Requiem (25) There's nothing elegant in this, no special skill, nothing save luck and speed and the odd flutter of threat; a clownish, loud bravado. He took the pill she pressed into his palm and the bottle of water she opened, popped the capsule to the back of his throat and washed it down in an intemperate swallow. There was no need for this. There was no need for all of this, all of this, this, this, this... custodial supervision. If he'd wanted a nurse he would have stayed at the hospital. If he'd felt the need for a cursory coddle he could certainly have stayed at home. In fact, if he had in any way desired the iron fist of a genuinely despotic nature directing his every breath and act he was sure this was a service his paternal grandmother would be more than happy to provide. Had he made those choices? No. No! It was very plain, exceedingly plain, he'd discarded all of that - the fuss, the fret, the fantastic bother of succumbing to a convalescence anyone and anyone's brother could see was in no way required. Instead he'd elected to take a drive. A simple drive. A restorative drive. A drive up a mountain to a cabin. Alone. Yet here she was weighing down a seat with her pills and her water and her watchful eye. Time to take the medicine, Maxim. Perhaps you should pull over and stop the car. What do you mean you'll wait for the cabin? The clock is ticking...tick, tick, tick. It was all he could do to restrain himself from stripping the watch off her wrist and tossing it into the darkest shadow of the cold grey woods behind him. What do you mean you don't like trees? That watch is ticking...tick, tick, tick. "The only reason you're angry with me is because I went to see your prince," she declared, pitching his pills to the glove compartment and unlocking the door to exit the car. "You knew I'd go. This can't be a surprise. You might as well curse the clouds for rain. It was nothing less than predictable." Predictable it was, and just as predictable he'd fly into a rage about it. Had she considered that? "It never occurs to you, does it, that I might know what I'm doing?" His boots hit the dirt and the car door slammed. "It never occurs to you to wait, to ask or, miracle of all miracles, to leave the last word to me." "Is that what you wanted? The very last word? Because I doubt he'd have heard it through the water." She strolled up the rocky grade and circled the side of the dilapidated porch, scouting out the cabin's perimeter - these trees, this clearing, their distance from the lake. "I don't suppose you plan on berating your good friend Max as well? Her actions spoke loudest, after all." "I don't have time for this, ifrit," he growled, brushing past her to take the stairs. He had three hours of daylight left and no plan to hunt by lantern. Pulling the key ring from his pocket, he gauged the likely contenders. Fourth key, fourth try, fourth twist and the rusted lock released. "I'd ask you to wait in the car if I didn't think you'd need to revenge yourself in the unlikely event I fall victim to the injurious insult of a splinter." "Funny," she allowed as she mounted the steps and moved in beside him. "Frankly, I'm more concerned about the bear who's left his feces by a window at the back. But perhaps I'm overreacting." He looked down at the blade in her hand, grumbled an appropriate Russian curse, and gave her leave to go ahead and enter the cabin first. This was not enough for her, of course - that twisting finger insisting he flatten himself against the wall and wait through a thorough search of the house. "Just go," he groused, sourly stepping off, thinking that some day, one day, he'd find the grit to throw off all his lofty moral compunctions and trump that knife with a gun. Not today, but some day. Some wickedly vindictive day. She was gone less than a minute when the beast came stumbling out - not a bear but a fat black bandit raccoon sullenly scuttling through the door, choleric with the interruption of his life and the comfort he'd carved from the rooms within. His great masked eyes glowered at Maxim, chastising this breach in primal etiquette, before he waddled down the stairs to lumber off in search of another home. "There are mice," she announced in a start at his back. "And spiders as well, though they don't appear to be poisonous. Still, I'd take a care with the darker corners if I were you." He stepped into the gloom of the cabin and grimaced at the smell; an insidious mix of mildew, mothballs, rodent droppings, and the stench of rotting food. Something red had been tracked across the threads of the well-worn carpet in tiny, feral footprints, turning it to a chaotically derivative tapestry of crimson paws. Shards of colored glass lay at the base of a bookcase whose lower shelves, now empty, had been gnawed over time and with great dedication by a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. Lamps had fallen over and broken, chairs been upended and rent. Every curtain was raked to tatters, one rod half-wrenched from the wall and left to dangle from a single screw. The worst, though, had to be the couch - or what once passed for a couch - its upholstery having been savagely disemboweled by sharp, shearing claws to retrieve the stuffing beneath. This is what he'd used to make his bed; you could see the way he'd piled the shreds to frame him like a nest. It was a mess; a dirty, discouraging, depressingly disagreeable mess. In fact, the only item that seemed to have escaped his vicious brand of destruction - at least the only item he could detect in his initial inspection of the room - was the sadly stiff deer above the fireplace; a dead piece of dread he tried not to take too much conscious notice of. Djinn slipped around him, striding through the devastation to march into a hall at the rear, from which she emerged moments later with a box of plastic trash bags. Delivering one to his hand and taking another for herself, they snapped them out and began the all-but-useless labor of selecting what might be saved - these cherished bits moved to a higher shelf or overhead cabinet while the rest fell to waste in their bags. Forty minutes passed, an hour, then more as they made their way through the cabin, carefully plucking through the detritus of a deceased man's life and cleaning up after the rodent who had so incorrigibly defiled it. His clothes were filthy, his muscles sore, his spirit long since spent when at last she called out to him from the shadow of the bedroom door. He was halfway across the room when she appeared in the entry; her expression at first triumphant, then altering by degrees to incorporate something ineffably sad. But he paid no attention to that. His only concern, his only interest, his only