Something More by JJBKJBJC (Seq to TEOES)

[JRK Archiver]

Chapter Nine – Fresh Hell


Dillon opened his eyes sleepily and sighed contentedly. Georgie was curled up against him. Sun was coming in through a crack in the curtains on the window, and he mused silently to himself that Hannah had actually slept long enough for the sun to rise before her. Last Christmas she’d been up by five.

He glanced at the clock out of curiosity and flinched a bit, startled.

“Georgie!” he said in a loud whisper, and Georgie shook her head a bit.
“Shhhh. Sleeping.”
“It’s nine-o-clock!”

Georgie opened her eyes, confused and sleepy.

“What?” Georgie asked, and it took a few more seconds for it to occur to her. “Hannah? Sleep until nine?”
“Damn!” Dillon said under his breath, sliding out of bed and pulling a pair of pajama pants over his boxers. “Do you think she’d open everything without us?”
“Maybe she figured we’d tell her to go back to bed?”
“Hannah!” Dillon called out as he entered the hallway. “Hannah Banana, you little monkey!”

He ran down the stairs, thinking he’d get a lecture for it later when Georgie reminded him they were teaching Hannah not to do that. He ran into the living room and stopped cold.

She wasn’t there. The room was empty. The Christmas tree and Christmas stockings were as they had left them. The now empty plate of cookies was on the end table, next to his digital camera, ready to go.

But no Hannah. And the presents were untouched.

“Hannah?” he tried again.

He listened, waiting to hear Hannah giggle or call out that she wasn’t a monkey. But he heard nothing until the sound of Georgie’s footsteps coming down the stairs. She entered the room yawning, having thrown her robe over her pajamas, and looked around in confusion.

“Where is she?” Georgie asked, and Dillon shook his head and started back towards the stairs.
“I guess she’s still…” Dillon’s voice trailed off into silence and he froze as something caught his eye.

He stared at the little green light.

It was supposed to be red.

The security system was disabled.

His mouth hung open slightly, something tortured brewing behind his disbelieving eyes.

He’d set it before bed. He’d been tired, but he remembered setting it before bed.

And now it was disabled.

“Dillon…”

Dillon didn’t have to turn around to realize that Georgie had seen what he’d seen. And she felt what he was feeling. It was in her voice.

“She’s in bed,” Georgie nearly whispered, and Dillon turned to look at her. “She’s in bed!” Georgie repeatedly more loudly, her voice a bit shrill, pleading with him to agree.

Dillon said nothing, frozen in place, and Georgie grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the stairs. They ran to Hannah’s room, and Georgie yanked the covers off of her empty bed.

“Hannah!” Georgie screeched in a tone she’d never used before, and Dillon stood staring in the doorway. “Hannah! This isn’t funny! Answer Mommy now!!!”
“Georgie…” a broken Dillon whispered. “I set the alarm last night-”
“You forgot!!!” Georgie screamed at him. “You just forgot! And Hannah’s hiding! Help me look!”
“Georgie-”
“You forgot!!!”
“I didn’t forget!” Dillon told her emphatically, quickly crossing the room and putting both hands on her shoulders, somewhat more roughly than he intended. “I didn’t forget,” Dillon said again, fighting to keep it together. “I set the security system last night. And it’s not set now. Which means somebody disabled it.”
“Then it was my mom! Or your brother! Or Lucas! Or Brook! Who else has the code, Dillon?”
“They don’t need the-”
“Someone decided to let us sleep in, that’s all!” Georgie said, her voice breaking and her angered hysteria giving way to quiet tears. “My mom has her… she has to, doesn’t she? She has to have her, or-”
“She’d never do that without telling us, you know that-”
“I- but- the code, Dillon, the-”
“There’s a gadget you can get on the black market that runs every possible combination through the system very quickly-”
“Then why do we fucking have it?!” Georgie yelled.
“I don’t know!” Dillon yelled back at her.

In the brief silence that followed, the truth sunk in.

And it hurt.

Georgie sank to her knees on the carpet.

“Oh God…”
“Georgie…” Dillon half fell and half sat down next to her.
“Kent?” Georgie asked, and Dillon could only look at her in response. “Oh God…”
“We need to call your dad.”
“Dillon, if I’d thought for even a second that he would go after her I would have… I don’t know, gotten bodyguards or something…”
“Listen to me, we need to just get moving! The sooner we get help the sooner we find her. And we will, Georgie. We will find her! I promise you that.”

Dillon stood up and reached down for Georgie’s hands. He pulled her to her feet and they made their way down the stairs. He steadied her with one arm and clutched the railing with the other.

They returned to the living room and Georgie sat rigidly on the edge of the couch, staring at the Christmas tree, her hands trembling, while Dillon searched for the phone.

“Why the hell did we get a portable phone anyway?” Dillon muttered tensely, looking around. “I’m gonna go get my cell-”

For the second time that day, something caught Dillon’s eye, and he broke off in the middle of a sentence.

It was a piece of paper. Just the corner of one, actually, sticking out from under the plate Hannah had left full of cookies for ‘Santa’.

The bastard had left a note.

“Georgie,” Dillon said, renewed shock nearly stealing his voice.

Georgie looked up, and Dillon gestured to the paper. He crossed over to it and slid it out from under the plate, wincing slightly at the words.

At least they had confirmation.

Not that he wanted confirmation on this.

“No police,” Georgie read out loud, echoing the words in Dillon’s head.

No police. Friendly discussion later., the note read.

Just like that. Five words. Just enough to make it clear that their lives were in his hands and they couldn’t do a damn thing to change that.

“‘Friendly discussion later’?” Dillon questioned in confusion, but Georgie’s thoughts were stuck on the first part of the message.
“We can’t call my dad,” Georgie started, but the sound of knocking on the front door startled her before she could continue.
“Shhh!” Dillon said quickly, pulling Georgie away from the windows. “Stay here, I’m going to… go look out, I guess.”
“Dillon, wait, what if-”
“Meeeeerrrrrrrry Christmaaaaaaaas!” Lucas’s voice came floating through from outside, and Dillon and Georgie both sighed.

Dillon answered the door, and Lucas and Brook’s happy smiles of greeting immediately vanished at the sight of his distressed face. Brook dropped her purse to the ground thoughtlessly and Lucas put down the big box of Christmas presents he was carrying.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Brook asked, and Dillon felt more tears spring to his eyes.
“Hannah’s gone. She’s just gone. She’s not anywhere. We think Kent has her,” he told her quietly, and opened the door fully to let them in.

Lucas stood shocked for a moment, and Brook stared at Dillon in wide-eyed disbelief. After a moment Lucas went to Georgie and embraced her tightly, and Brook gave Dillon’s shoulder a comforting squeeze.

“Have you called the police?” Lucas asked, and Georgie shook her head. “You gotta call the police! Come on, Georgie, your dad-”
“We can’t!” Georgie cut in. “We can’t! Kent left a note-”
“A what?” Lucas asked. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Who else would it be?” Brook pointed out, and Lucas sat down on the couch and rubbed his forehead with both hands.
“I can’t believe this,” he mumbled to himself, and Dillon shot him a hostile look.
“Yeah, poor you,” Dillon sneered, and Brook literally jumped between them before Lucas could respond.
“Hey! You gotta focus on Hannah right now, both of you, all right?”
“You think I can think about anything else?” Dillon asked angrily, and Brook shook her head in the negative.
“We have to do something,” Georgie said after a moment. “I can’t just sit here!”
“What about Lucky?” Dillon asked hopefully.
“No!” Georgie said quickly. “Dillon, he works with my dad!”
“With your dad! Not for your dad! Huge difference!”
“That’s too close of a connection to the police, Dillon! Look, I’ve seen Kent, you haven’t, okay, and I know he’s sick and twisted and more than capable of hurting her if he thinks he has a reason to!”

Dillon stepped closer to Georgie and wiped away a few of the tears that had fallen onto her cheeks as she spoke, and he nodded.

“Okay. We’ll find another way,” he conceded. “We’re not going to give him any reason to hurt her.”
“I think I have an idea,” Lucas said suddenly, and Dillon and Georgie and Brook all looked at him intently. “I can call my sister. Get her to get Sonny to help us. Whatever you think of the guy, he has the power to get things done. He has experience with this sort of thing. And he’s not the least bit connected to the police.”

Dillon and Georgie looked at each other for a moment, silently searching each other’s eyes for approval of Lucas’ plan, and then Georgie turned to Lucas and nodded.

“Do it.”

***

Half an hour later Sonny and Carly walked through Dillon and Georgie’s front door.

Sonny was needed.

Carly insisted on coming along.

She’d been in this house several times before, usually to pick up Morgan or drop him off. She’d also been to the park with Georgie and Hannah and her own boys too many times to count. Hannah and Morgan were the best of little buddies, and somewhere along the line Georgie and Carly had crossed the line from friendly aquaintances to friends.

It might have been that friendship that affected her. Or maybe it was simply that they were both mothers. Whatever the reason, when Carly walked into the living room and saw the look on Georgie’s face, it tore something in her heart, and she bypassed her brother and Brook and Dillon and went straight to Georgie and wrapped her up in a comforting embrace.

“She’s going to be okay,” Carly said softly, insistently, mother to mother. “One way or another she’s coming home. I won’t stand for anything else – that kid of yours is supposed to be my kid’s girl some day, remember?” Carly’s voice took on a gently teasing tone. “Some day we’re still gonna be in-laws.”

In-laws.

The words were just enough to get the smallest, saddest smile out of Georgie.

It was their favorite joke. Their only recurring joke, really. A few months before Carly had stopped by to pick up Morgan from a playdate and he had been watching a movie with Hannah. The kids had insisted on finishing their video, and so Carly had spent the remaining half hour of the movie talking with Georgie. A few minutes into this chat Carly had gestured for Georgie to look at the couch, and Hannah had been comfortably resting her head against Morgan’s shoulder. It was at that moment that Carly had laughed and joked to Georgie: “We’re so gonna be in-laws some day!”

Carly’s words were meant to comfort, but today those words hurt.

Sonny took charge of the situation, taking the note from the kidnapper from Dillon and nodding at the others.

“The wording mean anything to you?” Sonny asked, and Dillon shook his head in the negative. “This all you found?” Sonny asked.
“Yeah, under the plate,” Dillon told him.
“The what?”
“The plate! Cookies for Santa!”
“Okay, okay, take it, you know, take it easy,” Sonny mumbled, and Dillon got in his face.
“Take it what?” Dillon asked, and Sonny held up both hands to quiet him.
“Okay, I’m not trying to be inconsiderate here, okay, but you need to calm down if we’re going to get anything accomplished,” Sonny said, and Dillon clenched his jaw and bit back a harsh reply, mentally reminding himself that Sonny was here to help.
“I’m sorry,” Dillon finally said. “It’s just that I’ve never not known where she was before. Ever. In her life. And now she’s out there, somewhere, with this lunatic-”
“Well, wait, you don’t know that. Lucas filled us in on the basics of what’s been going on with this… professor… but we don’t want to rule anything out. It could be a simple ransom situation. You are a Quartermaine. And you might have enemies you’re overlooking. Can you think of…” Sonny’s voice trailed off as he realized Georgie wasn’t listening to him. “Georgie!” he said a bit loudly, trying to get her attention, and Carly put a gentle hand on Georgie’s back.
“Hmmm?” Georgie asked, having been pulled out of one of the various nightmarish scenarios that had been flying through her mind all morning. “What?”
“Is there anyone else who might have wanted to do this? Anyone you can think of – besides this Kent – who might have wanted to hurt you or take your child away for some reason?”

Georgie mulled it over for a moment and came up empty.

“I don’t think so. It’s Kent. I know it’s Kent,” Georgie’s voice dropped in volume and cracked slightly. “He wants to use her as leverage.”
“As what?” Dillon asked, hoping he’d heard her wrong.
“Leverage,” Brook filled in, nodding a bit in understanding as she looked over at Georgie. “He wants to use Hannah to control Georgie. To get her with him, or get her to do what he asks, or… force her into… something.”

It took a moment for that to hit Dillon, and when it did he felt like he might be sick. He sat down heavily on the couch. It sunk in for the others, too, and Carly leaned back against the wall, disgusted.

“Not gonna happen!” Dillon yelled after a moment. “He doesn’t get to force Georgie into anything! There has to be another way to keep both Hannah and Georgie safe-”
“Well that’s the objective,” Sonny broke in. “It doesn’t have to come down to Georgie or Hannah. Now,” he took a breath, “tell me what happened. Give me the details on this morning.”
“The lock’s been picked, I looked at it earlier,” Brook told him, and he nodded.
“Okay. The security system?”

Dillon laughed a harsh, bitter laugh and stood up again.

“The security system? That hunk of junk that any Tom, Dick or Harry can screw with if he’s got fifty bucks and somewhere to buy what he needs? You know, the one we thought would protect us?”
“Yeah. That one,” Sonny said simply, not interested in the dramatics.
“When I got up this morning it was past nine, and so I’m thinking, hey, my kid must have decided to open her presents by herself without dear old mom and dad, right? I’m thinking, damn, that sucks!” Dillon spat out, nearly choking on the irony of the words.
“You need to get to the point here-” Sonny started, but Dillon cut him off.
“The point? The point is that the thing- the thing, the light- the little red light was fucking green!” Dillon screamed, straining his voice. His chest shook as he took in a shuddering breath.

He wondered if he’d ever forget that moment. That fucking green light.

“I thought she might have somehow just slept late,” a tearful Georgie continued for Dillon. “I prayed somehow she just… And then she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere and then Dillon found the note.”

Sonny nodded, looking down at the note in his hands.

“Okay. Okay,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m going to need to know a little bit more about this ‘Kent’ before I can get my men looking into it. Full name, picture if you’ve got it, everything you know about his job and his past, whatever, you know. Just a place to start.”
“I can print a picture off the net,” Dillon said, and he immediately left for the computer room down the hall.
“His name is Ryan Kent,” Georgie said to Sonny. “He started lecturing at PCU in September, but my dad looked into it and found out that he somehow faked all his qualifications. Even his degree.”
“Uh huh,” Sonny said. “Okay. Tell me about places. Where have you seen him outside of school? Has he mentioned any place?”
“Um… outside Kelly’s, for sure. He attacked me there. In the parking lot.”

