go. That Stella had even noticed the receipt was a miracle.

That the team needed a break was something of an understatement, and it was what had had the team pile into the King & Pheasant long after the sun had set with repressed sighs and a big thirst. Though fairly busy, Boyd's glare and the constant shadow that was Spence, soon bagged the team a table of their very own opposite the bar, and Grace quickly got the drinks in. Brown eyes had flashed around in search of Sapphira, but Boyd couldn't actually remember if she was on that night; sleep deprivation was a bitch. Casual chit-chat dominated for a while so they could all mentally decompress, forget that folk slaughtering one another was all too common.

Beer number two was when Boyd caught sight of Sapphira proving she was indeed working that night. She wore a pair of high waisted jeans and oversized red flannel over a black tank top, while that raven hair of hers swished about in the high ponytail she favored for work – a Dutch braid being another. 'Fuck, she's gorgeous.' Boyd saw it and the two twenty-somethings in jeans and loose t-shirts, who thought they were God's gift to women, saw it as well. For a while he listened to Grace and Stella muttering about some period drama they'd rather taken to with only the occasional glance to Sapphira behind the bar. Although, when the idiots he'd mentally dubbed Creeper and Wanna-be Stalker let the drink get to them and turned handsy when Sapphira had left the bar to clean glasses away off a table, Boyd was out of his seat and across to the bar before Spence could even question where we was going.

Seeing red was an issue Boyd had struggled with for decades. One moment he could be laughing and joking with everybody else, and the next he'd slipped into full predator mode. Back in the early eighties, one of his superior officers had likened Boyd to an enraged bull complete with steamy breath huffed out from his nostrils. A less cruel Mr Hyde had been Grace's description while his divorce had been in progress and Luke hadn't long run away. Many at the Met had written him off as an arrogant bully years ago; that was more or less why he'd been given the Cold Case Unit. Boyd, however, preferred to think of his descending red cloud as a protective instinct he had control of – he wasn't above lying to himself.

With hardly a full ounce of effort, the gray-haired man dressed in a suit of black and powder blue shoved Wanna-be Stalker back from where he'd begun to loom over Sapphira, then grabbed Creeper by the wrist and pinned it behind his back.

"Don't fucking touch her."

"What's it to you, granddad? Piss off out of it." Stalker grunted – his breath stank of cheep beer – while Creeper tried to wrestle free of Boyd's hold.

Sapphira took her chance to scoot around Creeper to Boyd who she practically clung to. Dealing with the drunken fools hadn't been much of a problem until she'd left the bar, they'd apparently seen that as their green light to touch what they'd been ogling so thoroughly. Stalker had crowded her right as she'd set empty glasses down on the bar, and Creeper had promptly squeezed her ass.

"Never touch her again," Boyd repeated with a deep voice and firm glare that left no room for argument – or at least it left people with a brain no room to argue, the same wasn't exactly true for a set of drunk morons who'd skipped their day with the brain cell.

"It don't have nothin' to do with you. We were just havin' a nice chat."

Boyd huffed out a laugh and finally shoved Creeper away into the bar where he hopefully bruised a rib or two.

"A nice chat doesn't involve your hands on her ass. Keep them off or I'll break your fucking hand. Understood?"

In the background the bald owner hovered and pondered if he'd need to step in or not. He hoped not, the last fight had broken three barstools and a multitude of pint glasses that he could have done without.

Creeper rubbed at his wrist. "Why d'you even care? You ain't her dad."

"He's my boyfriend," Sapphira snapped. She pressed herself into the safety of Boyd's chest which had him snare an arm around her waist and kiss her temple instinctively. "Owen, please."

That was the bald owner's cue to finally put his foot down and kick Creeper and Stalker out of the King & Pheasant. As the old saying went; you don't have to go home but you can't stay here. Amazingly everything went right back to normal as soon as the door fell shut behind them, folk just grabbed their drinks and went right back to sipping. The so-called fun was over and drinks called.

Sapphira might have been a strong and resilient young woman, but she'd been through so much and Boyd absolutely refused to let two drunkards be what finally broke her spirit. She kissed him, rocked up onto her toes with the aid of his lapels distracting him from his thoughts. Although the rest of the team wasn't so distracted. Spence especially wasn't distracted. His mouth hung open as he watched his boss and this young woman share what was otherwise a tame kiss.

