“He left. I don’t know,” Ethan stated. “I was going to go after him but then Kane and Quinn dropped this in my lap. I had to deal with this first. He was my next move.”
She laid down the law.
This was her final say on this.
“If you remove him, you remove me. I’m going to go find him. Let me know your decision.”
Elizabeth left, slamming the door behind her.
All three men stood there.
“Ethan.”
Blackhawk shook his head.
There was no way he was fighting his wife on this. They all knew Chris was special to her. They all knew she only stayed in the FBI for as long as she did because of him.
Gabe was on his own. Yes, they were technically partners, but he wasn’t wearing Elizabeth’s target.
Nope.
Only, he wasn’t taking Chris’s side because of his wife. He was doing it because it was the right thing to do.
“If you push this, you lose an ME, Elizabeth, Callen, and me. The CIA offered me a job, and I’ll take it,” he bluffed. If he left the FBI, he was out of a job, and he knew it.
Only his boss didn’t know that.
Gabe was horrified.
“You’d play me like that?” he asked. “We’re supposed to be partners.”
“Uh, she’s my wife. Do you go home and do the opposite of what Livy wants? How’s that going to work out, Gabe?”.
Shit.
He was screwed.
“Jesus! The inmates are running the asylum and blackmailing me!”
“Gabe you’ve never liked the man, but you like her. Bury it. You need to do this for her. That’s her brother. If you ever loved her at all, see that this will kill her. If she loses Chris, she’ll die inside and out. We may be her husbands, but that was the man who taught her how to love. He’s a good person,” Ethan stated.
“I don’t get how you tolerate this.”
Ethan shrugged. “Honestly, it’s not your business why we tolerate it. We just do. Let it go. Is it worth losing your deputy director and the two people who run the Violent Crimes Unit?”
He calmed down.
“What the hell? When did I lose control?” he asked.
Callen knew.
“Right about when you tried to shit can Chris Leonard,” he added. “There’s not much off limits in her life, but that happens to be one of the people she’ll die to protect.”
Gabe sighed.
“Fine.”
“I mean it. He’s ours.”
“I told you fine. I’ll bend the rules for him this one time—only because he has an exemplary work record, he is excellent at his job, and he bleeds for this team.”
Callen knew it was more.
They had him over the barrel.
Gabe needed them to clean up this mess or he was going down with a black mark on his record. His legacy as Director of the FBI was at risk.
“He stays, but if it gets out that he’s this sick, I can’t protect him from the flack. You know that.”
“We’ll handle it. You won’t regret this,” Ethan stated.
Yeah, Gabe doubted that.
He already was.
Chapter Three
Across Town
I t wasn’t easy to find him. While she’d hoped he’d gone home to their house, he hadn’t. On top of that, his cell was off, and every call was going to voicemail. That gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, as she hoped he wasn’t going to do something like run or hide.
She just got the lead on O’Banion, and her plan was to dive in and make that man’s life hell.
So, she tried to hunt him down.
Elizabeth had called Wyler and he said he wasn’t there. So that meant there was only one other place he could go.
What used to be their townhouse.
When she got to Chris’s original home, it was clear that he was there. His shiny black Mercedes was parked up on the curb and the backend of it was all cockeyed.
It looked like a crazy person had parked it.
He loved that vehicle—not as much as the red one that had been destroyed in the fire, but he respected his rides. Chris was a car nut.
How he parked…?
Well, that said a lot about his state of mind, and she couldn’t blame him. The news he’d received had been devastating.
She wanted to weep and say how sorry she was for all of this. Someone she loved, who had been part of her, was sick and dying.
Her mind was spinning, and she began trying to figure out how to help him. Elizabeth couldn’t lose him.
She had to hold on to him for as long as she had him.
What had to come first was making him come back to work. If he was there, she could cluck over him, making sure he was okay.
Next, she’d start researching.
She was going to help him any way she could.
There was no doubt that he’d be stubborn, and that didn’t matter to her. They’d fought for him and fought to keep his job. If he went, she went.
Elizabeth would always choose family first.
Always.
Hopping out of the vehicle that she’d snuck away in, it was just one more time Rory was going to flip his shit. There was no doubt in her mind that at that very moment, he was ratting her out to Ethan.
Yes, she’d left the Hoover building unprotected.
But honestly, Chris came first. Later, she’d apologize to the man. Never again would he buy the excuse of a trip to the cafeteria for a coffee.
The man was like a boil on her ass, and she actually missed Ivan.
God!
She was going to pay for even thinking that. He’d be back and riding her ass with a vengeance in no time.
For now, she had to work on Chris and this situation.
It was time to see why he didn’t come looking for her. Had she gotten that kind of news, she would have found Callen, then Ethan, and finally Chris.
She would have leaned on them.
They were hers.