Carly’s eyes darkened at that, but Sonny remained unmoved.

“Where else?” he asked.
“I know he was at my car in the parking lot by the student center once, because he left an essay there. He’d regraded it. He left it there. But other than that I only ever really saw him in class, or in the building where his office was. I had to share an elevator with him once.”
“Uh… he talked to you after class a bunch of times, right?”
“Yes.”
“He ever mention where he lives, where he used to live, where he spends time?”
“The address he had on file at the university was an empty house. My dad checked the records and it was owned by him, but he wasn’t living there. There was… there was one other place…” Georgie said softly as it occurred to her, and in that moment something clicked in her mind.
“Where?” Sonny asked, interrupting her thoughts, and Georgie hesitated.
“What?”
“Where? What other place?”
“Probably nothing,” Georgie told him. “He used to try to get me to come to these study groups, that’s all.”
“Where?”
“I don’t even remember. Maybe he never said,” Georgie lied.

He’d said. He’d told her more about the ‘discussion groups’ she should be attending many a time since that first day he brought it up. Twice he’d pressured her into taking down the address, supposedly the house of another girl in the class. He’d always been flippant in the earlier days, trying to sound casual, telling her things like “Hey, friendly discussion later tonight! You coming?”

Friendly discussion later.

Coincidental wording? Georgie thought not.

While Georgie tried to remember if Kent had ever brought up the discussion groups in front of the rest of the class, Dillon returned with a picture of Kent, and Sonny questioned him briefly about what he knew.

Georgie didn’t pay attention to any of the discussion between Dillon and Sonny. After a moment Dillon touched her shoulder to get her attention and told her that he was going with Sonny and Carly back to the penthouse to speak to Jason and ‘the men’, that Lucas was insisting on coming along, and that Brook would stay with her. None of that even registered with Georgie. Her mind was otherwise occupied.

It was denial, at first. Then fear. Then just plain dread, because she thought she knew what Kent wanted. She thought she understood his cryptic little message.

It was the least appealing option she could think of. And it would kill Dillon. But she had no choice.

In this situation she was Hannah’s mother first and Dillon’s girlfriend second. She had to be.

And she knew what she had to do.

***

After Dillon and Lucas left with Sonny and Carly, Georgie was a mess. Brook tried talking to her, reassuring her, even reminiscing with her. Anything to distract her and keep her from the hysteria that seemed to threaten to overcome her.

Georgie never quite flipped out, but she never quite calmed down, either.

Something was off. Brook could see it, even though she couldn’t explain it. Georgie wasn’t just scared for Hannah anymore. There was something else there now.

Georgie was nervous. Distinctly nervous. And she kept checking her watch. She seemed to be waiting for something.

It was a long afternoon, and by nightfall Georgie said she needed to lie down and went upstairs.

Half an hour later Brook decided checking on Georgie was warranted, even if it meant invading her space briefly, and she left the living room and went up to Dillon and Georgie’s bedroom.

When Brook entered the room she noticed two things right away. One was the bed, rumpled but empty. The other was a notebook, the coiled kind Georgie liked to use, lying in the middle of the floor. Brook picked it up and flipped through it in the light spilling into the darkened room from the hallway. It was Georgie’s Modern Literature notebook. One page was ripped carelessly in half, made noticeable by the fact that the rest of the book was so well kept. Georgie was neat and tidy like that.

“Georgie?” Brook called out into the silent house, hoping without much hope that she’d get an answer. There was none.

Horrified by what she thought Georgie was about to do, Brook took off down the stairs, notebook in hand, and looked around anxiously for a phone. Her cell phone, or Dillon and Georgie’s portable phone, it didn’t matter which, as long as she could call Georgie and stop her. Both phones were around the house somewhere, but at the moment she couldn’t find either one. And Dillon and Georgie still hadn’t installed a second phone upstairs. Lucas often forgot his cell phone in her car, and she was about to go out and see if it was there when she took notice of the piece of paper on the kitchen counter. She’d ignored it the first few times her eyes fell on it, but now she noticed that it was rumpled in three spots by drops of water – or tears?

She turned it over to read what was on the other side.

It was a message from Georgie to Dillon.

Dillon,

I’m sorry. Please understand. Don’t ever think I wanted this.

I love you.

Georgie.

“Shit,” Brook whispered under her breath. “Shit!!” she said again a moment later, louder.

She took a moment to do another mad dash around the kitchen and living room areas in search of the always elusive portable phone, once again considering going out to her car, then gave up temporarily when it occurred to her to fit the paper on the counter against the ripped page in the notebook.

She tried, and it fit, but not completely. One half fit. But it wasn’t the whole piece, which meant Georgie had taken part of the page with her.

Why?

Brook searched out a pencil and found one in the kitchen cupboard where Georgie kept art supplies for Hannah. Using an old trick she’d seen her mother try more than once, she covered the page behind the ripped page in the notebook in a thin layer of lead, and the indentation of the writing from the previous page showed up. It was faint, and she couldn’t make out the house number, but the street name was clear.

Georgie was on her way to Greene Street.

Not to mention on her way to Ryan Kent.

Brook ripped out the page and took it with her. She grabbed her shoes and purse from just inside the front door and spotted the box of gifts Lucas had been carrying when they first arrived in the morning. Peeking inside she saw both cell phones – hers and Lucas’s – tucked between two presents. She grabbed her cell phone and was about to go out to her car when something in the back of her mind told her to grab Lucas’s phone, as well. She pocketed her own. It was tiny. She put Lucas’s in her purse.

And then she ran to her car and drove off.

And prayed she wasn’t too late.

***

Dillon felt hollow by the time he and Lucas left the penthouse and started to drive back to the house that night. Sonny assured him he had “everyone I can spare” looking into finding Kent and Hannah, but Dillon wasn’t entirely sure he trusted Sonny’s methods, and regardless the very fact that Hannah was out there somewhere without him and Georgie – and with Kent – was weighing heavily on him.

He forced himself to keep it together so he could pay attention to his driving. As they pulled onto the street where Dillon and Georgie lived, Lucas sat up straight suddenly.

“Where’s Brook’s car?” Lucas asked, alarmed.
“She parked in the driveway?”
“Yeah! Right there!”
“Why the hell would she leave Georgie alone?” Dillon asked accusingly, but a moment later when he opened the garage door he realized that Georgie’s car was gone, too.
“What the hell?” Lucas mumbled.

Dillon quickly parked and ran inside, and Lucas followed just a few steps behind him.

“Georgie?!” Dillon called.
“Brook? You here?” Lucas tried.
“Why are the cars gone? What the hell is going on?”
“How am I supposed to know? I was with you!”
“Just shut up! Shut up and let me think for a minute.”

Dillon ran his right hand through his unruly hair in frustration.

“If someone took them they wouldn’t have taken both cars, right?” Dillon asked after a moment.
“Why would they go somewhere in separate cars? Why would they go somewhere at all right now?”
“Maybe they left a note,” Dillon mumbled, and he ran over to check the kitchen counter.

He froze when he saw Georgie’s message. The water marks left on the paper didn’t go unnoticed.

“Dillon… I’m sorry…” Dillon read out loud, then read the rest in his head. Lucas was reading over his shoulder, and any other time Dillon would have gotten on his case for it.

But in this moment he didn’t even notice.

“Oh, God…” Dillon said after a moment, more to himself than to Lucas. “Oh, Georgie… you wouldn’t…”

But Georgie would. For Hannah, she would.

And they both knew it.

[JRK Archiver]

Chapter Ten – Here Goes Everything


I’m sorry. Please understand. Don’t ever think I wanted this. I love you.
I’m sorry. Please understand. Don’t ever think I wanted this. I love you.
I’m sorry. Please understand. Don’t ever think I wanted this. I love you.
I’m sorry. Please understand. Don’t ever think I wanted this. I love you.
I’m sorry. Please understand. Don’t ever think I wanted this. I love you.

Dillon heard Georgie’s written words over and over again in his head.

He heard her voice.

He heard her voice break.

“Maybe… maybe it’s not as bad as it seems…” Lucas said quietly, with forced hopefulness, and Dillon turned to look at him, first with the tiniest sliver of hope, then with dread.
“How’s that?” Dillon asked doubtfully.
“Well wherever she went, she took Brook with her, right? That’s gotta count for something. Maybe she’s just-”
“She took Brook with her, or she slipped away when Brook wasn’t looking and Brook followed her?” Dillon asked pointedly.
“How would Brook even know where to go?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know…” Dillon sighed and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “But Georgie’s… she’s trying to trade herself for Hannah. That much is crystal clear.”
“And Brook’s trying to stop her,” Lucas added, and Dillon nodded. “Which means all three of them are out there somewhere way too close to this psycho.”

Dillon nodded again, his eyes once again falling to Georgie’s tear-stained note. He stared for a few seconds, until it blurred from the tears gathering in his eyes. He reached out and grabbed the scrap of paper, seriously considered ripping it up, then changed his mind and put it in his pocket.

“Dillon-”
“What do we do?” Dillon asked helplessly, his usual contempt for Lucas forgotten momentarily.
“I don’t-” Lucas started, but Dillon interrupted him.
“What the hell do we do, huh? Do we call in the police now?”
“We could call Georgie’s dad. He’ll make sure it’s kept quiet.”
“It’s a risk… there are crooked cops in the PCPD, I know there are crooked cops-”
“Then we just call Sonny back here-”
“We gotta find out where,” Dillon mumbled, to himself rather than to Lucas. “We gotta figure out where they’re headed.”

Lucas nodded.

“And pray like hell they’re not there yet.”

***

Greene Street was deserted. No one was home. Anywhere.

At least that was what Brook figured by the third time she’d driven down the street, searching out Georgie’s car.

She wondered for a moment whether she could have read the faint wording wrong, but it seemed far more likely that Georgie had parked on a side street and walked to Kent’s house.

But which house? There weren’t many, and the ones that were scattered about looked still, dark and empty.

Brook hit the end of the street and made her third quick, reckless u-turn of the night. She started down the street a fourth time, this time searching for a light on, a passerby, maybe even Georgie herself. The street was eerily quiet and deserted, even for the late hour.

She was nearing the other end of the street and considering calling Dillon for help when she caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, and quickly turned her head to look out the window of the passenger side, braking to a stop.

A sudden banging on her window jarred her, but she realized gratefully after a moment that it was Georgie herself. Brook quickly pulled over to the side of the road and put the car in park. She climbed out and grabbed Georgie, pulling her into a quick hug.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Brook demanded, and Georgie pulled away from her angrily.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Trying to save your sorry butt from ruining your entire life, Georgie! What, are you thinking you’ll just be this guy’s slave for as long as he wants you?”
“I’m thinking I’ll get my kid out of that house. And after that… it doesn’t matter.”
“Okay, listen to me, okay? You don’t even know for sure that Hannah is in one of these houses. You don’t. You don’t even know for sure that Kent has her-”
“Yes I do. I’m sure.”
“Why?”
“Because I recognize his handwriting. On the note.”

Brook just looked at Georgie for a moment, then sighed and leaned back against her car.

“Okay. Okay, so we find a way to get her out of there. But not like this,” Brook told her.
“This is what he wants. The wording on the note-”
“No! I don’t care! Listen to me!” Brook interrupted. “We’ll call Dillon and Lucas, all right? We’ll call them and we’ll get them to get Sonny and his… ‘men’… we’ll get them over here and-”
“And Kent will freak and hurt her!”
“You don’t know that!”
“And you don’t know why I can’t risk it!!!” Georgie said, raising her voice slightly. “You don’t know what this feels like! You don’t know what it’s like to have a part of yourself out there walking around and have somebody take her! You don’t understand just how much this is the lesser of two evils!”

Their eyes met and held for a moment at that, and Brook opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t have the words. After a few seconds had passed she tried again.

“It’ll kill Dillon,” Brook pointed out, changing tactics.
“So would losing Hannah.”
“You don’t have to lose Hannah! You don’t have to trade yourself!” Brook nearly yelled, frustrated with the entire situation. “Georgie, just stop and think for a minute, okay? If you think you know where she is, we have the upper hand. We can get people in here to help her. But if you go in there now, alone, there’s no guarantee he’s going to let Hannah go, and he’s going to have you stuck there. In his house with him. Alone.”
“Yeah. He is,” Georgie said, her tone growing impatient. “You think I haven’t thought this through?”
“Then let’s go! Let’s go get Dillon or your dad-”
“Go home, Brook.” Georgie said, her tone authoritative but tinged with a hint of panic.
“I’m not leaving you here alone to-”
“Go home. This is my daughter. My life. I’m dealing with this my way.”

Georgie reached around Brook to open the car door, but Brook only looked at it, then her.

“I’m begging you, Georgie, for Dillon’s sake if not your own, find a better way!”
“Brook, I swear to God,” Georgie said shakily, “if you don’t just get out of here I’m going to lose my nerve-”
“Well good!”

Georgie slammed the car door angrily and walked several slow, hesitant steps away. When she turned back her cheeks were wet with tears, her determination broken, fear and reality setting in yet again.

“I want to do it, Brook, I swear…”
“I know, G… I know part of you wants to just rush in there and-”
“What kind of a mother can’t put her child first-”
“You always put Hannah first! I’ve seen that in you from the day I met you, Georgie. But this isn’t putting Hannah first, okay? This is irrational and crazy and it’s only going to get the two of you into more trouble.”

Georgie turned to look down the street and a sob caught in her throat. Brook reached out and put her arm around her to gently steer her toward the car.

“We’ll find a better way,” Brook promised quietly. “You’ll get her back another way.”

Georgie let herself be brought to the passenger door, let Brook push her gently into the passenger seat, and didn’t resist when the door was slammed and Brook got in on the other side to start up the car.

