Chapter Text
Lucy and Tim headed for the exit to look for Dimitri, ready to call for more backup. “Did he tell you where could’ve gone?” Tim asked. “You talked to him more at the party than I did, did he tell you anything, any hints about where he might go?” He reached to open the door.
“No, nothing,” Lucy replied, walking through. “We should probably talk to Adira, she might-”
She cut herself off, seeing the three guards who had welcomed them heading for Kostou’s room, stopping once they saw them. The guards’ eyes raked over the pair, registering the blood.
“Where is Kostou?” the one in the middle asked.
Covered in blood. Kostou’s dead behind us. There was no easy way out of this one.
“Uh…” Tim started, trying to think quickly, but they wouldn’t give him the time.
The men all put a hand on the guns in their belts. “I’m gonna ask one more time,” the leader said. “Where is Kostou?”
Depending on how quickly these men could draw, Lucy and Tim could be dead before they could even touch their own pieces.
The leader looked back and forth at the others, nodding, a decision reached.
Lucy reached for her gun in another Hail Mary attempt at survival, but before the men could even get their guns out of their belts, they began to shake violently with a distinct sound of electrical buzzing behind them. As the two on the sides fell, Lucy saw they had been taken down by the police officers with stun guns until the middle one fell, revealing Detective Nyla Harper behind him. Lucy had half a mind to launch at her for a hug.
Nyla nudged the leader she'd just taken down with her boot, making sure he was unconscious. She took in Tim and Lucy's appearances and announced, "You guys look terrible."
“Good to see you too, Harper,” Tim countered, not fully sarcastic.
“Kostou in there?” she asked, pointing behind them.
“Yeah,” Lucy answered. “Dead.” The two officers accompanying Nyla moved past them to go into the room.
“And the drive?”
“Nowhere to be found,” Tim answered.
Nyla looked back at him. “You mean like…”
“Fully decapitated.” Nyla made a face, and Tim continued, “Dimitri killed him before we got here, we don’t know where he is.”
She pulled out her radio. “Units, be advised, Kostou is dead, killer is Dimitrios Romanatos, still at large, possibly in the building, possibly has Kostou’s decapitated head with the drive in it.” Lucy’s eyebrows knitted together as Nyla put her radio back in her belt. “You two okay?”
“Yeah,” Lucy answered, still slightly shaken. “Did you find the guys in the basement?”
Nyla nodded. “Medics are with them now, they’ll be alright. Right now, the objective is to find Dimitri and find that drive. Covers aren’t needed anymore, you can arrest him on sight. Do you guys have any ideas where he might be?”
Lucy shook her head. “He has a fiance staying in the hotel, we can ask her if she has any ideas.”
“Okay, good, do that. Bradford, go with her in case of Dimitri hiding there or if she has added security.” She pulled two radios and spare cuffs from her belt to hand them one each, followed by their badges. The weight had never felt so good in Lucy’s hand. “I’ll stay here and help guard the body, fill forensics in when they get here.”
“Sounds good,” Tim said, starting down the hallway.
Lucy started to follow behind but stopped to call after Nyla. “Hey!” Nyla turned to listen. “How did you know the drive was in Kostou’s head somewhere?”
“The bug picked up Bradford’s code,” Nyla said, like it was obvious, before pointing to Tim. “That was good quick thinking, by the way.” She headed into the hotel room to help the team.
“I was too in my head.” Lucy’s sapphire necklace. Of course.
Lucy tried to maintain a poker face when she looked at Tim, but he knew her too well not to know what she was thinking.
“Lucy-”
“Don’t worry about it, you saved the opp. You’re better at undercover work than I was giving you credit for.”
“No, but-”
She fought to keep her voice steady despite the small lump growing in her throat. “Let’s just get this done.”
Silence. Again. Each one was worse than the last, but this one was taking the crown for the whole weekend. Because she wanted it to be silent. She didn’t want to hear a single word from him that wasn’t directly work-related, mentally kicking herself for ever breaking that rule in the first place.
“Before we talk to Adira, don’t you think-”
“The elevator is bugged,” she reminded him.
Tim steeled himself against her hostility. “Okay… can we talk at some point?”