urgency hitched - right along with the naked hunger in his eyes - to what she held in her hand. Mac took a hard look at the elm towering above his head, up through its boughs and branches and stems now ablaze in fiery orange and red, in an attempt to gauge exactly how long it was going to take those leaves to fall. A part of him thinks if he stands here long enough, trusty rake in hand, he can wait the sucker out. One stiff wind, that's all he needs to put this weekly chore to bed. One stiff wind that wasn't coming, that hadn't come again. So maybe old man Murphy had a point - old man Murphy, on the corner lot, with the companion elm, who spent each autumn throttled back in his shabby black recliner, beer in one hand, stogie in the other, waiting in comfort for his tree to shed its last dangling leaf. One fell swoop, Commissioner, that's whatcha gotta do. Hold right out to the bitter end and haul it off in one fell swoop. Problem was if you let it go and rain happened to fall (or worse, snow), the mulch of those wet, decomposing leaves would disease all the green grass beneath. Maybe old man Murphy didn't mind a lawn gone dead by March - probably not if his side yard was any indication - but the thought of winter thawing to a sickly yellow spring, and that dead ground mocking him straight through the haze of a dry, brown summer, was more than enough motivation to put the rake in gear; to gather these leaves, bag 'em up and kiss off another year. That, and the recognition he was in desperate need of something to do. Maxie had returned from the hospital in those early morning hours to a dark and quiet house; a single porch light burning in reproach and the only signal left by her parents to verify their knowledge she was not at home. He'd heard her hesitant step on the stair and the soft click of the door closing, steeling every muscle he had to resist the urge to leap out of bed and confront her the way he was supposed to, the way he used to, the way any father who cared about his daughter and the ungodly hour she'd dragged herself in was conscientiously compelled to. Put her on notice. Lay down a curfew. Take away her car, her computer, her phone. Ground her for life, if it had to be. Anything. Anything to let her know, in no uncertain terms, that this father meant business. Anything to shock her into silence long enough for him to talk and her to listen. More than listen; to follow his instructions and do. Instead he'd been stuck, motionless and mute, sweating out the night to a strategy that, despite her mother's insistence, he doubted would bring his daughter around. In fact, he half-suspected by ignoring this behavior they were flashing a gigantic neon sign that said her parents didn't care anymore and issuing the pass she'd been looking for to simply walk away. Permission. It felt like they were giving her permission, not only to make these mistakes but to pack her bags and charge out the door without even glancing back. Without even seeing what she needed she'd be leaving. Without even seeing she'd be leaving him. Long night, that. An entire night spent twisted in a sheet, kicking out his feet and pounding down a pillow to soften it up for the turbulent toss of his head. Dawn broke and it was just another shade of light on the ceiling above his bed. Images cartwheeled through his brain - the sight of his daughter in the hospital, that Cassadine in his office, those boxes in his garage. And when he strove to push past this, to shove it all to the side, his exhausted mind had risen to compensate with a frenetic series of flashbacks to the violence in his life - every shoot-out he'd witnessed, every cop gone down in flames; the funerals, the families, the final farewells; face after face after dead man's face attaching itself to the impotent fury of his sleepless state as his thoughts tumbled into memories, stumbled into secrets and lies and the prohibitive cost of the road he'd paved with the bricks he'd made of his very best intentions. And the door, that door to a past he'd worked so fiercely to forever close, had somehow come open once again. He's barely out of the car when Zander starts in on him. "I don't understand why I have to tell them I'm giving up my rights to the baby. The only reason I got into this thing was to be the kind of father that child needs. If you think I'm going to roll over on this, you're barking up the wrong damn tree." And so it begins. He'd seen it a hundred times, a thousand - the rampant paranoia that went hand-in-hand with undercover work. The fear, the doubt, the rush to judgment on every order given. They were so far inside the loop they were convinced they were out of it. Still, that kind of irrational panic took a month or two to surface. Zander'd had, what? A week? But the stakes were high on this one. Too high to offer up the luxury of second or third thoughts. "Ric's come at you again," he noted, his voice calm as he crunched through the snow in the direction of the footbridge. "Subtle may be in his vocabulary, he sure ain't wastin' it on me," the kid pronounced, falling into step behind him. "He's drawn up papers, you know. And damn if Elizabeth doesn't have that 'do it for me' look in her eye. If you expect me to sign on the dotted line I'll tell you again, you've got the wrong guy." "And where do you see this going, Zander?" he asked as they reached the old stone wall arching over the stream. "In a perfect world, I mean. Have you thought about that? Let's say for a minute you get out from under and your job's no longer an issue. Elizabeth married Ric. She's made her choice. You're going to have to live with that." "But I don't have to live without my kid and he, or she, won't have to live without me. I'll do visitation, week-ends, summers, whatever it takes. I'll go to court, I'll pay the support, even if it costs every dime I make. I'm going to be a part of that child's life and nobody, I mean nobody, is going to stand in my way." "I'm not the enemy, Zander." Though, from the look on his face, he might as well have been. The wild fire in his eyes, the intractable clench of his jaw, the steam of his angry breath as it pumped from those flaring nostrils told him he was on the list. "And I'm not asking you to give up your rights. They just need to think you'd be willing." "Why?" Suspicion sparked beneath the bark of the question, his expression growing guarded as he studied the man standing at his side. "How is my willingness to give up the right to raise my child going to help you take down Sonny, or Faith, or Alcazar?" "It's not." Mac turned away from him then to stare down at the stream, his gaze fixed to the gurgle of its waters as they struggled through the winter ice. "I'm not after