But…

“Wait!” Georgie said quietly but urgently as Brook turned the key. “Wait, she’s here…”
“G-”
“She’s here, Brook, I can’t leave… I can’t leave knowing she’s in there… I have to get her, okay? I have to get her, she’s probably scared… she’s probably scared, she could be hurt, I have to get her… I have to get her…”

Almost before Brook knew what was happening, Georgie was out of the car and taking off down the street. Brook was delayed a moment thanks to a tangled seat belt, but quickly took off after her near-hysterical friend.

Brook opened her mouth to yell Georgie’s name, then thought better of it. The last thing they needed was for a neighbour to notice them and call the police.

Brook was closing the space between them when something fluttered to the ground behind Georgie, unnoticed. Brook stopped when she reached it and picked it up.

No police. Friendly discussion later.

Brook stared, confused at first, then deeply shaken. A slight cry escaped her lips. . Something clicked in her mind.

She was frozen in place for a moment before she took off at a faster, more desperate run than before.

Brook caught up to Georgie just as she was approaching a darkened house, and she could have sworn she heard both of their hearts pounding.

“Wait!” Brook whispered loudly, grabbing Georgie and forcefully yanking her away from the house. “Shit, we’re in his yard…” she mumbled, gazing up at the house fearfully, and Georgie looked up at her in confusion.
“What…? I have to do this,” Georgie told her again, still panicked, and very much out of breath.
“You’ve got it all wrong! Georgie, we need to just get out of here, okay, you’ve got it all wrong, we need-”
“I need to get her out-”
“We need to get-”
“No-”
“Dammit! Georgie, come with me!” Brook said insistently. “I’ll explain as soon as we’re in the car! Come with-”

Brook broke off as Georgie’s gaze fell on something behind her, and a sudden terror filled her eyes. Brook turned just in time to see the handgun coming down at her head.

There was a sickening ‘thud’ as the steel connected with Brook’s skull, and she fell to the ground unconscious. She hadn’t even had time to be scared.

Georgie was scared. She stared into Kent’s wild eyes, her feet frozen in place, not sure if she wanted to run into the house or away from it.

“Where’s my daughter?” she cried, sounding so weak and pleading that in any other situation she would have hated herself for it.
“I’ll take you to her,” Kent said with a knowing, amused smile, and before Georgie had a chance to respond she saw his arm sweep toward her, and felt a sudden sharp pain in her head.

And then there was nothing.

***

Dillon dialed the first three digits of Mac’s home phone number, then quickly shut the phone off. He sighed and turned it on again, and an irritated Lucas grabbed it from him.

“How many times are you going to do that?” Lucas asked
“I’m thinking,” Dillon spit out.

The two men were sitting side by side on the living room couch, both of them lost in thought - horrible, terrible, violent thought.

“He’s gotta have them, right?” Dillon asked, the usual venomous tone he used with Lucas gone. “If he didn’t have them they would have called or come home by now.”

Lucas nodded reluctantly after a moment.

“I don’t want to believe that… but… I don’t know what else to think. If Georgie was headed to his place and Brook somehow followed her…” Lucas let his voice trail off.
“When you called Brook’s cell-” Dillon started.
“She’s got it off,” Lucas interrupted him.
“Georgie too.”

Dillon was quiet for a moment. He dropped his head into his hands very briefly, then looked up again.

“You know, I yelled at her,” Dillon confided, self-disgust in his tone. “All the time. We fought and we’d raise our voices and it would scare Hannah. And for what? For what? Movies? Directing? Like I care about fucking New York City right now?”

Dillon quieted again briefly, and Lucas spoke up.

“I know a thing or two about blaming yourself. Hating yourself.”
“Yeah. I guess you do.”

Dillon left it at that, not in the mood for a fight but not willing to let Lucas off the hook yet, either.

“Now really isn’t a good time to let it eat you alive,” Lucas said, “Not when we have to figure out how to handle this.”
“I don’t have the first clue how to handle this… I never know how to handle the stuff that matters…”

Another moment passed in silence before Dillon continued.

“I figured out the dad thing. Eventually. Took me a while. You know, when Hannah was first born, I couldn’t get it through my head that she was ours. I mean, I knew, on a rational level I knew, yeah, but… every time I wanted to take her somewhere I felt like I should be asking permission… I remember one day when she was, like, maybe three weeks old, Georgie wanted to get out of the apartment and she thought we should bundle Hannah up and go for a walk, and,” a tiny, sad smile crossed Dillon’s face, “honest to God, my first thought was ‘Can we do that?’ It just didn’t feel real yet. Took me a while to feel like the adult. Like the dad in the family. But once it hit me… I loved it. I know we had some bad times, but I loved it.”

Dillon cursed under his breath as more tears sprung to his eyes, and he grabbed the phone back from Lucas again, but he left it off.

“What if they’re hurt?” Dillon finally voiced what they were both thinking. Lucas swallowed hard and looked away. “What if they’re being hurt… right this second…”
“No,” Lucas murmured quietly, almost hopefully, as if willing it not to be true could make it so. “Don’t. They’re not.”
“You don’t know that. This fucker left bruises on Georgie before,” Dillon said through clenched teeth. “He’s touched her before.”
“He’s not touching Brook!” Lucas nearly yelled suddenly. He met Dillon’s eyes and took a deep breath. “Or Georgie, or Hannah, all right? I’m sorry, I… I know you’ve got them both out there, I’m just… I’m kind of freaking out here…”
“Brook is your priority. Like Georgie and Hannah are mine,” Dillon said simply.

Lucas nodded, feeling a little bit strange at the sudden display of understanding.

“I do love them too. You know I love them too,” Lucas told Dillon quietly, and Dillon nodded.
“Yeah,” Dillon said after a minute. “Yeah. Like I love Brook.”

They both nodded, and Lucas looked away in the brief silence that followed.

“We have to do something,” Dillon said, his voice catching slightly. “I can’t just sit here thinking and imagining… We have to call someone…”
“Maybe we need to just bite the bullet – so to speak – and call Mac.”
“But-”
“We both know it’s a risk. But Mac knows more about this than anyone other than Georgie herself, right? He’s done the research, and he’s talked to Georgie… he knows about this guy. And he’s a trained cop. I vote we call him. We’ll get him to keep it quiet. Kent will never know.”

Dillon stood up on tired, achy legs and crossed the room, then walked back, and continued pacing for several seconds, his hands folded behind his neck and his eyes on the ground.

“We can’t screw this up,” he said, hot tears beginning to spill over onto his cheeks. “This is everything, Man, we can’t screw this up… we just can’t…”
“We won’t,” Lucas said. “I can’t lose Brook any more than you can lose Hannah and Georgie.” His voice broke and Dillon looked up and met his eyes, a bit startled.

A few seconds passed in silence, and then Dillon nodded slightly.

“Yeah. I know,” he admitted.

Lucas stood up and crossed over to where Dillon was standing, and took the portable phone from his hand.

“Here goes everything,” Lucas said quietly, and he turned on the phone and dialed.

***

Georgie had been unconscious for at least twenty minutes. Probably closer to half an hour.

Or at least that’s as close an estimate as Brook could manage without a watch and with her own head pounding.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t wearing a watch. But having her arms tied behind her back was making it difficult to check the time.

Georgie was tied up, too, in the tiny darkened room. Brook figured it for a basement.

And Hannah was nowhere to be seen.

Brook’s mind wandered, marvelled, remembered for what could have been five minutes or an hour for all she knew, until a muffled groan of pain snapped her back to the present.

“Georgie?”
“Uhngh….”
“Georgie, wake up! Wake up! Look at me!”

Georgie finally lifted her head after several seconds, and moaned slightly again at the pain it caused.

“I know. Moving sucks,” Brook told her quietly. “Look at me, G, can you see me? What did he do? He hit you too?”

It took Georgie a minute to regain some clarity, and when she did she realized that she and Brook were both lying on a cold cement floor, hands tied inconveniently behind their own backs.

“Hit me. With the gun. Right after he hit you,” Georgie muttered, her speech stilted. “My throat is so dry…” Georgie’s voice trailed off as a thought hit her. “Hannah! Where… have you seen her? Is she here?”
“No. She hasn’t been here since I’ve been awake. Maybe he’s got her upstairs.”
“You think we’re in that house?”
“It makes sense.”
“None of this makes sense. Sense is me and Dillon in our bed and Hannah in hers and Ryan Kent non-existant.”
“It, uh… G, it actually makes a lot more sense than any of us realized…”

Georgie wriggled and turned until she was facing Brook without straining her neck.

“What?” she finally asked, quietly and simply, and Brook’s eyes filled with tears.
“We were so stupid. None of us even realized. I mean, you didn’t know, but Dillon and Lucas and me, we should have figured it all out…”
“I didn’t know what? Figured what out? Figured what out, Brook?!”
“Who he was… why he was doing this… God, Georgie, it was never about you! Or at least in the beginning it wasn’t about you! It was about Dillon and revenge and maybe a little bit about me in the very beginning but I think that picture probably changed his goals ‘cause-”
“Brook, you seriously have to just spit it out! What picture? Does Dillon know Kent?”
“Dillon shot Kent.”

Brook said the words plainly, and for a long moment Georgie thought she must have heard her wrong.

“What?” Georgie asked after the short silence. “Like… what, when he was a kid?”
“When he was in Europe. When I was in Europe.”

Georgie’s mind reeled, trying to remember the exact circumstances. It had been several months ago. The one and only time Dillon had been away from her and Hannah since Hannah was born.

“Your concert in… was it Prague?” Georgie asked, and Brook’s eyes darkened.
“Yeah. Prague. Not a place of happy memories.”
“That’s where Lucas cheated on you.”
“Same night.”
“When… how did… why did I never know-”
“It wasn’t about trust, Georgie, okay? And Dillon never wanted to lie to you. If you have to blame someone, blame me. I was freaking out. I was so terrified that somehow the press would find out what had happened and I’d have to deal with all that paparazzi crap way more than I already was.”

Georgie stared at Brook in confusion, and absentmindled licked her parched lips.

“Maybe it’s the concussion but I’m not following,” Georgie told her.
“It’s long and complicated and… look, Reader’s Digest version…” Brook took a deep breath. “You know I was getting some freaky fan mail. But it was worse than that. It got so much worse than that during that tour. Someone broke into my hotel room twice, and the notes weren’t always just mail, sometimes they’d just show up, and they were… they were twisted, like the guy thought I belonged to him… and I had guards, I always had guards, but when Lucas and I were together, they backed off a bit.”
“This is why you cut the tour short and decided to go back to school?” Georgie asked, and Brook shook her head in the negative, biting her bottom lip a bit.
“No. I cut the tour short because I was pregnant. I decided to go back to school after I miscarried.”

Georgie once again found herself staring at Brook and wondering if she’d heard her right. Brook stopped to clarify.

“I’m not telling this right… it’s just… Lucas and I were a mess because he was so stuck on the idea that he wasn’t who he wanted to be when he found out he was going to have a kid, you know? He kept going on about how he was just a former waiter following his girlfriend around the globe, and I kept going on about how I wasn’t sure it was even what I wanted, but he wanted it and we started fighting all the time… And my parents, they didn’t know what was going on, but they knew about the stalker and my dad thought seeing Dillon might, like, cheer me up or something, and I think he thought Dillon needed to get away too…”

Georgie nodded. She remembered only too well. She and Dillon had been doing some fighting of their own at that point. The stupid, pointless kind of fighting that happened when two overly stressed people lived under the same small roof.

“Yeah,” Georgie said quietly. “He needed to get away. I hated him for leaving for about an hour after he left, but I knew he needed a break.”
“Wasn’t exactly the break he was looking for. When he got there… I don’t know why, but I just totally unloaded on him. Everything. How bad the threats had gotten, the pregnancy, the fighting, everything. I needed to open up. I needed you, actually, but Dillon was the next best thing. And you know he already had issues with Lucas. He always acted like Lucas was only with me because he wanted to be involved in fame and fortune. Throw in the fact that he thought Lucas was making things ‘difficult’ for me in an already bad situation, and he just kind of freaked.”
“What, he yelled at Lucas?”
“Yeah. They both came to the concert that night, watched me perform. And they both came back to the hotel with me afterwards. And so the guards, they were just totally relaxed, ‘cause I had both guys with me, you know? But Dillon yelled at Lucas, and I yelled at Dillon, and then he left and Lucas yelled at me and I yelled at him and then he took off…”
“And you were alone.”
“For like a second, yeah. But it was right after Lucas left that the guy came in and grabbed me. One of those ski masks, with just eye holes? He had one on. He’d shot the guy guarding the door – with a silencer, I guess – and he tried to tell me he loved me, and I belonged to him… and he tried to take me away, and I struggled with him, and then Dillon… I guess he was coming back to check on me, I don’t know, but he saw the dead guard in the doorway and realized what was going on, and he took the guard’s gun, and he came running in, and… he stopped the guy.” Brook met Georgie’s eyes with a meaningful look. “Kent. He had to shoot him, but he stopped him.”
“I don’t… I don’t get it…” Georgie told her. “I mean, if you guys saw the guy’s face, why didn’t you recognize him around campus? And if you didn’t-”
“I didn’t. I never saw his face that night. He was on the floor and Dillon must have thought he was unconscious, and he came to check on me and I was… just having the worst pain… my stomach… and, uh…” Brook’s voice trailed off and she looked down. It was the worst of memories. “Dillon stayed with me. Called an ambulance. Told me everything would be all right. He just… he was great to me, and when he finally turned around later, the guy was gone. We had his DNA, ‘cause there was blood on the floor, but no one knew how to find him or where he’d gone.”
“I still don’t get why you think this guy was Kent,” Georgie said questioningly, and Brook met her eyes again.
“The handwriting. On the note. You said you recognized it as Kent’s. I recognized it from the threatening notes. He never did the cut-and-paste thing you see in the movies. The handwriting was always the same.”
“Seems kind of-”
“I know. I know it seems crazy to base it on just that, but I’m not. Think about it, Georgie. He started at PCU the same time I did. He put my favorite books on his course. He asked you to bring friends to these discussion groups. You always said that was weird. He talked about Dillon like he hated him. For all we know he could have been following me that night at Kelly’s. And hey, when did all of this start?”
“With me and Kent?”
“Yeah. The first time he ever acted weird with you, it was right after that day that Dillon brought Hannah to the student center to meet us before lunch.”