Lucy closed her eyes to breathe again, thankful that his “profession of love” was no longer ringing in her ears. “I think it’s important that we just focus on Dimitri.”
How could she have been so stupid? What was this, a romance novel? He was a police officer on an undercover operation. She should have been listening for code the moment he opened his mouth, but she was too wrapped up in the situation to think about anything but him. All weekend had been her getting her own hopes up and being surprised when he reconfirmed what his actions had been telling her, over and over again. Tim Bradford was a professional, and that would take priority over his personal life every time without fail. One last lesson she could learn from him.
They arrived at room 306, where Dimitri and Adira were staying.
Lucy knocked on the door. “Adira?” she called. “Are you in there?”
They waited a few seconds before hearing footsteps approaching. After a moment, she opened the door, in a tee-shirt and jeans, complete with tennis shoes. “Hey, guys! What’s up?”
“Hey!” Lucy said, matching her upbeat tone. “I was just wondering if you’d seen Dimitri lately? I had to talk to him about Kostou.”
“Hmm…” She looked to the sky as if she were thinking. “Mmmm… no! Haven’t seen him around much.”
“That’s weird,” Tim chimed in. “How long would you say it’s been since you’ve seen him?”
Lucy nudged him. Subtlety.
“Uhhhh, pffffft, maybe since… this morning? Yeah, yeah, this morning. He had to leave to get something and, uh, it’s been a while. Why? Is everything okay?”
Lucy monitored her body language. Loose, knees not locked even though she was standing in place. Waiting to react to something. She was waiting for them to tell her bad news, and she was ready to properly react to it.
Lucy peered around Adira into the hotel room. The bed was covered in clothes, half folded, half unfolded, next to a half-packed suitcase. “I thought you guys were staying the full weekend. Checking out early for some reason?”
She shrugged. “No shame in getting packing done early, I guess.”
“Look, Adira,” Lucy said, softly, in an attempt to disarm. “If Dimitri is in trouble, you need to tell us.”
“No trouble here. We’re just fine, thank you.”
“Kostou has friends, allies. Employees in this building who will kill for Kostou if Dimitri did something. His best chance at survival is with us.”
Her folded arms shifted, and Lucy knew she was getting somewhere. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You want to protect him,” Tim said, finally matching Lucy’s non-aggressive tone. “You love him, and you’d try to protect him no matter what mistakes he makes. Trust me, I get it. And because I get it, I’m telling you this is his only option at survival. If you don’t let us help him, and something happens to him, that’s not on you, but it’ll feel like it is for a long time. Even later, it’ll always haunt you a little if you don’t think you did everything you could to keep him safe.”
Her arms dropped to her side as she looked back and forth between Tim and Lucy, half looking like she wanted to cut and run out the third-story window behind her. Finally, she took a deep breath.
Aphrodite. That was the name of Kostou’s yacht. A yacht being kept in the Graycroft Piers left of the hotel. A yacht that Dimitri was in charge of the keys to. The plan was for Adira to meet him at nightfall, and the sun was setting by the time they talked to her. They didn’t have much time.
Nyla was already waiting for Tim and Lucy at the dock, with the same two accompanying officers from earlier. “Hey,” Lucy greeted. “Are more coming?”
“Yeah, the whole team is on their way. Are you sure he’s in there?”
Tim nodded. “This is the time Adira was supposed to meet him. He’ll be in there waiting with the drive.”
“I’ll go alone,” Lucy announced, earning a look from Tim. “I’ll get the USB and Dimitri off the boat alive.”
“Like hell,” Tim interjected. “You’re not going alone. He has the high ground and he could be armed.”
“He is armed. He’s terrified, and he doesn’t need any more pressure on him than necessary.”
“Chen,” he warned sternly, but Lucy could hear the pleading in his voice.
“I’ll be fine,” she promised, mostly to herself.
Tim looked at Nyla for agreement, but Nyla knew that once Lucy set a goal out loud, it was as good as done.
“Bradford, wait with me.” Nyla walked, waiting for Tim to follow, but he still didn’t want to budge.