It was reciprocal.
First things first, Elizabeth pulled out his spare key, got into Chris’s ride, and parked it the correct way. Then she headed to the front door and pulled another key from her ring. It had been there for a long time, and she never could get rid of it.
It was a moment of their past, and she knew he’d never changed the lock. Elizabeth called this place home at one time, too, and they had a rule about the place.
You could always come home.
And in a way, he had, and now so was she.
As she entered the elegantly decorated brownstone, Chris’s medical bag was on the floor with the tools spilled out onto the hardwood.
Yeah, he was going to be in bad shape.
First, the ride.
Then, his beloved bag.
Gently, she picked up the tools and placed them back in the old leather medical bag that she’d given him a long time ago. With reverence, she ran her fingers over the plate that had his name engraved on it.
It made her smile.
That had been one hell of a birthday celebration.
Elizabeth made a mental note to prepare something special for this upcoming birthday.
She wasn’t losing him to HIV.
Not now.
She would fight for as long as she had to for his sake. Chris wasn’t dying on her.
Not now.
They were still young.
“Christopher? I know you’re here! Where are you?” she called into the silence of the house.
It was too quiet.
It made Elizabeth edgy.
Scanning the first floor, his office door was ajar, and that was unlike Chris. He’d always kept it closed. The man was even more OCD than her.
Heading there, she pushed the door open and saw the light on the desk was left on. As she headed there to shut it off, that’s when she saw them.
There were two envelopes.
Picking up the one addressed to her, she opened it. The neat, precise writing
took her back to all the notes he’d left for her. It was comfortably familiar and gave her peace.
Until she read it.
With each line she finished, there was that rush of adrenaline.
“Oh Jesus!” she muttered, as tears filled her eyes. It sounded like…
A goodbye note.
In that instant, panic filled her as she finished it.
Everything had just escalated.
“Chris,” she whispered, realizing that she should have known. His medical bag was missing the one thing he’d always kept in it.
His gun.
It was gone.
Her heart began pounding. Racing up the stairs, three at a time, Elizabeth began praying to anyone who would listen. If she found him dead…
God!
Just God!
Rushing into the bedroom they once shared, he wasn’t there but the bathroom door was closed.
There was water running.
A million scenarios filled her head. She’d come across about a gazillion crime scenes, and her fear was what was waiting for her behind the door.
Jesus!
Elizabeth couldn’t believe that Chris would end his life. She couldn’t believe that he’d hurt himself and remove himself from their family.
She wanted to be sick.
She wanted to freak the hell out.
“Chris?” she called, praying to a God she’d left a long time ago. The last time she’d uttered a prayer, it had been when Ethan had been abducted.
For love, she’d pray again.
Slowly, she opened the door, fearing what she’d find waiting for her.
That’s where she found him lying on the floor of his shower. His head was obscured, and all she could see was his body.
Her heart thundered.
“Chris!” she shouted, as she raced toward his prone body, fearing the worst.
Elizabeth was forced into one of her worst nightmares.
She may be too late.
* * * B l a c k h a w k - W h i t e f o x * * *
Hoover Building
Ethan pulled as many strings as he possibly could to handle their current situation. Now, it was all about fixing a mess that the FBI had made years ago. If this got out, it was going to be hell for all of them. FBI conspiracies were a nightmare to handle—especially if the douchebag president was riding roughshod.
He’d feed them to the media without batting an eyelash. They were on their own, and he was going to ensure their asses were covered.
While he didn’t like it, it went with the territory.
This was his job, and he had to protect the institute, his partner, and their names.
This was his cross to bear.
Whether he agreed with what Gabe did or not—all those years ago—he had to clean up the mess that now came to light. It had fallen into his lap, even though he had been an agent at that time.
This was on his shoulders.
Again.
What had come to light was damn ugly. They’d taken a man, who was definitely guilty, played the system against him, and taken his right to a trial away.
They’d violated his civil rights.
That didn’t sit well with him.
At all.
All of his life, Blackhawk had fought for justice, and now he had to decide how this would all come down in the end. Would he be part of the side that declared justice for a man who wanted to hurt his wife or the side that didn’t care?
His heart said one thing.
His gut said the other.
At that moment, he was a man without a clue of how he was going to lean.
The whole shit fest was a hard pill to swallow. It wasn’t like he was surprised.
Gabe’s predecessor had played dirty a lot, and in the end, he’d gotten a big old dose of karma.
That was for sure.
Now, he was trying to keep his morals afloat in a sea of potential disasters.
All Ethan could hope was it didn’t bite him in the ass.
“How’s it going?” Callen asked as he came into the room, closing the door behind him.