[JRK Archiver]

The meaning hit Georgie before Brook explained it, and she closed her tired eyes briefly.

“That picture,” Georgie mumbled, and Brook nodded.
“Yeah. That picture. The one that was all over the Internet in minutes. Me and Hannah in the foreground, you and Dillon in the background. If he came here to somehow get closer to me and then saw that picture of Dillon with you and then you walked into his class later that day…”
“What, like… he thought I’d get him closer to you?”
“No, well, maybe partly, but I think he wanted to take you from Dillon. Like he thinks Dillon took me away from him, in some sick way.”
“That’s crazy.”
“So is he. Maybe… maybe it started as revenge, and then… I don’t know, maybe now he just wants you… or maybe it’s still just revenge, or maybe it is still partly about me, or maybe he’s just a total psycho…I don’t know.”

Georgie sighed, wishing her hands were free so she could hold her aching head.

“You know I saw him once,” Brook said quietly, thoughtfully. “Just around campus. In the parking lot, actually. He was staring at me, and I didn’t think anything of it. I figured he was one of those adults who knows my face and tries to think of my name. It never even occurred to me…”
“So… so that night, in Europe, when you went off in the ambulance, that’s when Dillon caught Lucas with the blonde?”
“Yeah. He’d called my parents when he called the ambulance, they were in Prague, too, at the concert, remember? And they showed up and once they were with me he left to go find Lucas. He went to tell him what happened, and how sorry he was, and all that, but… I think he just ended up pounding him.”
“I can’t believe I never knew all of this,” Georgie told Brook, and Brook shrugged as much as she could with her arms tied.
“It wasn’t about not trusting you. It was just me being totally paranoid and wanting to keep everything quiet. The press is like a wild animal sometimes. I just couldn’t deal with it at that point.”
“It doesn’t even help us, does it?” Georgie asked, her voice listless. “It doesn’t even do us any good to know all of this. It doesn’t give us any upper hand. We’re still stuck here.”

Georgie looked down, testing the ropes that bound her hands.

A sliver of yellow light suddenly crossed the floor, and Georgie and Brook turned to look up at the open door.

They both recognized the silhouetted figure immediately.

***

Dillon had been bargaining with a God he wasn’t sure he believed in all night. Making deals. Mentally sacrificing everything he knew he could live without if it would just bring his girls back to him safely.

And he wanted Brook back safely, too.

It was becoming altogether too risky, he decided as he looked around his living room. Too many people knew. Mac was there with two other police officers. The phone line was attached to some kind of tracing equipment in case of a phone call from Kent. Felicia was sitting rigidly on the couch, fiddling with various toys of Hannah’s and breaking down now and then. Lucas was in the corner of the room with Ned and Lois, talking quietly. Dillon hadn’t agreed to calling Brook’s parents, but Lucas had made the call himself and insisted that they deserved to know.

It was altogether too many people. They’d all been given all the details Dillon himself had.

Dillon found himself pacing back and forth across the room yet again, but a sudden ring of the phone stopped him in his tracks. He dove to answer it, but Mac grabbed his arm to stop him. The officer handling the tracing equipment gave Mac a signal, and Mac nodded at Dillon.

“Just stay calm. If it’s him, keep him talking. If it’s a neighbour or friend, get them off the line quickly.”

Dillon nodded nervously and picked up the phone.

“Hello?” His voice didn’t sound like his own, but the thought barely registered. “This is Dillon Quartermaine. Hello?”

There was no answer for several seconds, and Dillon turned to look at Mac questioningly.

“The line’s still open,” Mac told him. “You hear nothing?”
“Maybe faint breathing,” Dillon said, and then a thought occurred to him.

Hannah never spoke into the phone.

“Hannah? Hannah, it’s Daddy!” Dillon said softly, tenderly, and seven pairs of eyes focused intently on him, waiting expectantly. “I need you to listen, Honey,” Dillon continued. “I need you to talk… I know you don’t like to talk on the phone, but I need to you to talk this time… just say ‘Daddy’, that’s all I need, okay?”

There was no answer, and Dillon sniffled in an attempt to ward off tears.

“Just say anything, Hannah,” he tried again, losing faith that it was really her on the other end of the line. “Tell me anything… tell me what Bugs says… tell me anything, Hannah, come on…”

Dillon waited through another bout of silence, and he was considering giving up when Hannah’s tiny little tinny voice finally came through loud and clear.

“Mommy’s sleeeeeeping…” Hannah wailed, and Dillon’s heart sank. “Won’t wake up. Like Garfield, Daddy! Mommy’s sleeping!!”

[JRK Archiver]

Chapter 11

Seven pairs of worried and rather frantic eyes focused intently on Dillon.

He didn’t notice. Every fibre of his being was focused on his daughter’s voice.

“Hannah, Honey, where are you? What do you see? Tell Daddy what you see!”
“Mommy’s sleeeeeeping…” Hannah cried through the phone.
“Mommy’s sleeping where? Does Mommy have any cuts – any boo boos? Tell me what you see!” Dillon pleaded with her, but met with silence over the phone line. He thought for a minute, prioritizing his next line of questioning. “Are you okay, Hannah? Does anything hurt, Honey?”
“No…” The word was wrapped up in a childish sob.

Dillon sighed gratefully and turned to look at the others.

“She’s okay…” he murmured, and they all took it as an opening to ask further questions.
“Is she with Georgie?” Felicia asked, and before Dillon could open his mouth to respond Lois cut him off.
“Did she mention Brookie?”
“Ask her if -” Lucas tried.
“I don’t know!” Dillon nearly yelled at them, and then he turned his back, focusing on the call again. “Hannah?”

Hannah said nothing, and there was the sound of scuffling and movement and distant voices, and then Brook came on the line.

“Dillon?”
“Brook! God! Good, is Georgie okay? Hannah? You? Where are you? What can you tell me? Why’d you let Hannah make the call?”

That last question was the easiest to answer, and so Brook decided to field it first.

“My hands are tied. Hannah’s holding the phone. Thank God for speed dial.”

Dillon sat down heavily right there on the floor, sure his brain actually hurt from the excess of thoughts and images and questions flying through it.

“She loves buttons…” Dillon mumbled, then forced himself to focus. “Is Georgie unconscious?”

There was a pause, and an audible sigh.

“Yeah. She is.”
“What did he do to her?” Dillon could hear Felicia break down somewhere behind him, but ignored it.
“Hit her. With the gun.”
“He has a gun?” Dillon was dismayed, and various mufflied cries and voices from the others told him he wasn’t the only one. He was surprised Lois or Lucas hadn’t ripped the phone from his hand by now.
“How bad is she hurt? Can you tell? Does Hannah really look okay?”
“Hannah’s fine, I think,” Brook told him reassuringly. “She looks fine, physically, anyway. When the door opened and Kent came in I swear we both thought he was going to… that it was bad… but he just sent Hannah in here and left. Georgie, she’s…” Brook’s voice trailed off for a moment as she looked over at her friend. “She was out for a while after he hit her, and then she woke up and we talked, and then she passed out again just a little while ago… right around the time Kent came back with Hannah…”

Dillon closed his eyes.

“Does Hannah have any -”
“Listen, Dillon, you have to stop asking questions for a second here! I need to tell you – it’s the assho --” Brook broke off when she realized Hannah was right there. “That guy from Europe! It’s the guy you shot, Dillon, Kent’s the same guy! He was… it was partly about you, and maybe a little me… it’s such a mess, but it’s the same guy, and we were on Greene Street! I don’t know if we’re still there, we’re in a basement somewhere, but that’s where we were at the time, all right? When he hit us? That’s where we were! You have to – to get someone over here! Carefully! Get Mac or -”
“Mac’s here!” Dillon’s mind was reeling from everything Brook had just said. “Mac’s right here, he’s tracing the call, he’s… he’ll find out for sure where you really are, and in the meantime I’m on my way, all right? I’m coming, okay? I’ll bring help, just… just tell Georgie… tell her I love her and I’m coming, all right? And tell Hannah too? Please, God, Brook, just… just tell them and hang in…”

Dillon finally handed the phone over to Mac, and Lois nearly pounced on him, trying to get the phone away, asking him to ask Brook if she was all right.

“Brook Lynn, it’s Mac Scorpio, I’m trying to trace this call, but the equipment is having trouble. Are you on a cell phone?” His voice was authoritative but tense.
“Mine. He took Lucas’s…”

In the back of his mind it occurred to Mac that it was strange but lucky that Brook had been carrying two cell phones, but he decided it didn’t matter.

“Your mother wants to talk to you, and I need to talk to Dillon, so it’s just important that you keep the line open and remember that help is on the way.”

Mac got no response and handed the phone over to Lois, checked to be sure that one of the two uniformed cops was taking care of the tracing equipment and had his instructions, then approached Dillon and Lucas, who were arguing by the front door.

“… because my kid is in there and Georgie is in there and I’m not going to take a chance on Kent seeing a cop and emptying his gun into one of them!” Dillon shouted angrily, heading for the door, and Lucas pulled him back.
“And what happens when we get there and we have no backup and he pulls us in there and shoots us both and he still has all three of them?” Lucas shot back at him, and Mac got between them.
“I’m coming with you,” Mac told them both. “No arguments.”
“Good,” Lucas acknowledged, but Dillon only gave him a frustrated glare.
“The guy said no cops, Mac.”
“And you already broke that rule.”
“He doesn’t know that yet.”
“And he doesn’t have to. Just let me come along and handle this.”
“Mac -”
“I could be insisting on going alone, Dillon. I’m already breaking the rules letting you come along and not bringing police backup. Don’t push me. Just tell me where we’re going. What did Brook tell you?”

Dillon stared at Mac, eye to eye, and lied to his face.

“They were on Dunbar, near Berry Lane,” Dillon said evenly. “You take your car. We’ll take mine.”

***

Five minutes later Lucas was furious and more than a little bit scared as Dillon whipped around corners on the streets of Port Charles at a speed of nearly 80 miles per hour.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Lucas screamed, and Dillon ignored him. “Where are we going? What about Mac -”

Lucas broke off suddenly as it occurred to him. The speeding and crazy, reckless turns were for Mac’s benefit. Designed to lose Mac.

“You lied,” Lucas mumbled, as much to himself as to Dillon.

After only another minute or two Dillon slowed down, convinced that an unsuspecting Mac had lost their trail long ago, and concerned that speeding would only get him stopped by another cop. And that was the last thing he needed.

Dillon could feel beads of sweat rolling down his back and he drew in a ragged breath, finally realizing just how tense he’d been. He’d never driven like that before. He hadn’t driven at all recklessly in over four years.

The emotions running as high as ever didn’t help, either.

“You lied,” Lucas repeated, and Dillon didn’t bother to deny it.
“He said no cops.”
“We’re screwed! You know that, right? What the hell are we going to do when we get there?”

Dillon didn’t answer him. He didn’t know what they were going to do, or even what they were going to find. He wasn’t even sure he’d made the right decision. All he knew was that he had to get there and do something without risking Kent recognizing Mac as a cop and freaking out.

Preferably something that would bring everyone involved home safely.

“Where are we really going?” Lucas asked after a moment, and Dillon suddenly slowed the car.
“We’re here.” Dillon said rather ominously.

Lucas looked out the window and read a street sign as they passed.

“Greene Street?” He questioned, and a moment later another sight caught his eye. “That’s Brook’s car!”
“Where the hell is Georgie’s?” Dillon asked, his voice a bit high-pitched, and he quickly parked his own car behind Brook’s and jumped out.

The two men looked the car over. It had been left unlocked, but under the circumstances neither of them expected Brook to have the presence of mind to lock it.

Neither of them admitted out loud that they were both afraid that they were going to find blood or other signs of injury, and neither of them acknowledged the shared relief that there was none.

But they sighed a heavy sigh in unison.

“What house?” Lucas asked, his tone tense, and Dillon shook his head.
“I don’t know. Brook just said Greene Street. She said they were here and he knocked them out but she thought they were in a basement somewhere.”
“Wait, so they might not even be on this street?”
“I don’t know!” Dillon pushed away the impulse to tell Lucas to shut up. He wasn’t the enemy anymore. Not when compared to Kent’s evil. “We just… we gotta think this through…”

Dillon gazed up and down the street, as did Lucas, both of them looking for some kind of sign and finding nothing.

“There’s gotta be some way…” Lucas nearly whispered, speaking mostly to himself, and in the silence that followed Dillon looked up and met his eyes.
“It’s the guy from Prague.”

Dillon spoke simply, though not without emotion, and Lucas thought for a moment he must have heard him wrong.

“It’s what?”
“The same guy. The scum who attacked Brook, the guy I put a bullet in. That’s what started all this.”

Lucas was quiet for a moment, staring at him incredulously.

“Are you sure?” he finally asked, and Dillon nodded.
“Brook was sure. That’s all I know.”

Lucas leaned against the car, thrown back into bad memories.

“Does this help us at all?” he asked Dillon after a moment, and Dillon shook his head.
“I don’t think so.”
“So, what, we just… what, we… start knocking on doors?”

Dillon and Lucas looked at each other for a long moment, both of them feeling more than a little desperate, more than a little sick to their stomachs.

“We gotta stay discreet,” Dillon decided. “We gotta keep the element of surprise on our side.”
“Then what?”

Dillon thought it over, willing back another round of tears.

“We, uh… we can’t call Mac… We call Brook back? Maybe she can describe the house?” Dillon theorized, but then he remembered how they’d left things at his own house. “She could be still talking to her mom. They could be still trying to trace the call.”