He grappled with the decision, finally narrowing his eyes and faintly shaking his head. “Stick a fist straight up in the air if he reaches for his weapon. We can see it from here.”
She nodded, but she had already mentally refused to let anyone else die tonight if she could help it at all. Finally, Tim headed to follow Nyla. They headed to some bushes on the sidewalk, within vision and shooting distance of the boat, but definitely not hearing distance.
Lucy was on her own now, with one chance to get this right.
Slowly, she walked onto the dock next to the yacht, peering into it, knowing Dimitri was in the cabin. She knocked three times on the outside of the boat, then waited for the light in the cabin to turn on, whistling the first five main notes of Ride of the Valkyries. Their code.
The door opened, and she heard Dimitri’s footsteps headed up the stairs to the cabin. “Adira!” he shouted. “I thought you weren’t com-”
He stopped at the sight of Lucy, but there was no anger in his face. Surprised, afraid but not angry.
“Expecting someone else, huh?” Lucy greeted.
“I… I didn’t think you’d still be alive.” He looked her over, his hand slowly moved to his hip. Lucy kept her clenched fist at her side, knowing the moment she reached for her gun, at least one of them would be dead in seconds. “Where’s Adira?”
“Not coming.”
He frowned at this news. “No… no, she’s coming, she’s just… running late. She’s running late.” His hand tangled in his curly hair as the reality of his situation set in. “I’ll wait for her.”
“Dimitri, where’s the drive?”
He looked up at her with remorse in his eyes, and as his hand came down from his hair, the light caught it, and Lucy could see that it was covered in blood. Only one?
“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely.
“For what?” Lucy asked. “Kostou? I wasn’t his biggest fan either.”
“I needed his attention off me to do what I needed to do, so… I told him you weren’t in love. He’s obsessed with love because he’s never had it himself, so I knew that lying about love would be the greatest offense you could commit to him.” He wiped a tear forming in his eye. “I… I know that you know love. You know love the way my Adira and I know love. I’m sorry that I tried to kill the same love that makes my life worth living.”
Lucy paused, registering the information. She and Tim’s covers hadn’t faltered, their “love” was convincing to everyone, including two people obsessed with love in their own ways. The only people they couldn’t convince were each other.
“Who’s on the drive, Dimitri?” Lucy said, taking a step closer to the boat. “What was so important that you turned on Kostou?”
Dimitri wiped more tears coming out. “My sister.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Me either… she only worked for Kostou for a year. She was his pilot, she… she didn’t know who he was. She just knew he was a rich man whose private jet she flew. When she found out what he did….” He looked around as if the words he was looking for were visible somewhere on the boat. “I didn’t find out who she was until she’d quit. He acted like he was fine with her leaving, but…” His sentence trailed off.
“But he put her on the list,” Lucy finished.
He paused before nodding.
“Dimitri, being a pilot isn’t illegal. If you give us the drive, she can go into Witness Protection. She’ll be safe.” He shook his head, not trusting that the government could protect her. “We can tell her who you are, what you did for her.”
His lip trembled. “And Adira?”
“Adira is safe. She’s waiting for you.”
A hopeful smile tugged at his lips, before quickly fading. He took a deep breath. “Kostou’s head is in the cabin.” He retrieved a small object from his pocket with his bloody hand before throwing it over, and the object landed at Lucy’s feet. The drive. “The password is Romanatos96. Capital ‘R’. Protect everyone on that list. Even with Kostou gone, people will still be after them.”
Lucy reached for her cuffs, but her hands shot out in front of her when she saw Dimitri connect the barrel of his gun to his temple. “WAIT!” she cried. “Just wait!”
Dimitri chuckled, his grip on the gun tightening. “For what? To go to jail?” His finger slid around the trigger, ready to pull. “My abuser is dead, my sister is safe. I’ve done what I had to do.”
He raised his elbow for a better angle, squeezing his eyes shut as he braced for the blast. Lucy scrambled to fulfill her promise that he’d survive the night.
“I do know love!” she shouted. “I know love and I know that if the one I love left me this way, it would shatter me! Do you really want to do that to Adira?!” His grip on his gun remained tight, his eyes squeezed, but his lip was trembling. “You said that I know love the way you do, and you’re right. Adira isn’t here to tell you, but I am. I know that no matter what you did, she loves you.”