Sonny or Faith or Alcazar, or any of the scum currently getting rich in the world you work in. You want the truth, Zander? You're useless to me there. You couldn't carry the play beyond the first ring of enforcers. Some are too smart; the others know you too well. They'd see you coming a mile off. Sure one or two might toy with you awhile, like Faith's toying with you now. But a week'll pass, a month at most, before I find you dead in an alley - in a dumpster like Fowler or bleeding out on the pier like that South American muscle, Javier. Two men who, unlike you, should have been just a little harder to kill. You don't have a hope in hell of bringing in a case against organized crime, even with the whole department behind you. And while we're on the subject," he averred, casting a stern eye to the side, "I want to make it perfectly clear that you don't have the entire department behind you on this. All you've got is me. Me, and a couple of sergeants I think I can trust who were willing to put in the overtime. It's need-to-know, eyes only, deep cover, back-up restricted to three..." "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Just...just, just...hold on," the kid protested, backing away from the wall as he grappled with the change in his arrangement. "That's not what we talked about." "You talked and I listened," Mac intoned patiently. "Now I'm talking and you're going to listen. And make no mistake about it, Zander, that's the way it's going to work from here on in. You said you wanted out of the life and there's a chance I can make that happen. Do you want that chance or not?" Zander emitted a growl of frustration and began to pace the wall, his overcoat billowing behind him, the heels of his designer boots kicking up crusts of virgin snow. "Do I have a choice? I don't...I don't... The mob, Mac," he groaned. "The network, the trade, the transport. That's my area of expertise. Expertise? It's become my whole freakin' life! Drugs, guns, extortion," he ticked off on flailing fingers, stalking across the bridge to turn and stalk right back again. "Throw me in the world of white-collar crime and I'll stick out like a sore thumb. You think the captains will see me coming? Just put me in an office with a pocket protector and a snappy little bow tie." His hands came up to frame a face he sardonically bounced from side-to-side. "Which one of these things is not like the others? A four year old could pick me out." "Nobody said anything about an office, Zander, or a snappy little bow tie. I'm not even asking you to break with Faith. Honestly? It would be better if you didn't." A sudden silence fell. Zander's head cocked and his eyes narrowed, their pupils contracting to pinpricks. He was wary now; alert; his manic energies stilled to a vigilance born of the dangerous complication he sensed riding on the air. His response, when it came, was as cold and crisp as the breeze that sifted through his hair. "Maybe it's time to tell me exactly what you have in mind." Shame. There was an unbelievable amount of shame in what he was about to relay. He couldn't help but turn away from Zander's hyper-attentive stare to hunt down a spot in this January landscape of trees and rocks and freshly-plowed snow where that shame could be abandoned; where it could be set at such a distance from his pride that the telling might be easier to bear. But there wasn't a place large enough or deep enough to bury the filth of this disgrace, the heat of its humiliation; its ever-expanding excremental stain. And try as he might, he couldn't find a way to avoid fully disclosing the sin; to avoid ripping the wound wide open and exposing it from end to end. While the words might scour his professional soul, choke in his throat, burn on his tongue, he'd have to get them out. And the only solace he could find in this, the only consolation to cling to, was the knowledge that with this singular, miserable admission the bond between operative and handler would be finally and irrevocably forged. The risks would be clear, the stakes laid bare, and whatever shook out as a result of it would be a consequence they would share. They'd win or lose together; rise and fall as one. As tough as it was for him to tie his fortunes to this raw and reckless kid, he was going to do it, it was getting done. The time had come to lay every hard card he held to the table. Trust was a two-way street in the end - same as faith, same as loyalty, and just as important for him to extend as it was going to be for Zander. He hoped the kid could see that. He hoped the man could recognize all he was putting on the line. A low whistle sounded and he turned to find Zander shaking his head. "Must be big." Mac flinched, which seemed to startle the kid, then sucked a bitter breath and began. "The department has been compromised. And by compromised I mean there are men currently employed by the District Attorney's office and the PCPD who have been corrupted, bribed, bought off, paid to look the other way and, when push comes to shove, torpedo cases we have locked up - primed straight down the line to prosecute and put away. Some of this stuff has been going on so long it's become a running joke. Take Baldwin, for example. It's practically common knowledge he'll shift his focus for a buck. We had him on the hook to a senator once, a guy who got his jollies beating prostitutes. Greased his palm like a champ, but there was nothing we could prove. And as far as Edward Quartermaine's concerned, he might as well be on retainer. Lansing's less obvious," he admitted, dropping his gaze to gloveless hands he rubbed together less for warmth than to prevent them from freezing into fists. "How he got the job in the first place...this cushy berth as ADA? That appointment alone is a crime worth investigating. Sonny's brother. Carly's kidnapper. He had a pregnant woman chained in his house for I don't know how many weeks and not a single charge was filed. Now we're supposed to stand up straight, look him in the face and call him Mister Assistant District Attorney?" "The same man who wants to raise my child." "I get it, Zander. I do," he allowed, shooting the kid a substantial glance that confirmed he understood. "But I'm not finished, okay?" He waited for the flash of acknowledgement in those smoldering brown eyes, caught it and continued on. "There's a trickle down to rot, you know. A kind of corruptive gravitational pull. When you've got guys at the top, men you're told to respect and obey, and you see they've started to cut their own deals, that they think next to nothing of sliding the other way - it more or less sets a precedent. And if you happen to be weak or angry, hot for action or strapped for cash, those twisted guys