Dillon reached into his pocket for his cell phone, deciding it was worth a try anyway, but Lucas grabbed his wrist and stopped him. Dillon met his eyes and noticed that a fresh wave of fear seemed to have washed over him.

“What?”
“If, uh… if the line is open…” Lucas started shakily. “If it rings and he hears it… I mean, he can’t know that she has it, right? If we call and he finds out we take away our only connection… and he might get mad… and we don’t want him mad…”

Dillon sat down on the side of the road, nearly wincing at a mental image of an angry Kent terrifying Hannah and hitting Georgie.

“No,” he agreed quietly. “We don’t want him mad.”

Lucas sat down barely a foot away from Dillon, by his side.

They were there, on that same street. They were so close. And so trapped.

Seconds turned to minutes in tortured, helpless silence.

“We can’t screw this up,” Dillon finally said, and the tears began to fall.

***

“Mommy?” Hannah’s little voice was tentative, and on the verge of tears. “Mommy?”
“Hannah, Honey…” Brook spoke calmly, but she felt like crying herself. “Mommy’s just sleeping.”

Big, fat, childhood tears fell from Hannah’s eyes as she kneeled on the cement floor in the darkened room in front of her mother, and Brook was at a loss for words. She couldn’t move, couldn’t comfort her physically. And she couldn’t make the little girl’s mommy wake up.

“Daddy’s scared…” Hannah whispered, and Brook nodded.
“He doesn’t like to be away from you.”

Brook knew a thing or two about worried parents. When Hannah had given up on holding the phone up for her and the conversation had abruptly ended, Lois had panicked, and Ned’s voice had suddenly started booming through the phone.

The phone was lying on the floor several feet away now, the line still open, but both sides quiet.

“Your daddy’s going to come get us,” Brook told Hannah softly. “Uncle Lucas, too. Maybe Grandpa Mac. They’re all going to help us, okay?”
“And Mommy?”
“And Mommy.”

Hannah sniffled and looked around with childhood curiosity. She spotted the phone and picked it up again. She pushed a random button or two, watched the screen light up and the letters on it change.

“Hannah, I need you to put the phone back in my pocket. Just where you took it out from before. Can you do that?” Brook asked her, thinking that she didn’t want it to be in plain sight if Kent returned.

Hannah did as she was asked, her tiny fingers easily pushing the tiny phone into the pocket of Brook’s pants.

Brook was on the floor only a few feet away from Georgie, and Hannah turned back to her mother and gently touched her cheek.

“Mommy’s sick,” she said quietly, her voice breaking, and the tears and sobs threatened to come again.

Before Brook could reassure her, Georgie stirred and opened her eyes.

“Mommy?”

It took a moment for Georgie’s eyes to focus, but she knew that voice like she knew her name. That was her little girl’s voice. She sounded ready to cry, but she was there, and awake, and healthy enough to talk.

Under the circumstances the sound of that voice was the stuff dreams were made of.

And so they cried together.

“Hey, Baby Girl…” Georgie murmured, tasting the salt of her own tears, relieved beyond measure despite the horrible circumstances.
“Mommy, I’m scared…” Hannah wailed, and Georgie cursed the ropes that bound her hands behind her.
“You don’t have to be scared.” Georgie’s voice automatically took on a soothing tone she used only with Hannah, and only when Hannah needed comfort. “I’m right here. You’re with me now. I’m right here… Are you okay? Does anything hurt, Baby?”

Hannah shook her head and sniffled, significantly calmer now that Georgie was awake and talking to her. Brook had tried, but Mommy was Mommy. And only Mommy could make it all better.

“What about you?” Brook asked Georgie, and Georgie looked over and met her eyes.
“Sore.”

The tiny room went silent for a moment, and Hannah’s breathing grew ragged again, her little chin trembling.

“Come closer to me,” Georgie told her. “Use Mommy as a pillow. Come lie down.”

Hannah gratefully did as Georgie said, curling up against her.

“It’s late, Baby,” Georgie continued, once again wishing her hands were free so that she could hold her daughter. She settled for using her own body to give Hannah something soft to lean on. “I want to tell you a bedtime story, okay?”
“No books,” Hannah pointed out.
“That’s okay. I know this one by heart.” Georgie whispered, and her eyes filled with tears, which wasn’t lost on Brook. Lying close by and facing each other, it was easy to take note of these things.

Georgie took a moment to collect herself, then continued, her voice quiet and her tone thoughtful.

“Once upon a time… not so long ago… there was a girl who didn’t know what it was like to love a boy… and she wanted to know what it felt like to be loved. But she didn’t know how to make that happen. You know why?”
“Why?” Hannah asked curiously.
“Because she was a geek.”

Hannah laughed a child’s amused laugh, and Georgie managed a little smile.

“But you know what, Hannah? That geek, she was very, very lucky. ‘Cause a very special boy, he walked into her life one day when she least expected it. And he helped her play a trick on her sister, and then they talked for a long time, and that girl fell in love. Just like that.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”

Georgie took a deep breath. Her head was really pounding. But the story seemed to have Hannah calm and content, and it was doing good things to slow her own racing heartbeat.

“This little geek and the special boy, they decided to have a baby. They had a little girl and they loved her a lot. Even though she was a monkey sometimes.”

Hannah giggled again and somehow managed to curl up even closer to Georgie, pressed against her side.

“Like me,” she pointed out.
“Just like you. But you know what happened when they were trying to live happily ever after?”
“What?”
“A very bad man decided to take the geek and her little girl away.”

Hannah was quiet at that, and Georgie wondered if her four-year-old brain was making the connection. The little girl breathed deeply and rearranged herself at Georgie’s side.

“What happens next, Mommy?”

The question was asked innocently; the child oblivious. But the adults in the room were only too aware.

Georgie’s eyes filled with tears again, and she looked over and met Brook’s eyes. She found Brook looking as emotional as she felt.

They both knew the answer they wanted for that question.

“Mommy?” Hannah was insistent. “Mommy, what happens next?”
“Well, after that…” Georgie’s voice broke. “After that they lived happily ever after.”
“Yeah?”

Georgie sniffled and held back a sob.

“Yeah.”

***

“We gotta do something. I can’t sit here. It’s just not… It’s… Hannah’s probably… she’s probably, like, leaning over Georgie right now… crying ‘cause Mommy woke wake up… for real this time…” Dillon let his voice trail off. He wondered if this experience would forever ruin Saturday mornings for them. Maybe it would never be the same. Maybe he and Hannah would both need Georgie in front of them and wide awake to feel secure.

Maybe they’d never feel secure.

Maybe the bastard had stolen the most precious moments in his life whether they found his girls or not.

“We gotta do something.” Dillon’s voice was growing frantic, the very idea of never finding them – or finding them too late – eating away at him.
“Not that.” Lucas was adamant.
“If she left the phone on she would have put it on vibrate --”
“You told me yourself her hands were tied.”
“She could have had Hannah do it! That’s how they made the call in the first place!”
“She also has a head injury, Dillon. She’s probably not thinking clearly… I don’t like it.”

They were still sitting on the side of the road, in the wee hours of the morning, desperation rising in both of them.

“We can’t chance him finding the phone and taking it away,” Lucas continued, forcing his voice to be something like calm. “She could be clinging to that phone as her only line to safety. Don’t you get that?”
“He could be hurting them, Lucas. Do you get that? Are you thinking about that? ‘Cause every second we’re sitting here could mean one more bruise, one more cut, one more nightmare down the line!”

Lucas didn’t budge, staring out into the space in front of him, and Dillon forced himself to take a harsher approach.

“You think he’s got his hands on Brook right now?” Dillon nearly cringed just saying it, but it had the desired effect. Lucas stood up and shook his head.
“Shut up…” Lucas whispered. He couldn’t take the image. “Shut up…”
“Shut up? What good does that do, huh? You think telling me to shut up does them any good? You think I’m not just as freaked out here as you are? Who the hell is to say he’s not on top of Georgie right now? I’m making that call!”

Dillon turned his phone on again, but Lucas ripped it away from him.

“Five minutes, Dillon!” Lucas’s tone was pleading. “Just five minutes, okay? She might call us when it’s safe to. Just give her a few more minutes.”

Dillon stared at him defiantly for a few seconds, then finally nodded.

“Five minutes. Then I’m making the call.”

***

Hannah was fast asleep, unaware of the nightmare she was living with her mother and cousin, at least for the moment.

Georgie envied her.

“They say ignorance is bliss,” Brook said suddenly, breaking the silence in the dark room, and Georgie looked over at her.
“Sounds about right.”

They were both feeling a strange sense of calm. Maybe the complete and total inability to fight back under these particular circumstances had made them resigned. Maybe they’d been left alone in the basement long enough to breathe easy for at least this moment in time. Maybe Hannah’s rhythmic breathing was lulling them to sleep.

Maybe it had something to do with having a concussion.

“You think that door is locked?” Brook asked, her eyes on the door at the top of the nearby staircase. Georgie followed her gaze.
“I’m not sending Hannah up there alone,” Georgie told her simply, and as Brook opened her mouth to clarify her question, suddenly the door opened, and then it didn’t matter anymore.

Ryan Kent was in the doorway.

And none of them, least of all a four-year-old, was going to get by.

He descended the stairs slowly, watching them, smiling as if they were his house guests.

“Bastard!” Brook sneered suddenly, driven by six months worth of emotion, and though Georgie understood the impulse only too well, she shot Brook a warning look.

Kent didn’t react to the comment, instead just taking a moment to take in the scene.

“Comfortable?” He asked after a moment, a hint of teasing in his voice, and Georgie fought an impulse to swing her leg out and kick him.

Hannah stirred and woke, and fear immediately filled her eyes when she spotted Kent. She burrowed deeper against Georgie’s side, and Kent took notice and leaned in toward her, reaching out to touch her cheek. Hannah backed away from him, forced to move away from Georgie in the process, until she hit the wall and stood staring at this new monster to haunt her dreams.

It was around that time that Georgie decided she wanted Kent dead rather than jailed.

“Fuck you!” she screeched at him, and he raised his hand to strike her – at which point Brook managed to kick him in the shins.

This amused him. Greatly.

“Brook Lynn, isn’t it?” He said with a laugh, as if she wasn’t known to him, and she smiled back at him, feeling a little victorious to have something to surprise him with.
“So Prague sucked for you too, huh?” Brook tossed at him, and both she and Georgie savored the sudden wave of uncertainty that crossed his face.

He didn’t know they knew. And they’d take any tiny victory they could.

“One more little tidbit, Professor,” Brook continued more confidently, “They stuck a GPS chip behind my shoulder blade after that unfortunate little incident. As soon as they realize I’m gone – you’re screwed.”

She watched his face, gauging his reaction, hoping he believed her. And wishing it was true.

There was a hint of worry in his eyes, but he tried to hide it.

“It was Dillon’s idea,” Georgie said suddenly, wanting to support Brook’s lie and also see how Kent reacted to the mention of Dillon’s name.
“Prick,” Kent muttered under his breath.
“A damn good shot, though, isn’t he?” Brook twisted the figurative knife a little.
“If this is all about Dillon…” Georgie began, choosing her words carefully. “If you just want to punish Dillon…”
“So much more than that now,” Kent told her, smiling the smile he used to use on her in class, and she felt her skin crawl.
“Then if it’s about me,” Georgie continued, pleading her case for Hannah’s sake. “Then you don’t need Hannah. He’ll come after me. You can let Hannah go. Let Brook take her out of here. And if it’s still about Brook, let me take Hannah out of here. And if it’s about --”
“What if I want to take everything he has?” Kent asked her, and she could see in his eyes that he was enjoying every minute of this, and she wondered if it was about all of them in one way or another. Maybe it all fit together nicely for him, his destructive attraction to her and his need for payback against Dillon and his obsession with the Brook Lynn that existed in the media. Wherever it had started, somehow it had ended up here.

[JRK Archiver]

And maybe the details didn’t matter.

Georgie’s breath caught in her throat as Kent reached out to gently stroke her cheek. She turned her head away, but there wasn’t much more she could do.

Sitting only a foot or two behind Georgie, Hannah was watching. She didn’t understand the hows or whys, but she knew her mother was in distress. And her lower lip began to tremble yet again.

“You know no one ever cared to figure me out before,” Kent said softly, and somewhere in the back of her mind Georgie wondered if that was a key to who he was.

Maybe he was just clever and crazy.

It was one more random, fucking thought that didn’t matter and wouldn’t help them.

Kent traced the line of her jaw with one finger, then trailed it slowly down her neck.

She knew he wasn’t going to stop there.

She was approaching her breaking point when a phone rang.

And he stopped. And listened.

“I took your…” Kent’s voice trailed off as his eyes fell on Brook. The muffled ringing was clearly coming from her, and her eyes widened in fear as he lunged toward her and forced his hand into her pocket.

All three of them watched him with dread as he straightened up and stepped a few feet away, the phone in his hands. He looked at the tiny cell phone thoughtfully for a moment, apparently going through some kind of internal debate.

Then he flipped the phone open and listened.

“Hannah? Honey?” Dillon’s emotional voice came through the phone, loudly enough for Hannah and Georgie and Brook to hear it a few feet away from Kent. Georgie and Brook knew enough not to react.

But…

“Daddy!” Hannah called loudly, and Kent smiled a satisfied smile.

He hadn’t been 100% sure who the voice on the other end of the phone belonged to.

As it turned out the kid was good for something.

“Hannah?” The tinny voice from the phone carried into the room again.
“She’s right here,” Kent told him almost as though he was going to hand her the phone, but of course he didn’t. “She’s right here with me. And your lovely girlfriend. And your niece.”

Out on the corner of Greene Street, Dillon closed his eyes, momentarily letting the feeling of defeat overcome him, and Lucas looked on in horror.

But there was no giving up now.

“I’m going to put another bullet in your mother-fucking-” Dillon spat, but Kent cut him off.
“Payback’s a bitch!”

Over the phone, there was a child’s frightened scream. Someone yelled “No!”. There were the softest sounds of a scuffle.

And then a gunshot echoed in the quiet of the night.