His eyes opened, causing tears to spill out. “I can’t be with her. I’ll go to jail!”
“Right now, she’s not worried about you being with her, she’s worried about you being alive! She loves you, and that doesn’t change whether she can be with you or not.”
He blinked through spilling tears. “If I live… I’ll do life. She’ll be stuck visiting me for the rest of our lives. I want her to live, not… I love her too much to make her wait for a life she’ll never have.”
“Today… you made sure I remembered what it felt like to not know if the one I loved was dead or alive. To not know whether I’d ever see him again.” Lucy recalled the basement from that day, remembered how she had to suppress the fear of not knowing if Tim was alive or not in order to function. She remembered his quarantine, the distant memory of not knowing if her TO would make it back from the other side of that door. She remembered every time she heard “Officer down” on her radio coming from a scene she knew he had responded to. That was the feeling she now summoned in full now for someone else’s benefit. “It took over my brain. My body. I couldn’t close my eyes because all I’d see was him. I imagined my life without the possibility of ever seeing him again, and it was enough to drive me crazy. And that’s how Adira feels right now. I didn’t lie to you when I said she was waiting for you. The future, your future together, if you even have one, all of that is secondary to her right now. All she’s thinking about right now is seeing you alive one more time.” Lucy took two more steps toward the boat as she saw Dimitri’s grip on his gun loosen. “Will you let her see you one more time? Doesn’t she deserve for you to give her that?”
Dimitri gripped his gun one last time, causing Lucy’s breath to hitch in her throat, before he dropped the gun with a heavy sigh, making his way toward the ladder to get off of the boat.
Nyla, Tim, and the rest of the team came out from the bushes. Nyla and her team made their way to Dimitri to arrest him, but Tim headed straight to Lucy. “You okay?”
She nodded but wasn’t completely sure if “yes” was the truth.
“You did it. Just like you said you would,” he praised.
“ We did it.”
He softly smiled, and Lucy realized she forgot to tell Dimitri the most important part. When Adira saw him smile again, all that worrying would be worth it for her.
“So what did you tell him to get him to put his gun down?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Just doing my job.”
First thing was showers. After showers, two long separate video calls with Grey.
“Well, you finished your operation a day early,” he told Lucy near the end of their call. “Take the day, tell Bradford to do the same. Come back to town and just take the day to unwind. Back to patrol on Tuesday.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And good job. Both of you.”
Lucy smiled at the computer. “Thank you, sir.” He hung up and Lucy handed the computer back to Nyla. “So now what?”
Nyla exited out of the video chat program and closed all the computer windows. “Now, we go home. And I have a day free to bug my daughter any way I please.”
“I don’t know if I can just ‘unwind’ that easily.”
“Sure you can,” Nyla assured. “You can unwind knowing you saved the lives of everyone on that list and more.”
Lucy stood up from the table, stretching her legs. “I’ll tell you what I could use right now: a long nap.”
“Well, you can always nap on the way back. That’s an hour and a half of sleep while Bradford drives.”
“Wait, I’m… I’m riding back with Tim, too?”
Nyla looked at her like it was obvious. “Yeah? My van is full and Motor Transportation needs their car back.”
“Cool,” Lucy said, nodding, planning to knock out the moment she sat in her seat.
Packing was quiet. They went over details from the case, complained about paperwork, no conversation they wouldn’t have with anyone else.
Lucy looked around the room as she left, mentally bidding the fancy lamps, phenomenal showerhead, and cloudlike bed goodbye. After one final ride in the newly debugged elevator, she gazed around the gorgeous, ornate hotel lobby one more time, waving goodbye to the desk manager, who she hoped had no bad feelings toward them.
The sunshine of the parking lot felt sweeter than usual, and she imagined she was feeling the freedom she’d earned on her skin. She was proud of herself. Of both of them.
Tim unlocked the car doors and threw his duffel bag in the back. After setting her suitcase down next to his, Lucy climbed into the front passenger seat, expecting him to get in. She looked over and saw he was leaning frontward against the driver-side window, blocking the sunlight. She opened her door and stepped out to find him bowing his head over the hood of the car, fiddling with the keys, in thought.