"You go back to your seat, Superintendent." Said the bald owner. "I'll bring over another round for you and your friends. A thanks for dealing with Ian and Ciarán. Those two always have to cause problems. Bunch of idiots. Saph, go sit for a while. I can handle things here."

"Thanks, Owen."

Owen! Boyd made a mental note to remember that name. Owen – formerly known only as Baldy – might have been suspicious of Boyd's relationship with young Sapphira to begin with, though had come to see he wasn't some lurking pervert.

The pair found their way back to the round table where Sapphira perched on Boyd's lap and he wrapped his arms loosely around her waist. Stella and Grace might have wisely chosen to remain silent beyond greeting Sapphira, but Spence swiftly made his opinion on the relationship known with a series of disproving expressions that Boyd worked hard to ignore.

~X~

In the following couple of weeks Boyd and Spence had continued to but heads over Boyd's relationship with Sapphira, but they'd mostly been focused on their Lovecraftian case fortunately. Although Grace had defused one disagreement before it grew too explosive – 'pack it in' had been her exact words.

Keeping on keeping on had finally yielded some genuine results in their case when Boyd had managed to startle a confession out of Chen's suspicious former business partner. To be perfectly honest the confession had seemingly lifted a vast weight off of their triple murderer and, once information had started pouring out, the floodgates were open and a torrent burst forth. Mark Diggory was his name and he'd ultimately murdered three people out of greed and anger. Diggory had been ousted from the business they'd essentially began together after Stanley Chen had discovered Diggory's embezzlement, something hadn't ever been reported to police, and been left feeling betrayed, humiliated, vengeful, and in need of money. An argument with Chen and their accountant in the parking lot had made its way inside where it had escalated until Diggory had grabbed the closest heavy object and started thwacking. Turned out that Chen had offered the unidentified homeless man some money in exchange for helping to clean out a storeroom, and had been killed after stumbling across Diggory. Everything afterwards had been a panicked and chaotic attempt to cover it all up. Shamefully, it had worked until Stella had spotted the bloody receipt. They had their man but it wouldn't ever bring those innocent people back. Stanley Chen and his accountant could have reported Diggory's crimes but had chosen not to. Then there was the homeless man – they'd likely never learn his name – and he'd died just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Three lives stolen because of greed. Why did murder always have to come down to such pathetically mundane reasons?

A case closed with a killer caught wasn't ever celebrated long at CCHQ, not because they didn't care but because there was always another case waiting to be solved. Few police officers, and even fewer civilians, had ever seen the record room where the Met's cold cases were stored, and that was probably for the best. The sight could only be described as shocking. Row upon row of endless cardboard file boxes with names and numbers scrawled in various coppers' handwriting. There had to be a total number logged by some poor sucker on punishment duty somewhere, but Boyd had never come across it – might be better not to know. Purgatory would probably have been a better name than the Cold Case file room. A place of unending wretchedness of lingering suffering, not just for the victims themselves, but for the families and friends who'd been forced to carry on their lives with neither answers nor closure. So, no, celebrations never lasted long at the Cold Case Unit.

Sometimes case reviews took up to a week with each team member looking through approximately fifteen cases each before Boyd officially reopened one of them. However, when Grace had come to him with an absolute tragedy from 1986 where two ten-year-old girls had vanished while walking home from school, only to be located four days later inside a dumpster behind what had then been a failing Italian restaurant, it had been reopened almost before Grace had departed his office.

Children were Boyd's most hated cases for a reason, and for that same reason they were the ones he worked hardest to solve. Whichever barbaric monster had raped and strangled them had literally tossed them away like garbage, and it just wasn't right. It had all gotten to him though, especially with Boyd and Spence still butting heads over the elder's involvement with Sapphira, so she'd quietly taken it upon herself to distract him now and again. At one point she'd even convinced him to help her kneed bread – oddly therapeutic. 'I know you'll solve it' she'd said with a smile. 'You always do.' The problem with that being that Boyd could reel off every case he'd left unsolved.