[JRK Archiver]

Chapter 12

Dillon Quartermaine was hoping that Brook Lynn Ashton had been shot.

If someone had told him a year ago, a month ago, even a week ago, that he was capable of thinking that thought, wishing that wish, he would have given them directions to Ferncliffe.

But here he was, running blindly down the street in the direction Lucas swore the gunshot had come from, hoping and praying that his niece had been shot.

Kent wasn’t bluffing. Dillon knew Kent didn’t bluff. Someone had to have been shot.

And he might not survive it if it was Georgie or Hannah.

And so he ran, and looked up to the heavens every now and then, praying to any available higher power that if someone had to be bleeding and hurt and perhaps even dying, that it was Brook.

He would never look his brother in the eye again.

Lucas was off to Dillon’s right, praying a completely opposite prayer.

A gunshot in a quiet neighborhood wasn’t a discreet thing. The sound had been enough to tell Lucas, who had heard it in the night air rather than over the phone, what direction they should have been headed in. It had taken a stunned and rocked to his very core Dillon a few seconds to react, but he ran wild-eyed after Lucas down the street as a few neighbours cautiously came out of their houses.

There was no plan anymore, no element of surprise. No thought left at all. Only something like instinct. And so as they dashed down the street, and prayed their opposite prayers, there was no decision process when it came to whether to ask a neighbor for help. Lucas veered off of the road and into the yard of a frightened older couple who had emerged onto their front lawn.

“Ryan Kent! Where?!” Lucas demanded, out of breath, and a moment later Dillon was by his side, and the woman pointed to a house just a few houses down the street, on the opposite side of the road.
“1029,” the woman told them, stuttering, clearly afraid of the madmen in front of her.

But then they were gone, taking off for Ryan Kent’s house like their lives depended on it.

And in a sense, their lives did.

The house was locked, but it made little difference. Dillon launched the first rock his hands fell on at the front window, and it did the trick nicely. Both men cut themselves as they removed enough glass to climb through, but they didn’t care and barely noticed as they ran aimlessly into the house and started opening doors.

Lucas brought a sharp shard of glass with him.

Maybe they were madmen now.

It was Dillon who found the door to the basement after what felt like several minutes but in reality was a handful of seconds.

He was nearly to the bottom of the stairs before the sight really hit him.

His prayers hadn’t been answered.

Lucas’s had.

“Georgie!” The word was choked out of him as he knelt in front of her and pressed his hand over the wound in her chest. Her eyes were open, but he wasn’t sure she was seeing him.

Brook was kneeling by Georgie too, but as soon as Lucas reached the bottom of the stairs she was in his arms.

“Did you call an ambulance?” Dillon yelled at Brook, and she shook her head, indicating ‘no’, her tear-stained face apologetic. There hadn’t been time, and her hands weren’t free. It took Lucas only a moment to cut the ropes that still bound her wrists, and then she threw her arms around his neck and held on for dear life.

And for that one moment, Dillon hated them both.

“I’m right here,” Dillon murmured to a barely conscious Georgie while Lucas located Brook’s cell phone and called for help. “I’m right here with you…” He unknowingly echoed her words to Hannah earlier.

In the relative calm of the next few seconds two things occurred to Dillon.

Kent wasn’t there.

And Hannah was huddled in the corner of the room with dried tears on her cheeks and her eyes frozen in space.

“I tried to talk to her…” Brook told Dillon, her words less than clear because she was still crying. “She’s, like, almost catatonic or something… and I had to help Georgie…”

Brook’s voice was apologetic. Dillon ignored her.

There were only two people in his world right now.

Dillon kissed Georgie’s forehead gently, and whispered to her one more time that he was right there, and stepped away from her to go to his daughter.

The unshed tears in his eyes finally started to fall as he approached his little girl. The emotions were too huge, too many. He was holding on by a thread. Georgie was lying bleeding on the floor a few feet away. An ambulance seemed to be taking its sweet time getting there. His daughter, who he had desperatedly needed to see okay for the last several hours, looked uninjured but psychologically destroyed.

He moved slowly toward her, wary of startling her, but when he reached out to touch her hand she launched herself into his arms and clung to him with all the strength of a hungry, tired and traumatized four-year-old.

He had no words, and it seemed she didn’t either. He sat down heavily on the floor and they held tightly to each other, both of them crying.

Suddenly Lucas was yelling up the stairs to the paramedics. Two men with a stretcher appeared and quickly got to work. Whatever questions they had they asked Lucas. He was the only one in the room capable of putting together a full sentence.

Utterly exhausted, Dillon managed to pull himself up off the floor – with Hannah still in his arms – as Georgie was loaded onto the stretcher. Somehow or other he made it up the stairs with the others, feeling more than a little dazed, and when the paramedics stopped Georgie in front of the ambulance and asked who would be riding along with her, all eyes turned to him, and he realized he had a choice to make.

“Can, uh… look, if we can both just --”
“One person. And certainly not a kid.”

They were firm, and Dillon knew he had only a second to make a decision. He couldn’t really comprehend not being by Georgie’s side right now, but Hannah wasn’t letting go of him for anything in the world, and he couldn’t even think of letting go of her, either.

He stood over Georgie with Hannah in his arms, torn, and suddenly Georgie lifted her hand weakly and touched his side.

“Hannah,” Georgie whispered with considerable effort, and Dillon nodded in understanding.

She was right. It always came down to putting Hannah first. He should have known.

“Okay,” he told Georgie, leaning down until his face was near hers. He could see she was in agony, and it killed him. “I love you. Always. And I’ll be right there at the hospital, right after you get there, and you’ll be fine. And Hannah will be fine, too.”

He told her these things he didn’t think he believed, and kissed her forehead again, then looked up and met Lucas’s eyes. He took a deep breath, then tilted his head toward Georgie slowly, gesturing wearily, and Lucas nodded and came to take Dillon’s place by Georgie’s side.

Dillon would thank him later. He wasn’t the enemy anymore.

Dillon was vaguely aware that more tears were making their way down his cheeks as Lucas and Georgie got into the ambulance, and a uniformed officer led him (with Hannah) and Brook to a waiting police car. It was only too clear that neither of them were in any condition to drive themselves to the hospital.

They drove in near silence, the only sound a mess of erratic breathing from three people in extreme emotional distress.

Dillon watched the lines go by on the pavement out the window.

“It’s okay,” he whispered into Hannah’s hair.

But it wasn’t okay.

It might never be okay again.

***

Dr. Jarred Coates had been working in the ER at Port Charles’s General Hospital for nearly fifteen years. He knew all about dealing with worried families. He’d actually come to think he was rather good at it over the years.

But the Quartermaine and Scorpio clans were proving to be a challenge.

As far as he could tell the mass of people in the waiting room were concerned about three individuals in particular. (Aside from the gunshot victim herself, of course.)

There was the girl, maybe about twenty, bearing a striking resemblance to that Brooklyn rock star his own daughter loved. Several people identifying themselves as relatives of Drs. Alan and Monica Quartermaine hounded him, insisting that he get her in for a CT scan immediately, but even the Drs. Quartermaine themselves couldn’t make a concussion a priority. And so the girl, who wasn’t even his patient, sat curled up in the arms of the man who had come in with the gunshot victim.

The other two, one of whom actually was his patient for the night, were apparently father and daughter despite the fact that they looked more likely to be brother and sister. The little girl was his immediate concern. Children tended to get priority over adults. And her emotional state was cause for alarm.

Dr. Coates took a deep breath and made his way toward the group.

“Mr. Dillon Quartermaine?” He approached the young man with the unruly hair, but before he could say anything further a sixty-something red head jumped in front of him and pointed her finger in his face.
“What the hell is taking so long? My family runs this sorry excuse for a hospital and we can’t get any information about my daughter-in-law’s condition and you’ve got both of my grand-daughters sitting in this closet-sized waiting room waiting for treatment while every other person who walks through the door immediately gets --”
“Ma’am, we prioritize based on the seriousness of the injury --”
“Why don’t you prioritize based on the seriousness of your desire to keep your job?”
“Mother!” The man was about fifty, and his tone was one of warning. “Brook says she’s fine. We’ll get her examined as soon as possible. And if you’d let him do his job, I think Dr…” He glanced at the ID card on the doctor’s white coat. “Dr. Coates was about to take Hannah to be examined. Am I right?”

Coates sighed and nodded gratefully, and turned his attention back to his little patient, sitting in her father’s lap.

“Hi Hannah!” His tone was light, and he smiled disarmingly. “My name is Dr. Coates. I need to take a look at you to make sure you’re not hurt anywhere. Can you come with me?”

The little girl burrowed further into her father’s arms, and when Coates met the young man’s eyes, he was surprised to find a hint of coldness there.

“She stays with me,” Dillon said firmly, and Coates looked at him for a moment before replying.
“If you’d like to come along with us that’s no problem --”
“I’ll hold her.”

Coates looked at Dillon in surprise, and Dillon repeated himself.

“I’ll hold her. While you examine her.”

It wasn’t a request, simply a statement, and Coates sighed. It would complicate matters for him, but only slightly. And he didn’t want to argue with this poor man. Not having seen his tormented eyes and heard a general story of what he’d been through tonight.

Coates gestured for them to follow him, and Dillon turned his head toward the man who had intervened between himself and the pushy grandmother earlier.

“Ned?” Dillon called his name. “The second anyone hears anything…”

Dillon let his voice trail off, and Ned nodded.

“Immediately. I promise.”

Dillon stood, still carrying Hannah, and followed the doctor out of the room, right past Georgie’s crying mother and sister.

***

“Hannah, can you tell me where anything hurts?” Dr. Coates asked gently, but the girl said nothing.

Dillon was sitting on a bed in a tiny cubicle, and Hannah was in his lap.

“Can you tell me, did that man, did he do anything to you that you didn’t like?” The doctor tried again, but Hannah said nothing.

“He shot her mother, if that counts,” Dillon muttered bitterly, sarcastically, not at all sure why he felt like lashing out against this man. He knew he was only trying to help.

Coates let the comment go.

“Normally right about now I’d ask her to lie down so I can take a look at her,” he told Dillon, and when Dillon didn’t take the hint he sighed and turned to retrieve his instruments. He quickly listened to Hannah’s heart beat, then looked in both of her’s eyes with a lighted tool. The child barely reacted to the blinding light.

“I don’t see any sign of concussion,” Coates said as much to himself as to Dillon. “I’d like to undress her to check for bruising.”

He reached out for the bottom of Hannah’s grubby pajama top, and she didn’t react as he pulled the top over her head.

Coates was happy to find that Hannah seemed nearly uninjured, save for a dark bruise on her right arm.

But to Dillon, that single bruise might as well have been ten or twenty of them for all the fury it put in him.

He held Hannah tighter, and whispered to her again that it was okay now.

And he promised himself that Kent would pay.

For Brook.

For Hannah.

And especially for Georgie.

***

When Dillon finally found his and Georgie’s family again, they were in the waiting room for the OR, rather than the ER.

He’d expected that. He and Georgie weren’t married, which meant that legally it fell to Mac to act, and Dillon himself only had to react to Mac’s decisions.

He told himself what was happening now was a good thing, that the doctors were doing what they needed to be doing to save Georgie’s life.

But his mind just refused to acknowledge George in surgery as a good thing.

Mac spotted Dillon as he approached and got up to talk to him.

“How’s she doing?” Mac asked, looking at Hannah, who had become somewhat of a permanent fixture in Dillon’s arms.
“Better than Georgie,” Dillon told him, and Mac nodded, willing to get the details later if that was how Dillon wanted it.

Dillon looked at Mac expectantly, and Mac took a deep breath.

“We haven’t heard anything since they took her in for surgery. Felicia’s barely keeping it together.”

Both men knew Felicia was far from the only one, but neither said it out loud.

“I should have been there when then wheeled her away,” Dillon mumbled quietly, and Mac looked him in the eye.
“You were taking care of your daughter. You let me take care of mine. And you and I both know that’s exactly how Georgie would have wanted things to happen tonight.”
“Don’t say ‘would have’!” Dillon nearly groaned at the thought, and Mac nodded apologetically.

Neither one wanted to think about having to use the past tense when it came to Georgie.

“I need to sit,” Dillon said wearily after a moment in silence, and Mac went with him over to a row of chairs, not far from the other family members waiting for news.

“Listen, Dillon, I want you to know that I have every man I can spare – and some that I really can’t – out looking for Kent. I talked to Brook Lynn and she told me Kent took off out a back door as soon as he heard breaking glass. That was you and Lucas, I assume?”

Dillon managed a tiny nod, his eyes glazed and his mind elsewhere.

“Okay. We’ve also opened up a line to the public. We’re asking for tips from anyone who has seen him. We’re using the media this time. And as soon as Georgie is out of the woods, I’ll be out there myself. It might take some time, but we will find him.”
“I want to be there,” Dillon said, a hint of ice under the softness of his quiet voice.

Dillon didn’t look up and didn’t elaborate, and watching them both as they sat together in silence, Mac couldn’t help noticing that the haunted look on Hannah’s face was mirrored on Dillon’s.

Dillon was just better at keeping up appearances.

“She’ll be okay,” Dillon said suddenly, insistently. “She’s going to be fine.” He nodded a few times, trying to convince himself as much as Mac. “She’ll make it out of this. She will.”

Dillon looked even younger than he was in that moment, almost child-like in his desperate uncertainty, and as he sat looking at Mac hopefully, it occurred to Mac that he was waiting for him to agree. There was an unspoken “Right, Mac?” at the end of every sentence Dillon spoke, and Mac awkwardly patted him on the back and managed a little nod.

“She’ll be okay,” Mac agreed, praying it was true.
“Yeah. She’ll be okay.”

Dillon kissed the top of Hannah’s head, and sighed heavily.

“She’ll be okay.”

***

It was more than an hour later when Ned finally left Brook with Lois and Lucas and went in search of his younger brother. He found him sitting on the cool hard floor, leaning against the wall, in the hallway just around the corner from the waiting room. And, of course, Hannah was in his lap.