“Tim?” she asked.
“I meant it.”
“What?”
He looked up from the car at her. “I meant what I said to you. Yes, I used code to let them know about the drive in case we didn’t make it, but I meant every word I said.”
“Tim-” she tried to interject, but he wouldn’t let her.
“The opp is over now. No codes, no bugs, no covers. It’s just you and me. And I can’t get into this car with you and drive another hour and a half in silence if we both have anything to say at all.”
“Okay, so why have you been avoiding me for weeks? Why can’t you even tell me why you never tried for another date?”
“I did tell you! I told you in the basement!”
She didn’t answer, taking a second to remember.
“Lucy, for a year, I was more comfortable around you than anyone else, and I never looked into why you were the only person who made me feel that way. And then I realized, and it turned my world on its head. I thought it would go away on its own and it got worse. I thought it was ridiculous, and then you said yes to a date. And then we went and… it was everything I knew it would be.”
Lucy’s breath hitched. This whole time she’d thought she’d done something wrong and she didn’t even matter enough to him to tell her what it was.
“But then, I got scared,” he continued, making his way around the hood of the car, closer. “Everything good in my life has gone to hell at one point or another, and you’d become the best thing in recent memory without even trying. So I basically ran in the other direction, and I sent this to hell myself. And for that, I’m sorry.”
Lucy blinked away tears threatening to form, determined to keep her eyes clear. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because this weekend, I got a taste of life with you. I held your hand, I danced with you. I got to feel you clinging to me in your sleep. Those were real things that happened.” Lucy stared at the ground, and when she did, she saw his shoes take three more steps in her direction. She raised her chin and her breath caught again at having him so close. “And I saw how much I hurt you. How much I kept hurting you. And I need you to know now that you are my dream, you have been for months.”
“But it doesn’t have to be a dream!” she exclaimed, finally taking a step toward him. “It never had to be a dream, I… I just wanted to be with you!”
Tim blinked at her admission, as if, after all they’d been through, he had any right to be shocked.“But what if it’s just for now?” he finally asked. “What if we get our hopes up and I let you down?”
“Tim… the only way you can let me down is by knowing what you want and not even trying to have it.”
He took a breath, registering her demand.
“And so what if it doesn’t work out down the line? Are you really going to not let yourself be happy now because there’s a chance we might not, what, be together forever?” She took another step toward him, now just a foot away. “We are cops. Anything could happen to us at any point, and if we go out, we wanna go out knowing we took the leap, right?” She took a breath. “And plus,” she finished. “I have a feeling that if we gave this thing an honest try, we might be in it for the long haul.”
His eyebrows shot up, hope dancing in his eyes. “You think so?”
She smiled, reaching up to his cheek. “In the basement, you said that you didn’t think I’d want you how you are, or you didn’t ‘trust’ me to. Is that true?”
He reached up to his face to hold her hand there. “I’m trying not to let it be.”
She stroked his jaw, cherishing the feeling of the stubble scratching her thumb. “Good. We’ll build trust together.”
Her eyes flicked to his mouth and that was the green light he needed. In less than a second, he’d crashed his lips into hers, his hands pulling her face closer to his. She moved her hand from his cheek to his neck, using the other hand to steady herself against the car. He kissed her deeper, pushing her backward, so he could turn her to press back against the passenger seat window, still kissing her like the world was about to end.
She pulled his waist to her, then back to his head, incapable of getting enough of him. Free to be his, finally believing he could be hers.
He broke the kiss for air, bringing a needy noise from her since breathing was currently not a priority for her. He chuckled lowly, bowing his forehead to touch hers.
“It is an hour and a half drive back home,” he complained.
“I mean… we finished the operation a day early,” she answered, running her fingers over the short hairs on the back of his neck. “So we don’t technically have to leave until tomorrow....”
He brought his head up to look at her, leaning his hand against the roof of the car behind her, eyebrows raised. “So what are you suggesting, Mrs. Morse?”
She got on her toes to whisper into his ear, “I think you should get the bags from the backseat.”