at the top? Well, they give you an excuse. Pretty soon you're out there looking to make a deal of your own. As hard as it is for me to say this - and it's hard, Zander, believe me - we've got a couple of men on the force who've started to do exactly that." "Who?" There was a hunger in the question Mac found hard to ignore. He guessed he could understand it. As many times as Zander had come up against law enforcement, and as harsh as most of those encounters had been, the news that the boys in blue - the men who'd cuffed him and hauled him away - were not as clean as they claimed had to be vindicating in some cruelly-karmic, backhanded way. It was an irony the kid seemed to latch onto and from which he appeared to derive a certain furious satisfaction. Yes, this much he could understand. But that grin, that know-it-all, gotcha grin he was on the verge of producing, was a reaction Mac discovered he was in no mood to entertain. "Not Taggart," he shot back, puncturing the smug expression currently rising to crease that face. The mention of Zander's primary antagonist - though he'd long since left the department and the town - had the desired effect; dousing any retroactive glee like cold water to a stubborn flame. "Marcus gave a damn about the law, Zander. You may not believe it, but he did. And he was as clean as they come." "If you're waiting for me to say I miss him..." "I'm not," Mac sustained, his stoicism easing for an instant to relax into half a smile. "He asks about you, though. Maybe it's for Gia, but you never know. I think you grew on him." "Yeah. Like a fungus," the kid dismissed. "So are you going to tell me who's on the take or not?" "Capelli," he pitched into the calm of the moment, knowing it would never get easier to say. "It started slow. Carrot on a stick. Some information here, a little muscle there; Alcazar groomed him like a pro. We think he's black-bagging it now. He might even have had a hand in that robbery on the Haunted Star. Nothing we can prove. And then there's Beck..." He closed his eyes, hitched a breath and released the strain of his compressed fatigue, his shoulders slumping on the exhale. "He looks good on paper. A small town sheriff from Hay's Landing, broke his training at Quantico following his father's death. Lost his wife and son to a drunk driver. Channeled his grief into the work." "But?" "But Lansing brought him in. Lansing," he repeated, emphasizing the snag. "They've been thick as thieves ever since. I don't know if Brian trusts him, if he's following chain-of-command, or if he's flat-out open-for-hire. One thing's for sure. You can't spend a whole lot of time with Ric Lansing and avoid breaking the law." "So you want me to crack this open for you," Zander conjectured through a knowing grin, piecing all the facts together with a dawning, and somewhat disturbing, enthusiasm. "Don't go getting ahead of yourself," Mac barked back. "That's not what I want and it's not something you're remotely capable of pulling off. All I want...now listen to me, Zander. Are you listening?" he charged, pinning his authority to the wall with a brutal, black glare. His voice dipped low to the corrective tone he reserved for serial offenders; brisk and blunt and cold with command. "All I want is your word that you'll do exactly what I say. No short-cuts, no refinements, no improvisation. Not a single order I give will be open to interpretation. Do you understand what I'm saying, Zander? Don't just nod your head. Tell me. Do you understand what I need from you?" "Yeah. Yes, Mac, I do," the kid insisted. "And I'm in. When do we start?" The 'we' was good. Mac liked the 'we' - though it would take a few weeks to discover if he had it in him to play on a team or if he was just blowing smoke. And if he was...? Too late now. "We've already started, Zander. See, you've got something Ric Lansing wants. We're about to find out just how far he's willing to go to get it." "Dad?" He jolted from his reverie to discover his daughter standing at his side with a look of worried concern in her eyes. His head jerked up to take in his surroundings and he saw the yard was now clean. The leaves had been raked into three large piles while he'd been staring out into space. "Maxie," he said, speechless for a second as he took in the chore she'd done for him. "If you could just help me bag them up?" "Sure." He nodded and she nodded back, handing him the spare rake she'd used in place of the one he'd been leaning on. "And after that, maybe we could talk?" "Sure," he said again, feeling like a fool and hoping that by then he'd have regained his bearings enough to remember what time of day it was, what day of the week it was, and why in bloody hell the thought of such an innocuous conversation scared him. Requiem (26) Walk slowly now, small soul, by the edge of the water. Choose carefully all you are going to lose, though any of it would do. It's half a turn he makes, a twist from the waist around to accept the coffee she's brought out to him on these front porch steps - not rising, not getting up; refusing to surrender the last warm pool of sunlight left in this autumn afternoon. No, he'd saved it for her, saved it in the way you save a seat at the movies, on the bus, in a lifeboat. He scoots to the side, vacating the space he's reserved for her in the sun. A stranger would think him generous here but, really, the act is thoughtless. As thoughtless as all the acts of love performed by fathers are. Were she to thank him for it he'd quizzle his brow, as if that gratitude were offered for something as unconsciously accomplished as breathing. She knows this in the very same thoughtless, instinctive way, and so sits quietly - accepting his seat, this gift, without remark. They stare into their mugs awhile, sifting through the remnants of old conversations, looking for a place to begin. She marks the silence and sinks into it, realizing all of a sudden that she'll miss it when it breaks. She feels closer to him in this silence than she has for years. "How is your friend?" And there it goes. For a fleeting instant she wrestles with the need to jump after the stillness and drag it back. Just an instant, though. "I don't...?" "Maximillian," he clarifies, eyes locked to the coffee he's clutched prayer-like between both palms. "Your mother and I were at the hospital. We saw you...he...Tony called and we..." He lets the sentence trail. "Oh," she allows quickly, more to stop that portentous thread of a topic from unraveling than because she's shocked to hear this. "He's fine. He was released and he's fine. I didn't...I wasn't really...I didn't come out here to talk about him. I wanted to talk about Zander." His chin sinks to his chest. She knows he can't