The real distraction from his work life had come when Sapphira had come to him almost in tears because she and Elizabeth had been banned from visiting Abigail in the girls' home she'd been assigned to. While parents being kept away from children in care due to mistreatment wasn't all that uncommon, banning siblings from visitation certainly was; especially when said child was actually seventeen. She, Elizabeth and Abigail had been separated and isolated from one another for so long than doing so again threatened to break them. John Calaghan's twins had already been saving for a three-bedroom place so Abigail could be with them once she'd turned eighteen, so a sudden ban made no sense. Staff at the girls' home had apparently listed Abigail's well-being as their reason, but that was a non-answer if ever Boyd had heard one. Regardless, his girlfriend was panicked and Boyd had a rank high enough to throw his weight around. With some quick digging, a handful of phone calls, some assistance from Grace, and only one actual threat, Boyd had soon managed to determine that Abigail's social worker had listed her sisters as a threat to Abigail's mental well-being by causing flashbacks and risking re-traumatizing her. Therefore Sapphira and Elizabeth had been placed under restrictions to ensure Abigail's safety. While not in agreement, Grace had been able to understand where the social worker's assessment was coming from. Thankfully Grace had promised to pull some strings and try to appeal the decision, which had worked wonders to soothe Sapphira's and Elizabeth's minds. Those girls didn't need to be kept apart, they needed to finally be allowed to be a family.

All of Grace's help with the appeal needed to be done around her day to day work at the Cold Case Unit, and with Social Services dedicated to functioning at a snail's pace, appealing wouldn't be over quickly. So the sisters had thrown themselves into their hobbies to ease their frustrations. Sapphira had probably spent a little too much of her monthly wage on books, while Elizabeth had begun doing portraits of people's pets to both exercise her creative flare and net herself her own income. Sapphira being the only one paying rent had bothered Elizabeth as the older sister, but her therapist had agreed Elizabeth wasn't quite ready for proper employment and art calmed her. That was how she'd ended up with a handful of photographs of dogs, cats and one particularly fluffy guinea pig tacked to her walls waiting to be memorialized in a painting. Thoughts of getting a cat had also popped up.

~X~

That Mondays were terrible was practically and axiom, but Boyd really had hated that particular Monday. He'd woken up to rain and a crash at the end of his road that had blocked the whole place off and forced him to take the long way to work, then the suspect in their double child murder had turned out to have a watertight alibi. Nothing had gone his way that day and all he wanted was to get home out of the rain for the night. However, when he pulled his Audi into his drive and rounded the brick wall to his steps, the man with gray hair threatening to stick to his forehead, found Sapphira sheltered outside his door with a large pizza box in her arms.

"Shit!" He exclaimed as he stopped dead with a deep sigh. "I'm so sorry, Sapphie. I totally forgot you were coming over." Boyd stalked up the steps as Sapphira stood careful to keep the pizza flat. "I didn't mean to make you wait."

"It's okay." She stretched up to kiss him. "I guessed you'd got engrossed in something or other. I did try to call you."

As they headed inside the comfortingly warm house and cracked open a bottle of red, he explained his cellphone had been left in his office for most of the afternoon while he'd been rooting through records with Grace. Distracting. His latest case was something he'd struggled to shut off from after he'd seen those grotesque crime scene photographs. Whoever could do that to two children was a monster that needed to be taken off the streets – and hopefully castrated. If anyone could take his mind off of things it was his beautiful Sapphira, and, by God, did she succeed. By the time they were half way through the pizza and Boyd had refilled their wine glasses, he'd managed to focus on Raiders of the Lost Ark with his left arm wrapped around Sapphira's shoulder. However, homicide cases had a nasty way of lingering and returning when least expected. It didn't come as much of a shock to Boyd when Sapphira leaned in to kiss him lovingly and tug him out of a place he didn't realize he'd gone to. Green eyes looking up at him with such care were like a soothing balm. Boyd said he was sorry.

She shook her head. "Don't be. You're work is important, I know that. If you need to talk about it, you can always talk to me."

Thin lips pulled up at the corner of his mouth to flash her a weak smile before he pulled her closer so he could kiss her forehead.

"I know. That's why I love you."

A hush descended at that. A long silence that threatened to stretch off into eternity if they weren't careful. When blue eyes found green ones, Boyd saw they were flooded with so much hope and happiness eager to break free.

"Do you mean that – actually mean it?"

"Yeah," Boyd confessed. "Yes, I do."

The term 'care for' had been the one he favored for most of their budding relationship, but they'd sailed far beyond basic care months ago. No, he loved her entirely, he just hadn't had the guys to say it aloud until that moment when they'd slipped out with all the cunning and luck of an escaped convict. This was no crush and far more meaningful than any infatuation. It wasn't some mid-life crisis wanting to stroke his ego with a girlfriend thirty-something years his junior. Love. He adored her.

"Good, because I love you, too."