“If you’re out here by yourself because you want to be alone, feel free to tell me to leave,” Ned offered, but Dillon shook his head, and gestured for him to sit.

Ned lowered himself to the floor next to Dillon, and noticed that Hannah was fast asleep.

“We’ll probably hear something soon,” Ned told him reassuringly, and he nodded, avoiding Ned’s eyes.
“The, uh… the last time I sat on the floor in a hallway in this hospital… It was the night Hannah was born…” Dillon’s voice was soft and reflective, and he took in a slow, careful breath. “We were supposed to be giving her up, you know, and… I pretty much thought it was the worst moment I’d ever go through.”

Dillon tried to say something else, but it got caught in his throat.

“You were wrong,” Ned filled in for him.

Dillon nodded, fending off another wave of tears.

They sat in silence for several seconds, and then finally Dillon turned to his brother and forced himself to meet his eyes.

“I wanted it to be Brook.”

Ned’s eyes filled with confusion.

“What?”
“When I heard the gunshot and knew it had to be one of them. I didn’t just want it to be Brook, I hoped and prayed.”

There was guilt in Dillon’s eyes, and although the thought of anyone wishing his daughter hurt or dead was disturbing to Ned, under the circumstances it was only human, and he knew it.

He took a moment to put his thoughts together.

“Dillon, if I’d known, at that moment, that one of them was hurt… if I’d had the chance to hope and pray… I would have prayed it was Georgie. It’s just the way the whole father-daughter thing works. Brook is my priority here. Georgie and Hannah are yours. You don’t have to apologize for that.”

Satisfied with that for the moment, Dillon leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. The truth was that the guilt he felt was the least of his concerns, and Ned could see that.

“So how are you really holding up?” Ned asked, and Dillon opened his eyes and stared at nothing.
“I put this broken record in my head that keeps telling me ‘she’ll be okay’, ‘she’ll be okay’… Part of the reason I came out here was ‘cause I couldn’t stand staring at that door anymore, waiting for the doctor to come through it…”

Dillon let his voice trail off for a moment, and he ran his right hand absent-mindedly through Hannah’s fine hair.

“My little chatterbox hasn’t said a word all night.”

Dillon’s tone was lighter than it had been, and thoughtful, but there was a sadness attached to it, and his eyes shone with unshed tears.

“I’m, uh, I’m not too sure I can handle this…” Dillon confided quietly. “Georgie… Georgie might be okay, you know, and I’ll have to, like, figure out… if I can deal with whatever happens there… I don’t think that’s gonna hit me until I know for sure what I’m dealing with… but Hannah, she’s… she’s right here, you know, and physically she’s pretty okay… but this really messed with her head… and I’ve just got this pit of acid in my stomach right now ‘cause I look at my kid and I wonder if this, this experience, if it’s going to, like, live inside her and keep her from being the happy-go-lucky, ‘look, Daddy, it’s a puppy!’ kid she always was… And this is going to sound… probably a little silly, I guess, but I don’t think I’m coming at this 100% as a father, ‘cause… as much as I’m worried about her for her sake, part of me is thinking that I can’t handle never having her back the way she was because I need her, if that makes any sense to you… You know we’ve always been a little weird, just the age thing, maybe, I guess… or maybe not, maybe that’s just us… I don’t know… but I swear to God, the kid is four years old and she’s, like, my best little friend… I mean, like, I see a movie trailer, and I immediately start calculating in my head just how long I’m going to have to wait until Hannah is old enough to watch it with me… You and Brook, the music thing connects you, right? And it’s… I think maybe it’s kind of like that… I mean, Hannah’s four… she’s four and she’s already got some of it figured out… we’ll be watching a movie and if the camera is moving a lot or in some weird way, she’ll look up at me and she’ll just grin and she’ll just go ‘Cool shot, right Daddy?’… I think somehow I’m still young enough to be silly enough to actually enjoy things she enjoys, the way she enjoys them… or maybe being silly is just me… but then there’s the fact that she loves movies, too, right, so then we have stuff in common, and then there’s cartoons, which is sort of different, but in a good way… I don’t… I don’t really know what the hell I’m saying, but I swear to God there’s nothing in the whole crazy wide world sweeter than Saturday morning at our house.”

[JRK Archiver]

Dillon broke off, and broke down, his eyes wandering back toward the waiting area.

“But not if Georgie isn’t asleep down the hall. Georgie needs to be asleep down the hall!”

Dillon cried quietly into Hannah’s hair.

And somewhere off to the left of them, behind thick walls, under harsh lights, Georgie was dreaming…

…



“You look pretty, Mommy!”
“Thank you, Hannah. You’re the prettiest little flower girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life, Baby Girl.”
“And Daddy looks handsome with his hair all better. But don’t tell him I said that!”
“I won’t. He’s touchy about his hair.”
“I told Morgan after you and Daddy have one week of honeymoon alone I get to go on vacation with you! He wants to come.”
“We’ll bring him along on vacation sometime, okay? Just not this time. This is special.”
“’Cause it’s after the wedding?”
“’Cause Daddy and me have waited a long, long time for this.”

…

“You know, it’s all going to be different this time. We get to enjoy it all this time. Doctor’s appointments and picking names and decorating a nursery and telling our families and all the good stuff --”
“Oh, wait, Dillon, about that, I don’t want to tell our families yet.”
“No?”
“No. It’s our little secret. In a good way this time. I want it to be ours for a while.”
“Okay. I like that. What about Hannah?”
“We tell her tonight.”
“She’s going to be so ridiculously excited!”
“She is, isn’t she? So am I.”

…

“Mom, I hate Morgan!”
“Morgan? Corinthos?”
“He keeps teasing me and pulling on my pony tail and running away and --”
“That’s just how a ten-year-old boy says he likes you, Honey.”
“That’s stupid! I hate boys!”
“You won’t in a year or two.”
“Yes I will!”
“No you won’t!”
“Yes I will!”
“No you won’t!”
“Yes I will!!!”

…

“Dillon? Why the long face? What’s wrong?”
“Hannah’s sleeping.”
“Hannah’s been known to do that.”
“It’s almost ten-o-clock on a SATURDAY morning and Hannah’s sleeping!”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
“It’s just a teenager thing. You don’t have to take it personally.”
“She wasn’t ever supposed to do this particular teenager thing. I really thought she was going to rise above it.”
“Dillon, it’s not a character flaw. She and Morgan were out late last night--”
“Don’t remind me!”
“She’s tired. You ask me, you’re lucky she lasted this long getting up to watch TV on Saturday mornings with her daddy.”
“But we’re not normal! Come on, Georgie--”
“We’ll rent a movie to watch with the kids tonight, okay?”
“Three.”
“Three?”
“Three.”

…

“You know, Carly’s going to be saying ‘I told you so’ pretty much forever now. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. It cracks me up, though, Dillon. I kind of like it. I’m just happy for the kids.”
“The kids. We’re standing here dancing at her wedding and still calling them ‘the kids’.”
“Always.”
“When did we get so damn old?”
“Sometime between Thanksgiving 2004 and now.”
“And we have to do this all again. And again.”
“I think watching the first kid grow up is the worst. Should be easier next time.”
“Says you. You didn’t have to ‘give her away’.”
“You’ll survive. Just look at her. She couldn’t look happier if she tried.”
“Yeah… We did good, didn’t we?”
“Yeah. I think we did.”



***

“Dillon,” Ned said quietly. “Dillon, I think they’re ready to talk to us.”

Dillon looked up, and struggled to his feet, and they joined Mac and Felicia and Maxie and Bobbie and Tracy and Brook and Lucas and Lois.

No one asked any questions, because there was really only one question they needed answered, and they all knew the doctor knew what they wanted to hear.

They all stared at the tense doctor expectantly, Mac with his arms supporting Felicia and Maxie, Ned and Tracy each with a hand on one of Dillon’s shoulders.

“As you know, the bullet was very close to her heart,” the doctor began. “The surgery went well, but the next twenty-four hours are critical.”

The doctor went on, but Dillon didn’t hear much beyond that.

Georgie was alive. For now, that was enough.

***

Alan and Monica had to pull some strings to allow both Dillon and Hannah entry into the ICU room Georgie had been put in, and as Dillon entered the darkened room and took in the sight of Georgie’s pale form in the bed, he remembered the last time Alan and Monica had pulled strings for him at the hospital, the night he was supposed to say goodbye to Hannah and hand her over to another father.

It occurred to him again how bad that had felt, and how much worse this was now. At least then he’d had a choice, and he’d been in control.

He had no control over anything now, and it was a new kind of hell.

He took a seat next to the bed and rearranged Hannah on his lap. She was fast asleep and he could have left her with someone else and come to see Georgie himself, but he needed this moment. He needed all of them together and breathing, in the same room, even if only for a few minutes.

He reached out to touch Georgie’s hand gently. The silence of the room was broken by the sound of the machines that were monitoring her, and it was eerie and unsettling.

He watched the heart monitor for a few minutes, clinging to the sight, all the while fearing the regular beat pattern would suddenly change.

After a while he checked his watch out of habit and curiosity, and realized it was now late in the morning.

Saturday morning. Just after Christmas.

It was all so very, very wrong.

[JRK Archiver]

Chapter Thirteen – That Something More…


It hurt.

Like hell.

The last thing Georgie wanted to do was come out of her sleepy haze and feel the pain full force.

But someone was holding her hand. Someone was waiting for her.

And her eyes seemed to open of their own accord.

“Hey! Hey! Oh, Georgie, you have, like, no idea how desperately I’ve wanted to see those beautiful eyes!”

It took a moment for her eyes to focus, and when they did the joy on Dillon’s tear-streaked face almost made it worth the pain and strain of waking up.

“Dillon?”

God, was that her voice? So dry and quiet and weak?

“I’m right here! I’ve been here since they brought you here from surgery! Hannah was here, too, for hours, but eventually I convinced her to let your mom take her home and give her a bath and get her something to eat and… look, she’s okay, all right? I don’t want you worrying about her… You need to focus on you for a while --”
“I need to see her…”
“Soon. I’ll have your parents bring her by soon. I promise. I just want to sit here and look at you. You got through the first twenty-four hours just fine. They had me terrified you wouldn’t, but you did.”

The look on his face was distinctly proud, and though she couldn’t quite manage to smile at him, some small part of her was smiling on the inside.

“How bad is it?” Dillon asked after a moment, his voice full of concern. “Should I call the doctor? Maybe he can give you something else for the pain. Emily was by earlier and she said they were giving you everything they could but maybe if I talk to Alan and Monica --”

It took some effort for Georgie to shake her head from side to side just a little, but it quickly quieted Dillon.

“Just stay with me,” Georgie requested, and Dillon smiled.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Dillon said, a catch in his voice. “Like, forever. I mean it. You’re going to be so sick of me.”

Georgie shook her head again, and her eyes closed briefly until a thought hit her.

“What about Brook?” There was a hint of worry in her pained eyes, and Dillon quickly put her mind at ease.
“She fine. She’s just fine. Little bump on the head, a little shaken up. She’s at home and she’s got the whole family and Lucas all hovering around her. No worries, okay?”

The worry in her expression turned to fear, and her weak grasp on his hand grew just a little bit tighter.

“And Kent?”
“He took off. Right after Lucas and I got there. Your dad has, like, half the police department out looking for him. Maybe more than half. They’re going to find him. And I’m going to make sure he’s punished, I promise you that.”

The look on Dillon’s face bothered Georgie. It was a more intense version of the vengeful determination she’d seen there that night in New York, when they’d all been sitting around Brook’s kitchen talking quietly.

She wanted to tell him to let the police handle it, that punishing Kent wasn’t worth getting himself into trouble.

But her eyelids were just too heavy. Her eyes were closing whether she wanted them to or not.

And sleep was welcome. There was no pain when she slept.

That conversation would have to wait.

***

The next time Georgie woke, her mind cleared faster, and the pain was just the slightest bit less intense.

And her parents were by her side.

“Mom…”

Felicia opened her mouth to say something and instead broke into tears.

“That’s her way of telling you she loves you and she’s glad you’re going to be all right,” Mac said with a smile, and Felicia waved him away and leaned forward to kiss Georgie on the forehead gently, inadvertently getting a few tears on Georgie’s cheek.
“I’m okay now, Mom…”
“I’m sorry, I said I’d keep it together, I just --”
“It’s okay. I understand. I do.”

And she did. She was a mother, too, after all.

“I guess you do, don’t you?”
“Dillon…” Georgie sighed, wincing, then forced another breath into her lungs. “Dillon said you’ve been taking care of Hannah since I’ve been in here… I don’t even know how long that’s been, but thank you.”
“It’s been almost two days now,” Mac filled in for her.
“She hasn’t been any trouble, Honey. She’s just been real quiet.”

Georgie’s eyes filled with tears at that.

Hannah Felicia Quartermaine was not a quiet child.

And if Ryan Kent had traumatized her to the point of near silence… If he’d killed her spirit in any way…

Maybe letting Dillon go after the bastard himself wasn’t such a bad idea.

“Is she having nightmares?” Georgie asked, and Felicia reached out to wipe the single tear that made its way down her cheek.
“Don’t worry about that,” Mac said soothingly. “We’ve got it under control. Lucas came by to see her this morning and he actually got a few smiles out of her.”
“Dad, I need to know. How bad is it? Does she wake up screaming at night?”
“She did,” Felicia told her, knowing she’d worry more if she was left to wonder. “Twice. But we calmed her down quickly. She was more worried about you than anything.”
“Mom, maybe she needs to see me. Maybe I should talk to her, tell her I’m okay. Can you just… Can you bring her here? Or can Dillon? Where is he?”
“Where do you think?” Mac asked, smiling softly again, and Georgie realized immediately that she really didn’t have to ask. If Dillon wasn’t by her side right now, he was with Hannah.
“Good,” Georgie murmured, her eyelids fluttering closed briefly. “She’ll feel safe with him.”
“Well, yeah, she does,” Dillon’s quiet voice broke in. “But she kind of needed to see her mom.”

