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The woman's voice that stopped Eliot in his tracks spoke in Hebrew.
“Take one more step and you die.”
Eliot kept his feet planted but turned his body towards the voice.
“It would be nice to know who broke into my own safe house to threaten me,” he growled into the dark in the same language.
There was a brief silence, and then the woman’s voice was back.
“Mikel Dayan says that you can be trusted.”
Eliot blinked. Whatever answer he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.
“Can you be trusted?”
“That depends,” he said, wondering if he should risk putting his earbud in. “What do I need to be trusted with?”
The light in the hallway of his apartment was switched on, and Eliot could see the outline of a woman wearing a tight shirt and cargo pants, holding a gun in one hand. She’d used that hand to flip the switch, taking the weapon off Eliot, which he assumed meant that she’d decided to trust him.
“Please,” the woman said quietly, her free hand pressed tightly to her side. Eliot watched as blood dripped between her fingers and onto his floor. “Please,” she said again, in English this time, and Eliot saw her face was shiny with sweat. “Help me.”
She was exhausted, he could see that. It was confirmed the next moment when she groaned and slid down the wall, knees giving out from under her.
“Hey,” Eliot said, moving towards her. He stopped again as the gun she still held trained on him once more. And despite the pain the woman had to be in, her aim was rock steady.
“Can you be trusted?” she gasped.
“I guess you’re going to find out,” Eliot said, and her hand dropped as the woman sagged, what seemed like every ounce of her energy gone. “Alright,” he said, taking the gun from her and tucking it into the back of his waistband. He didn’t start with the obvious wound in her side, he worked his way from the top down.
He didn’t feel anything under her thick, dark curls on her head, and when he peeled her eyelids back, the woman’s pupils were the same size in her brown eyes.
“I was stabbed,” the woman said, hardly any fight left in her voice. “Not hit in the head.”
“I’ll be the judge of how injured you are, thanks,” Eliot answered, continuing to prod gently at the rest of the woman’s body. He didn’t disarm her beyond the gun, but he did find four knives in various locations.
“Alright,” he said when he determined she’d been telling the truth. “Up we go.” Eliot grasped her along the forearm, helping the woman to stand. She winced, but refrained from making any noise. “My surgical stuff is in the master bath. Come on.”
He wound up having to cut away her shirt, but Eliot ignored the bared skin except for the ragged knife wound in the woman’s abdomen. She kept silent the entire time he cleaned and irrigated the wound, as he began to stitch her up. He did notice that her stomach already had some pretty impressive scars on it.
“Mossad?” he asked, not looking up at her.
“Former,” was all the reply he got.
Fair enough. If he’d shown up at this woman’s house in the middle of the night wounded, he wouldn’t want to answer questions either.
“Mikel told you about me?” he asked as he finished taping gauze over the stitches he’d made.
The woman nodded, cracking the seal on the water bottle he’d given her. She needed the fluids.
“Said if I was ever in Boston, you could be counted on.”
Eliot raised an eyebrow. This safe house was just outside of Denver.
“She kept tabs,” the woman said, pulling a small tin out of one of the pockets on her cargos. She took a pill out and swallowed it, chasing it with more water.
Eliot stood and began to clean up the bathroom; it looked like the surgical suite it most often was, blood spattered in unlikely places.
“Thank you,” she said after a brief silence, and Eliot looked over to see her playing with a small stone on a thin necklace.
He nodded to her, then jerked his chin at the shower. “Clean yourself up. I’ve got some clothes I think will fit you.” She was about Parker’s height, though she had more curves. “They’ll probably be a little tight, but it’s better than bloody. There’s plastic wrap under the sink to cover the gauze.” The woman nodded at him, and shortly after Eliot left the bathroom, he heard the water kick on.
By the time it turned off, Eliot had cleaned up all the blood he’d found in his hallway, leading to the window in the room he’d turned into a gym. He’d placed clothes for the woman just outside the door of the bathroom, and he’d gotten started on a shakshuka. Eliot needed to get some protein into her, as well as the electrolyte drink he slid down his counter to her as she walked into the kitchen. Eggs were an easy way to do that.
He looked up when he didn’t hear the bottle open to see the woman wincing as she tried to braid her wet hair. Eliot sighed and rolled his eyes.
“You’re gonna pop a stitch,” he said. “Let me finish this while you drink, and then I’ll do it for you.”
He felt the eyes boring into the back of his head.
“Am I to be trusted or not?” he asked in Hebrew, not looking at the woman now standing at his counter.
She didn’t answer, but moments later Eliot smiled as he heard the bottle open.
“Beteavon,” he said shortly, putting a plate of the spicy tomato and egg dish in front of her.
“Rav todot,” she said, taking the fork he also offered her and stabbing it into one of the eggs.
Eliot sat down to his own plate, but he made sure to watch the woman’s face as she tasted her food. She paused and closed her eyes, fork still in her mouth, and Eliot could see her relax as she savored it. He smiled, then dug into his own.
Eliot finished his food first, but he made sure the woman got a second helping before he began to work on her hair.
It was naturally very curly, but so was his, and he was able to tame it back smoothly into a nice French braid. When he tied it off, Eliot walked around to take care of the dishes, glancing at her face as he picked up her plate.
It was the widow’s peak that finally gave away who she was. Very distinctive, for a very distinctive ex-Mossad, ex-NCIS agent.
“I heard you were dead,” he said, not looking at her.
The silence told Eliot that she was debating throwing one of her knives in his back.
But when Eliot just kept washing his dishes, she settled back into her seat.
“I’d like to keep it that way,” she eventually said, barely audible over the running water.
Eliot shrugged. “Fine by me.” He dried his hands on the towel he’d thrown over his shoulder and pulled a pen and a sticky note out of one of his drawers. “But if you ever need help staying not dead,” he said, writing one of Hardison’s always on and secured lines on the paper. “Call this number.” He held it out to her, meeting the woman’s eyes. “My people, we’ve got contacts all over the world, now, ones who help and don’t ask questions if we tell them not to.”
He could see her hesitating to take the note. Eliot kept holding it out.
“Think of it as an emergency contact,” he said. “I know you’ve got people helping you; just let me extend that network a little bit.”
Still, she hesitated.
“Am I to be trusted or not?”
Slowly, Ziva David took the note from his hand. Eliot smiled at her.
“Just tell whoever answers that Eliot sent you. They’ll get you whatever you need.”
He turned back to the dishes, and by the time he finished the last utensil, Eliot was alone in his safe house again.