Many might have expected this next step in their relationship to quickly lead to sex, to Boyd lifting her and stalking to his bedroom to ravage the woman he loved. She'd not have refused him, Sapphira probably would have bitten her lip in that not-so-innocent way of hers just to encourage his inner wolf. Yet lust and love weren't the same thing, and being snuggled together on the cream couch in each other's comforting warmth and basking in their confession felt far more intimate. They remained cuddled up until the wine had been finished the credits rolled. They'd have been there even longer but, when Boyd had started to drift off, Sapphira had insisted he went to bed while she turned everything off and cleaned up their empties.

Swapping that crumpled suit of his and donning a loose black t-shirt and boxers had felt surprisingly good. Formality gone in favor of relaxation and, hopefully, a good night's sleep. Something a police officer learned early on after graduating one of the Met's various training centers – that being Hendon more often than not these days – was to never take sleep for granted, that was why so many with detective in front of their name had learned to nap in chairs so well. Yet, before he could clamber into his awaiting bed, an idea struck Boyd and made him smile. A quick bit of rummaging in the junk drawer of his nightstand earned Boyd his prize, and he quickly placed it into Sapphira's hand once she'd joined him.

"So you don't have to wait outside getting wet."

In the palm of her hand was a small silver key much like many others, but Sapphira recognized it as the one he'd given her all that time ago before her brother had kidnapped her. Having the familiar weight in her hand again came as something of a surprise, though it was a truly welcome one; London got cold when it rained after all.

"Really?"

Boyd nodded as large hands when to rest on her slender hips. "Of course really. I love you."

"I love you, too." They shared a kiss. "Now, go warm the bed up for me while I change."

"Yes, Ma'am." He teased before treating himself to a long gaze at Sapphira's backside as it vanished into the bathroom.

By 'while I change' Sapphira had actually meant putting on one of the old t-shirts she'd stolen from Boyd that easily came down to mid-thigh on her. There was something all straight men enjoyed about seeing their girlfriend wearing their clothes – a possessiveness. He liked holding her tight as they drifted off to sleep as well; her body a comforting presence against his as the Sandman arrived.

~X~

Sapphira had hardly gotten inside the apartment she shared with her sister when the smell of paint assaulted her nose. A pungent scent which lingered somewhere between solvent and turpentine, and quickly had her shoving windows open once she'd dropped the groceries down in the kitchen.

"Elle!" Sapphira called as she waved a hand in front of her nose to clear the paint fumes away. "Elle, it smells like a cheap drug den in here."

Elizabeth poked her head out from her bedroom. Her dark hair held up in a messy bun and a smudge of tan paint on her cheek close to her nose. Her whole appearance was a far cry from the day they'd met each other again chained to that bed.

"You say something?"

"Yeah. Are you distilling moonshine or something?"

Elizabeth chuckled softly. "Only my own personal supply. Don't go telling your boyfriend."

"Eh, don't worry about Boyd. You give him a few jars and he'll pretend he never saw anything." Sapphira made quick work of unpacking the groceries and stowing stuff in the fridge – quicker still when Elizabeth helped. "I take it painting dogs is going well."

"Actually, yes. Seems rich people really like having bespoke portraits of their ugly chihuahuas."

"What does bespoke even mean, anyway?"

Elizabeth shrugged as she deposited a few cans of soup into the poor excuse for a pantry. "That I can charge more."

Sounded about right. Sapphira hadn't ever understood art, it seemed like nobody could ever agree on what was actually good and spending a fortune, on what was often little more than a hand print, just didn't compute. Still, art was her sister's happy place much as books were Sapphira's.

Elizabeth held a guilt for not being able to face job hunting, but Sapphira totally understood and wouldn't force Elizabeth into something she wasn't ready for. The money their father had left them, when added to the inheritance from Donovan, meant they weren't desperate for money.

While paint fumes cleared out on the afternoon breeze and Elizabeth surely came down from her mild high, they prepared a small lunch of chicken salad sandwiches and ate at their small table. Eating when they were hungry, sleeping when they were tired, weren't things that came naturally to the sisters, or maybe that those things had been trained out of them would have been a better description. Anger covered up pain for lots of people but the sisters refused to give anger and pain any more of their time. Things were good now and that would be the main focus of their lives and they could indulge when they wanted – hence the mini chocolate muffins Sapphira pulled out from their snack cupboard.

"Muffin and a film?"

Elizabeth just grinned.