Georgie opened her eyes, expecting to see both Dillon and Hannah and instead finding that Dillon was back, but alone, standing in the doorway.

“Where is she?” Georgie asked quickly, and Dillon gestured to the hallway.
“Carly came by to see how you were doing, and I ran into her and left Hannah with her. Just for a few minutes, so I could check with you first. I didn’t want to bring Hannah in right away. I wasn’t sure you were up to it. But she’s been begging to see you. I thought for a while maybe seeing you like this would scare her, but I think not seeing you is scaring her more.”
“Bring her in.”
“You sure you’re --”
“Dillon, bring her in here. Now.”

Dillon nodded, satisfied, and turned to go back to the hallway. He beckoned to someone with his hands, and suddenly Carly was there, holding Hannah’s hand, and Dillon bent down and picked the little girl up.

Carly offered a sympathetic smile, and a little wave, and then backed off. It was a family moment, and every once in a while even Carly Corinthos knew enough to keep her distance.

Carly disappeared back into the hallway, and Georgie knew without asking that she’d be back later.

Dillon approached the bed whispering in Hannah’s ear.

“… so you need to be real quiet and gentle, okay? Real, real gentle… The doctors haven’t quite made Mommy all better yet.”

Georgie slowly, painfully, shifted her body to make room for Hannah on the bed. Dillon looked at her uncertainly, but the look on her face told him she wouldn’t have it any other way, and so he lowered Hannah onto the bed next to her.

“Hey Baby Girl,” Georgie whispered.
“I missed you,” Hannah said simply, and Georgie managed a little smile.
“Me too. Missed you.”

Everyone was silent for a long moment, and then Hannah smiled up at her mother.

“Grandma made me grilled cheese.”

It was the kind of random, unprovoked, childish comment that was typical of Hannah, and Dillon felt a wave of relief wash over him. For two days, any time he’d seen her he’d had to pull any kind of response out of her, and he had been terrified it would be that way from now on.

But maybe it wouldn’t be. Maybe she just needed to see Georgie awake to feel normal again.

“Grandma’s really good at that, isn’t she?” Georgie said, shooting an appreciative look Felicia’s way.
“Hey, what about me? Grandpa cooked a frozen pizza!” Mac teased, and Hannah looked at him and grinned.
“Morgan loves frozen pizza,” she informed him.
“Maybe if you ask really nicely Grandma and Grandpa will let Morgan come over to play,” Dillon hinted. It was a kind of subtle test. The old Hannah would have jumped at the chance.

But the Hannah in front of him had other concerns at the moment.

“But I want to go home,” Hannah nearly whispered, and her little chin quiverred, and in the space of two seconds she broke into sobs. “I want to go home with Mommy…”
“Shhhh…” Georgie shushed her, wishing it hurt less to move so that she could wrap Hannah up in a hug. “Baby, I’ll be home soon, okay? I’ll be home soon.”
“It can all be all right now?” Hannah asked her, sniffling. “No more crying?”

The adults in the room were suddenly more heavy-hearted at that.

There had been far too much crying in their lives lately. Certainly far too much for a four-year-old to handle.

“No more crying,” Georgie agreed. “It can all be all right now.”

***

“I come bearing gifts!” Brook said brightly when she popped her head into Georgie’s hospital room a few days later. “Is it a bad time?”
“No! Get in here, I’ve been bored.”

Georgie was regaining her strength, and the painkillers had the pain under control, and now the worst part of the injury was the hospital stay itself.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been by before this,” Brook told her as she took a seat by the bed. “I kept trying, but you know my ma is kind of hard to argue with and she’s had me resting up and eating soup and all that. All over a bump on the head. I swear if I’d been through what you’ve been through Ma and me would be attached at the hip for life whether I liked it or not.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing it was me,” Georgie said lightly, and Brook shook her head.
“I never meant – Sorry, I just --”
“Hey, I was kidding. Now move on to the important stuff – what’d you bring me?”

Brook smiled and reached into the bag she was carrying.

“Well, it’s probably my music obsessed mind pushing my ways of recovery onto you, but I always need a huge music library at my fingertips when I’m sick, and I figure you could probably use a little music therapy yourself.”

Brook pulled a personal CD player out of the bag first, and then started piling CDs onto the bed.

“What have you got?” Georgie was curious. Music might help break up the monotony.
“Everything I ever heard you listening to, basically. You want to wallow in dark and depressing, I’ve got you covered. You want to cheer up with a little reminder of your childhood, I’ve got a healthy dose of Shania.”
“I’ll take the Shania to start,” Georgie said thoughtfully, flipping through the CDs. “The last thing I need right now is dark and depressing.”
“Okay…”

Brook located several Shania Twain CDs in the bag and pulled them out.

“You remember how we used to tease your mom when we’d catch her dancing around to this stuff?”
“Yeah. Hannah does the same thing to me. Payback’s a bitch, huh?”

Georgie spoke lightly and without thought, but they both recognized the words instantly. And it wasn’t a happy recollection.

“Sorry,” Georgie mumbled, and Brook shook her head.
“Pulls you right back to that moment, yeah?” Brook asked gently, and Georgie closed her eyes.
“Yeah.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“You know I always kind of figured having Hannah made me grow up as much as anything ever could,” Georgie said thoughtfully a moment later. “But this whole thing with Kent, it actually makes me feel older, and kind of more, like, almost mature, and… not in a good way, you know?”
“Yeah. I know. Welcome to the land of the jaded and cynical. I’ve been there a while.”
“I don’t want to be cynical. Hannah doesn’t need a bitter mother.”
“You don’t have to be bitter. You just… can’t really get away from knowing that life can get this bad. And it changes you.”
“Hannah’s only four and she’s already got a taste of that feeling. I could kill Kent for that.”

Brook nodded and looked away, hoping Georgie couldn’t see the look in her eyes.

Brook knew. Georgie didn’t.

The police had a line on Kent. Using the media had come through with a reliable anonymous tip. Mac was on his way to the location at that very moment.

Without backup.

Without witnesses.

And Dillon was right behind him.

***

Mac Scorpio had finally thrown the rule book out the window.

It had taken a while.

Georgie had broken down the night she told him Kent attacked her.

And that was hard to watch.

So was the struggle she went through for weeks afterward, not knowing where Kent was or what he planned to do.

It was almost worse when the shoe was on the other foot, and he’d had to watch Felicia and Maxie suffer through not knowing where Georgie or Hannah were, or what Kent was doing to them.

He’d suffered through that himself, too.

And then he’d seen Georgie looking more dead than alive in her hospital bed.

And the spirited little girl he called his grand-daughter had curled up on his couch in complete silence and stared at nothing.

He wasn’t even sure exactly which straw broke the camel’s back, but just for tonight he wasn’t sure he wanted to uphold the law. Just for tonight he wanted to be the man he once was. He’d killed before.

He didn’t really know what he was planning to do. He told himself he might still do the legal thing, the thing expected of the commissioner of police, and call for backup and try to arrest Kent.

But the fact that he hadn’t called for backup already and he hadn’t tried to stop his not-quite-son-in-law from following him told him he had more sinister intentions than he was willing to admit.

***

Dillon was fifty feet behind Mac on the road.

And he thought he might throw up.

This was supposed to be the scene when the furious father and not-quite-husband got his revenge.

On a logistical level, Dillon had all he needed. He had stolen a hangun from the Quartermaine estate.

On an emotional level, Dillon had more than enough rage built up to go ahead and do what he felt he needed to do. The man had terrorized his child and nearly killed the one person who had been his entire world since he was sixteen, and the sounds and images and feelings of it all were burned permanently into his memory. Sheer fury alone ought to have been enough to get the job done.

But there was another level, an intensely personal level, that was getting in the way.

Part of Dillon wanted to pull the trigger and watch Kent bleed.

Another part of him was sickened by the thought of taking a life. Even that life. And as he drove closer and closer to the site, he became more and more troubled by it all.

He wanted Kent to pay. He wanted Georgie to feel safe. He wanted to feel like a real man protecting what was his.

But he wasn’t sure he could do it. He was a lot of things, for better or for worse, and he knew it – but ‘killer’ wasn’t one of them.

He just hoped his hand would be forced, that anything that happened would be a matter of self-defense.

And that it wouldn’t haunt him forever.

***

Dillon pulled up outside the abandoned warehouse, taking note of Mac’s car fifteen feet away. He wondered vaguely for a moment why Mac hadn’t gotten out of the vehicle yet.

Dillon sat in silence for several seconds, too sick to his stomach to move.

Fear set in.

This was big. This was huge. This was beyond huge.

He looked up and their eyes met for a long moment, but neither man moved.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

When Mac knocked lightly on Dillon’s window Dillon jumped nearly a foot off of the seat.

Calming himself as much as humanly possible under the circumstances, Dillon opened the door and got out.

They looked at each other, looked at the warehouse.

“He’s in there?” Dillon questioned, watching his breath form a cloud in the cold air.
“So I hear,” Mac confirmed.
“You call for backup?”
“Just now.”
“So we have…?”
“Probably something like four minutes.”

Dillon waited. For all of those four minutes.

He had a gun in his hand.

But he couldn’t make himself act.

As soon as Mac and several uniformed officers entered the building, he got back in his car and left.

***

“I couldn’t do it.”

Georgie squinted, trying to make out where the whisper was coming from.

“Dillon?”

He was leaning against the wall, near the doorway of her hospital room, looking apologetic.

“I was right there, right by the warehouse, Kent was inside, I had a gun in my hand… I couldn’t do it.”

It took a moment for what Dillon was saying to sink in, and when it did Georgie tried to sit up and remembered just how badly that still hurt.

“Did they get him?” She questioned quickly, wincing as she repositioned herself. “Does my dad have him?”
“He’s in police custody.”
“Why do you make that sound like an apology?”
“I should have… I should have been able to do something, to -”
“To what? To what, Dillon?”

He said nothing, but they both knew.

“Come here,” Georgie ordered sternly.

Dillon shuffled his feet toward her bed and sat down in the chair next to it.

“I wanted to make it so that he could never hurt you or anyone else again… I wanted to get him for what he did…”
“Look at me,” Georgie insisted, and Dillon did as he was asked. “You handled it right,” she murmured reassuringly. “You did it right.”

Dillon looked up. He’d needed those words.

“The system could screw this up,” he pointed out.
“If it does, we’ll deal with it then. Dillon, we’re here, together. I’m going to be fine. Hannah’s acting more like herself again. Brook is fine. We won.”

She let a moment pass in silence.

“And I’m so, so grateful that you didn’t do anything that you would regret. You’re not a killer, Dillon. Hannah’s father isn’t a killer.” She gripped both of his hands in her own. “Guns don’t belong in these hands.”

He sighed and bowed his head.

“I wanted to-”
“To be the tough muscle man from the movies who takes revenge. I know. But I’m glad you’re not.”

Dillon swallowed a lump in his throat.

“I’m so sorry about so much, Georgie.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I mean about the fighting… if we hadn’t been fighting maybe you would have told me sooner, about everything that’s going on, and then -”
“No. I wouldn’t have. I don’t think so. It wasn’t about trust, Dillon, it was about keeping the secret from everyone, and avoiding a scandal. I’ve trusted you with my life almost since the day we met.”
“Back at ya,” he told her with a little smile.
“And you know it’s not like we were fighting constantly. Even with everything that was going on, there were a few beautiful Saturdays in the last few months, and… and we managed to have a beautiful weekend in New York…”

A little smile appeared on Dillon’s face, and it was almost secretive.

He’d nearly forgotten.

“What?” Georgie asked curiously.
“You know… without opening a can of worms here… there is a little something missing from my life…” He teased, and reached out to brush her hair back.

Georgie gave him a ‘I can’t believe you’re going there!’ wide-eyed look, and he smiled disarmingly.

“Relax. It’s okay. I assure you, the only thing this has to do with New York is that I bought the ring there.”

Within a second her tired smile matched his own.

“A ring?”
“A ring,” he confirmed.
“Dillon if we’re not talking about an engagement ring this is the worst joke ever,” she said with a confident laugh, and he stood up and looked around the room, spotting his jacket on a chair in the corner.
“I can’t believe I left this here earlier…” he mumbled, and then he searched the coat pockets until he found the ring box.

Approaching the bed, he faced a little conundrum.

Under the circumstances – to get down on one knee, or not to get down on one knee? That was the question.

He tried it out with a goofy little smile, but he could barely look in her eyes from that angle on the floor with her bed being so high.

She giggled, and he considered staying down there just because it seemed somehow appropriate for laughter to be a part of this, since it was a part of them.

But real, strong, serious love was also a part of them, and that won out. He got up sat down in the chair, leaning forward so that their faces were close, ring held out in front of him.

He ran through a few phrases in his mind, trying to figure out exactly how to say this.

“I would be honored,” he said slowly after a moment, his gaze locked on hers, “if you would finally, finally, finally be my wife.”

Tears pooled in her eyes despite the smile on her face as she nodded slightly, not trusting her voice. He leaned further forward to kiss her gently.

“Is that a yes?”
“Yes…” she managed to get out, nearly choking on a sob. “Dillon, I’ve wanted to say yes to that question for so long…”

Laughing from the joy of it rather than because anything was funny, he kissed her again, and then slipped the ring on her finger.

“Goes well with the IV tube,” he joked, and she smiled up at him.
“Get in bed with me,” she requested.
“As you wish,” he murmured, and carefully did as she asked.

They lay there curled up together for several minutes, not needing words. He couldn’t see her face and began to wonder if she’d fallen asleep, so he saved all the things he had to say for later.

A few more minutes passed, and it turned out she wasn’t asleep after all.

“Dillon?”
“Hmmm?”
“You know they’ve still got me on a lot of painkillers -”
“Am I hurting you?!”
“No! No, it’s not that, it’s just… if I, um… if I can’t remember this clearly in the morning, can we do it again?”

He smiled, kissed her forehead, and fingered the ring gently.

“As you wish.”