“Not well,” he admitted. “In fact, it’s a mess. The woman who was left in the alley is being used like a rope in tug-o-war. We want her, the city won’t hand her over, and Gabe is about to flip his shit.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah, you can say that again. The Metro PD says she’s theirs since O’Banion is dead and this is a hoax. I can’t tell them that he’s actually in protective custody.”
He didn’t blame him for being worked up.
“What can we do?” Callen asked.
“We might have to work this one off of pictures and hang in there until the next victim is found.”
“I don’t like this, Ethan.”
He sighed.
Neither did he.
“I know, Cal. I feel dirty about the whole thing, and that’s hard to swallow for me. I run my part of the FBI above the law. I don’t take shortcuts or violate someone’s rights to shut them up. Once you go there…it’s all downhill.”
Well, Callen understood that, but he was referring to the fact that this was about their woman.
Elizabeth.
Fuck O’Banion’s rights.
His wife came first.
“No, I meant about Elizabeth facing down this sicko. I just read the file, and the guy had a raging hard-on over our girl. I don’t feel comfortable with her helping him. I want to put a bullet in his head. Isn’t there a way around this?” he asked. “If he looks at her wrong, I may kill him. After all, he’s already dead, right?”
Oh, Ethan got it.
“I know, Callen, but we have to try to do the right thing. Elizabeth is going to be the only one who can do this. She’s going to need a team.”
“And?”
“I pulled the file on that particular case, and in order to catch someone tied to O’Banion, I think we need to bring in the experts.”
“Uh, okay. Who exactly would that be? I thought you wanted to keep this low-key.”
Oh, he did.
That was his plan.
So, he laid it out.
“Chris worked on the original case, and he knows what the man is like.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“Tony too. He was in Boston when she was working it as an agent. He will keep it quiet, and he has knowledge of the cases. He was one of the Feds who helped put Carl Fitzpatrick and Joey O’Malley away on a later case. He was the bone expert that was lent out by the FBI.”
“That sounds good. Who else?” Callen asked.
Ethan flipped through some pages.
“We also have two agents listed in that original file. I think in this case, in order to keep it low-key, we should involve them too.”
“I agree.”
“I know our wife. She will want to work with Johanna, and she can do research, but in the field, she needs to have the two agents who were with her that day.”
Callen thought about it.
This was one big circle.
“Is that why you let Max Chase into the building?” Callen asked. “He came to see her.”
“Yeah, well, she likes to play momma bird, and that man still has a hole in him from his father’s death. I figured she could always use someone who is on the up and up. Max had proved himself on that case.”
He agreed.
Callen didn’t think that Ethan understood how all of them were links in that chain. It was one thing to live out the story, but looking back, it was miraculous that they’d all missed each other by moments.
“Did you ever see that beaded necklace she keeps in that box in her desk?”
Blackhawk thought about it.
“The turquoise one?” he asked pouring himself a drink. What he needed was something a lot stiffer than coffee.
It had been a bad day.
While HR frowned upon it, the upper management had booze in their office for meetings. “Want a drink?” Ethan offered, willing to s
hare.
“I’ll pass. That bourbon shit will kill my liver. Natives and hard liquor do not go well together at all.”
Ethan laughed.
He was well aware. That was why he was having A drink—as in one.
“Yeah, I know. Why are you asking about that old beaded necklace?” Ethan asked, taking a seat at his desk.
“The beads…I gave them to her over fifteen years ago, and I never knew it.”
Ethan’s drink paused halfway to his mouth, and he glanced over at him.
“Pardon?”
“They were from me.”
Clearly, he was missing something.
“How the hell did you manage to do that? I’ve seen them since the day we were married. She’s carried them from Salem to Damascus, and back to DC.”
Here was the miracle that was their lives. It was why Callen had no doubt that he was meant to be part of their union. It was the little coincidences—normally, something they didn’t believe—that kept catching them off guard.
“Remember when I came to see you in DC?” he asked.
“When? You came a few times.”
Yeah, he was aware. For his grandfather, Callen kept trying to get past Ethan’s hate.
It had never ended well.
“It was the first time. I was supposed to sit in on that training speech you did on profiling, and a few others that weekend.”
Oh, he recalled it.
Ethan had been an asshole to his younger brother, and he still regretted it.
“Yes, I recall.”
“I came to your brownstone first, and I talked to you about forgiving me.”
Ethan kept drinking.
There was a burn in his gut, and it had nothing to do with the pricey bourbon.
It was guilt.
It festered there.
Truth be told, Ethan hated that day. He hated how he’d treated Callen. That had to have been hard for his brother, and he’d never forgiven himself—or for any of the other times that he’d hurt him.
“I vaguely recall it,” Ethan stated.
Callen laughed.
“You told me to die, I left you a note, and then I walked away from my brother with the intent of never coming back again.”
Yeah, he had been a horrible human being that day, and Blackhawk knew it.
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