help it. "Again?" "But we never really talk about him, you know? We talk about his things and we talk about me and we talk about the fact that he's gone, but we never really talk about him." "I just don't know that there's that much more to say, Maxie." "But I've got stuff to say, Dad." It's half a statement, half a plea she extends in the marriage of her voice and eyes. "I know it's not going to make a difference and maybe that means it's not important to you, but it's kind of important to me to, you know, just say it." His chest expands on a mighty breath, as if he could suck patience from the air, then collapses with his shoulders as he braces himself for this inescapable ordeal. "Okay," he submits like someone's on the verge of hitting him or hurting him or cutting off a finger he's now resigned to lose. "Go ahead." It's a small, sad opening but she takes it, knowing it's the best he can do. "When Kyle took me up to his room and we...you know...did what we did, I didn't know he had a camera running. I just didn't think about that at all. I wasn't thinking about anything except how handsome he was and how popular he was and how he'd picked me. Out of all the girls Kyle Radcliffe could have been with, he ended up picking me. And it was just...wow, you know? It meant the world to me. I couldn't have told you why at the time, but I can tell you now. It's like I thought everything he was and everything he had would somehow rub off and suddenly I'd be the prettiest girl in school with all the kick-ass friends and everyone would look up to me because, well because I was with him. And I was willing to pay the price for that. I made a choice. Sure, it turned out to be a lousy choice, the worst choice of the decade and maybe even my life, but that's the choice I made. And because I did, because I made that choice, everything coming after it falls on me." "That's a little harsh, Maxie, don't you think?" "No. No, I don't," she says swiftly, needing him to stay the course until she gets where she's going. "How many times have you lectured me and Georgie on the importance of taking responsibility for our actions? How many times have you told us we have to live with our choices and own up to our mistakes? I never really understood why you got so worked up about that stuff. I never really understood how serious it was until after Kyle and his friends linked that night to the high school website and played it over and over again. Then, you know, it was like this major epiphany. This is what he meant." Mac scowls, lifting a grumpy gaze to the lawn. "The whole point of those talks was to save you from having to learn it the hard way." "I'm a Jones, Dad," she imparts wryly. "Some things are gonna go down hard." His eyes wizen with the truth of the statement, softening a bit in the face of an undeniable fact. "The point is I learned the lesson. The point is I had that lesson down when Zander came along. The choices I made with him? They were my choices - not yours, not Mom's, not Zander's, mine. And I weighed every single one of them, every step down the line. Because I knew what could happen. I knew what it was like to be blindsided and how fast things can go wrong." "I hear what you're telling me," he grants, squinting at a distant spot across the street he doesn't truly see. "But I look at those choices and I've got to say they're not very comforting. You aided and abetted a fugitive, Maxie. That's a crime. You can go to jail for that. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, was to turn Zander in." "And that would have been your choice, don't you see? Your choice for me." "It's the law, Maxie. Everyone's got to follow the law." "Everyone except the police," she grumbles, then curses herself for straying off the path. "Dad, what I'm trying to say here is Zander gave me choices. That's all he did from beginning to end. He asked for my help and then he let me decide what I was going to do. I could've said no at any time and he would have respected that. He would have understood it. More than understood it, agreed with it. Truth is, in those last few days he kept trying to say no for me. I wouldn't let him, though. Because, guess what? It was my choice." "Okay," Mac sustains, snagging on an issue, an open wound. "If we're going for full disclosure here, I'd like to know why you chose not to trust me. Because that's what you did, Maxie. Zander was in my house. In my daughter's room. Did I hear a peep from you? Did you come to me and tell me what you were planning to do? Did you ask for my help to work things out? You say these were all your choices. One of those choices was to keep me in the dark. Do you still think that was the right move?" She considers the question so seriously it clearly surprises him; takes so long with it, in fact, that he has time to sip his coffee, flick a twig from the crease of his jeans and return his gaze to her face as he waits on her answer. "It was the right move for me," she confesses eventually, looking up at him with a sorrow so sharp it almost makes him bleed. "It was a bad move, though. I didn't know. I didn't know there'd be a fire, or that you'd come, or that you'd be burned. I'm sorry, Dad, I really am." And he sights the single, eviscerating tear that swells to spill over a lash. "It wasn't your fault, sweetheart." Because now he's cringing inside, tormented to find a misery so completely attached to him. "I was doing my job that night. And you're right, you couldn't have predicted it. But do you see how the choices we make can have far-reaching consequences? Consequences that have nothing to do with you or the problem you're trying to solve?" His burly hand extends to bridge the distance between them, coming to rest on her knee. "It's a painful lesson to learn but an important one, too. And I hope, knowing what we know now, you wouldn't make the same mistake again." "No," she avows with a shake of her head. "I wouldn't make the same mistake twice, that's for sure. If I had it all to do over again I'd force him to leave town right away. I wouldn't hide him or lie for him or anything. I'd just throw him in the back of the car and hit the road." His eyes grow wide with astonishment, his mouth dropping open in shock. "Maxie, I think you're missing my point." "And maybe you're missing mine," she suggests, grabbing hold of the hand on her knee as it begins to slip away. "You have to understand, Dad. I never would have chosen not to help him. And yeah, maybe it would have been better for you, and for Emily Quartermaine, and for Detective Beck in some way I still don't get, if I'd just given up and turned him in. But I don't know how I could have found a way to live with myself today if I hadn't listened to him, if I hadn't stuck by his side." "So you don't regret it?" he states, amazed; a soft tug pulling his fingers from her grasp. "Not any of it? Not at all?" She watches him turn back to the street, hanging his head in disappointment, and a tiny anger flares. "He's dead, Dad," she advances remorselessly. "Every day of the last freaking year has been one big fat regret. Just because I don't feel bad about the things you think I should feel bad about doesn't mean I'm not sorry. I'm sorry about everything. And you should be, too." It's strange, the way he starts at that; the way his posture straightens and his skin seems to bristle, every hair rising on end. It's a wall, another wall going up and she has no idea why. She wants to cry, not tears but screams of a truth that might get through to him. How can hers be such a difficult position to comprehend? He should get this. He should. Or at least he should try. "I don't know," she sighs, her shoulders slumping in a way that makes it more than evident they are nothing less than father and daughter. "Why did he pick me? Zander, I mean. I'm the police commissioner's kid. Talk about lousy choices. It was one thing when I stumbled in on him hiding out in the hospital. Anybody could have walked through that door. And yeah, I covered for him - but you should know I made it very clear I didn't want to get involved. He was accused of shooting a cop! That so wasn't going to fly with me. But then he comes back...later, outside Kelly's, and begs me to hide him. Me. Mac Scorpio's daughter. Why?" "He probably thought you were someone he could trust," Mac renders in a tone she reads as deliberately cautious. If she weren't in such a desperate place, trapped in this soul-sucking space she needed to fill with a fragment of understanding, she might latch onto his mood and its sudden, subtle discomfort. Instead, she sees it as an opening and scurries to crawl in. "And he was right about that. He could trust me. But it broke his heart to have to. The funny thing about all this?" she inserts through the wisp of an ironic smile. "If Zander were sitting here now, taking part in this conversation? He'd agree with you. You know that, right?" Mac appears to struggle with the concept, his neck arching slightly, his look strained as if he were viewing her from the vantage of a million miles away. "I know you don't want to hear this, but you and Zander were a lot more alike than you think. If it were some other guy I was trying to help, some other man on the run from the police, do you know what Zander'd do? He'd insist I tell him everything and let him handle it, just like you. I can't even begin to tell you how bad he felt being that guy - the guy who dragged me in." "Then he should have let you go." "He tried, Dad. He really did. I just wouldn't let him shake me off. The stone-cold truth is he needed me. I knew it and he knew it, and I think if you put your fear for me to the side for a second, you could probably admit you know it, too. Not that I expect you to," she adds in a concessionary nod to the paternal forces that drive him here. "You have every reason on earth to be angry with me and disappointed in me. Me, Dad. Me. My actions, my words, my lies, my choices - not Zander's, don't you see?" His gaze clouds and his focus splits, turning inward to fix on the heart of the matter and the darkest part of his fear. "Do you know what scared me most?" he discloses in a tone so soft she has to lean in closer, cocking her head to hear. "What scared me most was knowing that Zander wasn't in his right mind at the end. He'd gone over some mental ledge. And there you were running after him while I was strapped to a hospital bed. I thank every god known to Man that you never met up with him again." He surfaces to the present moment like a hard charge of lightening, his eyes striking out to the neutral street in manifest despair. "You don't know about madness yet. You don't know how it takes all those choices away. But Maxie, I see this every day. Anything could have happened to you and Zander, himself, wouldn't have had the power to prevent it. That's when you needed saving. And I wasn't there." The tears rise before she can even process a reason for them - her heart engulfed by a compassion so entirely unexpected and undefined that it threatens to overwhelm; to drown out every thought she owns beneath a massive wave of feeling. She blinks, tripping the tide, sprinkling the sorrow down her cheeks as she recognizes the guilt he feels and how certain he is that he'd failed her; that in some manner, in some wrenching way, she was only alive by chance. "I love you, Dad." It's all she has and everything she wants to give him. "And I'm okay. I am. Look." He doesn't want to look, doesn't want her to see him, doesn't need this weak, defeated face betraying a shame she'd be forced to acknowledge and fasten in her memory. But a finger comes to twist that chin, to capture his reluctant eye and turn it firmly to the side. "I'm fine, Dad. Look at me," she demands in a voice hoarse with emotion. "I'm fine, and do you know why that is?" she insists, diving to the seat of his pain; charging headlong into his doubt. "It's because you're my father." He's lost now, there's no denying it; lost like a ship she's unhitched of its mooring and sent floating off into the darkness of an ungovernable sea. His features crack; his lips parting to seize a breath as his eyes film over. Wordless. There's not a thing he can say and she knows it, sees it for herself and moves toward it - falls into arms that open for her as instinctively and thoughtlessly as the rest of all those acts of love. "You want to tell me how it is I can be so damned angry with you and proud of you at the same time?" he croaks on a wet laugh. "Back at'cha, Dad," she growls into his chest, relieved to find in this one moment, in this one instant at least, they had managed to land on the same page. "So maybe I'm like Zander. Maybe we're both a lot like you." "Again with Zander! You never stop." "Just following in the footsteps of my father," she quietly replies. "He's pretty relentless, too." He dropped the last crust of the ham-and-swiss into a mouth upended to receive it and crushed the wrapping to a ball - Jabbaring it classic skyhook-style to the basket at the end of the bench. The two chips left in the bag were devoured in similar fashion, his chip-to-sandwich ratio once again coming out precisely right. The can of lemon-lime, sad to say, contained just the suck of backwash. He'd have to work on that. He'd have to work on that if he planned to keep on doing this. Foot traffic slowed at sunset. It's a boondock burg, a tiny place; lots of little kids and families trading sidewalks for cars; professional men in their jackets and ties heading straight from the high-rise to the four-door sedan and the drive home to dinner. Rush hour (a complete misnomer, the rink and the dink of it played out to more of a rush thirty minutes) would come and go as he sat on this bench; fewer and fewer people passing by, their friendly faces closing down like the town as they hurried to beat the dark. Not like Marrakech or Berlin, or the Amsterdam he remembered from his youth, cities that screamed to life once the sun turned its back. This one shut up tight; crossed her legs and pulled down her skirts like the provincial prude she was. Used to bother him years ago when his blood ran hot for the con - a scam, a pitch, the bolt from mark to mark, attraction to attraction; that itch for action a town like Port Charles would never let him scratch. Safe they'd made him, normal he'd be, grounded in the suburban fantasy of a woman six steps from insane. Then five, then four, then three and two - he shook his head to lose the thought of her, the sight of her in that bed. Is this what you wanted for me, Mom? Is this what you had in mind? When you still had a mind, that is. He's not surprised to find it, the pain's forever just beneath the skin, surging, simmering. He never tells anyone, not that anyone's asked or would really want to know, but he often wishes she were here. Not there, drooling and deranged, but here beneath a tree behind him, over that wall, atop that hill. He could visualize this, dreams about it for long stretches of time; embracing the idea of that appeasement - the way it fulfills her longing for a quiet peace; the peace she'd always aimed for yet had never quite been able to manage to reach. These are the musings that settle in a soft thrush to the seat of his soul as Lucky Spencer rises, strides through the chilled grey dusk of twilight, and enters the gate of Memorial Glen. Requiem (27) Consider his life which was valueless In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files. Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man. Ask. Was so much expenditure justified On the death of one so young, and so silly Lying under the olive trees, O world, O death? "So a man calls his wife and he says, 'Hey honey, I just won the lottery! Pack your bags!' And she squeals, 'Oh my God! Oh my God! Wait a minute, wait a minute...warm weather or cold? What should I pack?' And he says, 'I don't care, just be out of there by the time I get home.'" "Lucky, who are you talking to?" His eyes shift from the headstone, the smile still stitched to his face, to take in the troubled countenance of his newly-arrived and majorly mystified sister-in-law. "It's a Spencer thing," he contends through the grin. "Lesson Number Two-Sixty-Three. Always take full advantage of a captive audience." "Wait. You're telling jokes to dead people? In the dark?" "Moon's out, Em. I can see you, you can see me. And hey, just so you know, if I don't get a laugh in this place? Doesn't necessarily mean the joke wasn't funny." He'd offer her a seat beside him on the ground beneath this tree but he didn't think she'd take it. The old Em would've shared the dirt with him. The old Em, that long-ago waif, his runaway Em, wouldn't even wait to be asked. This new one, this Mrs. Princess Nik? So not her style. "Come to pay your respects, or are you meeting up with one of your husband's freshly-risen relations?" "Actually, I'm here to see you," she confessed. "I've been trying to connect with you for days but you never seem to leave the police station. What's that about?" "Procedural penance. Mac's idea." His features creased to a mocking scowl. "I'm on a desk until I understand a desk," he mimicked dryly, his tone pitching to echo his boss's stern, punitive decree. "You could've come by the apartment. Elizabeth would have been happy to see you." "Well, yes. But I wanted to talk to you alone." She took a step closer, hesitant though; clearly uncomfortable in these macabre surroundings. "Elizabeth was the one who told me where you were. I didn't believe her, but she wouldn't explain. She said to ask you. So, okay, what's going on here, Lucky?" "Just a different shade of penance," he maintained. His chin dipped and he turned away, scouting out his headstone in its spill of lunar light. She leaned in cautiously, squinting for the name. "I take it you knew that...um, I can't read it...him? Her? That person there?" "Used to think so, yeah." He gave her half a second to decipher the marker, which was half a second longer than her interest held. "Must be pretty important to have you wandering through a cemetery after dark." "It is," she acknowledged, relieved to return to the firmer ground of the reason she'd come. "Can we...?" She gestured to a concrete bench three graves back behind her and pursed her lips when he didn't move. Fine. He could hear the snip in his mind, read the huff of that sigh; her valiant exasperation. "It's Nikolas, Lucky. There's something wrong and he won't tell me what it is." "Did you ask?" "Well, of course I asked!" "No offense, Em, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes you just get an idea in your head and decide to run with that." "So you think I'm making this up?" "I don't know." He resisted a shrug, aware this nonchalance annoyed her. "What did he say?" "He said it's nothing, but he always says it's nothing even when it's something and I just...he won't...he won't talk to me." Her chest deflated, her shoulders curling in dejection; the shift in gravity pulling her hair forward to curtain her face like a veil. "Ever since he had that conversation with Maxim he's been, I don't know...tense. He won't tell me what they said to each other or what really happened. All he'll admit to is a misunderstanding. But he's not letting it go, Lucky. He broods about it day and night." Lucky snorted and her head shot up, her expression an angry wound. "Em," he asserted gently, revising his response on the fly. "You realize that's who he is, right? That's what he does? He's been this way since we met him. Push comes to shove you've gotta know you married The Brooding Cassadine." "But it's not just that. It's deeper," she insisted. "More all-consuming. It's like he's trying to work something through." She took a step closer, her hand rising, urging him to hear her out. "I mean, he'll be sitting on the couch, okay? Just staring off into space. Then, without any warning at all, he jumps to the computer or the phone, or sprints up the stairs to the attic to dig through the records of the Cassadine Estate. When he finally comes down to dinner he's angry, as if eating were some kind of rude interruption I was forcing him to deal with. He snapped at me last night, Lucky. He's never done that before. And he's not drinking anymore, either." "Hang on, hang on," he interjected on a chuff of amused surprise. "He's not drinking anymore and this is somehow a problem for you?" "Not a problem," she groused, her head bobbling back and forth in terse communicative frustration. "It's just...different. He's different, that's what I'm saying. Help me out here, Lucky. You've talked to him. I know you have." "Five minutes," he submitted swiftly. "Once for a total of five minutes tops." He'll leave out the fact that he'd found his brother lying in wait for him, his unaccountably fevered approach, how he'd brushed past the obligatory hellos to throw down his needs like mortal challenges on the front steps of the PCPD. Did you get those credentials? Can you try again? He knew my uncle, Lucky. And she knew him, too, I can tell. They spent some serious time together. Who are they? I've got to know. Five quick minutes was all it took. Five minutes max at the start of this morning's shift rotation. "I think he's trying to put all the pieces together, Em. Who are these people? What do they want? Why are they really here? It's the same stuff I've been trying to work out since they crawled into town." "But he didn't care before," she protested, dissatisfied with those answers. "Well, he cares now and it's about time, too. They're up to something, I told you that. You think you can take it all at face value and I'm telling you, you can't." The descending notes of a muted arpeggio erupted inside his jacket's fold. "Hang on a second," he grumbled, slipping his fingers to a pocket and drawing out the phone. "Hello? Yeah." She paced fretfully across the grass, halting directly in front of him as he waited for his father to get to the point. The cell tipped discreetly beneath his chin. "You're standing on his grave, Em." She started at the news, recoiling in horror, and the mouthpiece angled up again. "No, I'm still here." He watched her take an extra step apart, distancing herself from that morbid spot, and the receiver dropped once more. "Now you're standing on his dad's." She let out a mortified yelp and scurried to his side. "No, I wasn't talking to you. I've got a life going on here. Fine. Later." He flipped the phone shut and looked up at her with a smile he could see she was nowhere near in a mood to appreciate. "I don't know what to tell you, Em. He's doing his thing, I'm doing mine. We're trying to get to the bottom of this." "Great," she muttered petulantly. "And what do I do in the meantime?" "Leave him alone. Don't get involved." His voice lowered in warning. "Emily, I'm serious. He's not going to thank you for that." "But maybe..." And here it comes - the hand dropping to his shoulder to deliver its earnest squeeze just confirmed it. "Maybe if you went back to Wyndemere with me we could all sit down and talk about this. He shouldn't be on his own, Lucky. He shouldn't have to deal with this by himself. You're his brother. I'm his wife. You could even bring Elizabeth! We could all join forces. It would be just like the old days. The four musketeers sitting around a table, brainstorming it out." "What did I just say?" He broke from those pleading eyes and shook his head in disgust. "I swear, Em, I get the sense lately the only reason you talk to me is to sucker me into your play. What are you really after here, my help or my permission? Because you're coming up empty on both. Not that it matters. You'll do whatever it is you're going to do and, hey, I can't stop you. So just go do it, okay?" A painful silence thumped to the ground to expand that injury between them; he could feel the hurt roll off of her in a cascade of aching waves. The grip on his shoulder loosened, her touch wistful for a moment before its lingering weight slipped away. "I can't believe you said that," she murmured in a small, childlike voice. "And I can't believe you don't know where you are," he shot back roughly, unable for some inexplicable reason to continue ignoring the ghost interred not six feet from where she stood. "I don't...I don't..." he stammered, grappling for the words as his agitation roiled and his eyes twisted shut. "I don't blame you," he allowed, his tone much softer now. "At least no more than I blame myself. I don't think he wanted to live, and I know he didn't want to be saved. Did he want to be remembered, though? Because I'll tell you something, Em, I sure as hell don't want to remember him." He refused to look her in the face, to see the trace of confusion there; her struggle to determine exactly who it was he was talking about. He hoped she'd clue in soon and spare him the need to explain. "I used to visit Summer all the time. I used to weep at the side of that grave. Her death was so incomprehensible to me." His gaze lifted to the stone, to the name, to the man who waited so patiently for a grief that never came. "I don't know what to do here. He made a choice, right? I mean, you were there. You saw it. This is what he chose." Seconds unwound in the shadow of that discomfiting truth and a chill wind rose, skittering ancient, arthritic brown leaves in a dervish dance across the grass. She shivered. No way to be certain if it was a reaction to the cold. "Are you coming back with me or not?" "Pass," he pronounced on a dejected sigh. He'd imagined her more of a friend than this. Braver. Truer. Wiser in the ways of the fractured heart. He didn't watch her go, but heard those shoes crunching through the leaves and the snap of her heels once they hit the pavement, echoing in the distance. She was right. There was nothing left to say. He fell back against the tree, fished through the shallows of his memory, cleared his throat and started up again. "A man walks into a bar..." And it had all come down to his hand. It's his hand she looks for now. His right hand. His right-handed right hand. The same right hand that had written all those hefty checks to law school. The hand that was attached to that arm that was attached to that shoulder that was attached to that will that was willing to go up against Helena Cassadine herself. That right, righteous, check-writing hand that had insisted with an effortless, looping scrawl this mouse was worthy of a shot at graduating summa cum laude. The hand that didn't bother having faith in her because it knew, it knew she'd get the job done. This was the hand she wanted to see. This was the hand she remembered. It was smaller then, of course. The first time she saw it through dangling bangs, from a grief-bent head, through red-rimmed eyes scoured by hours of intermittent crying. When she first stepped off the rocking boat to the shore of that damned island, his hand had been smaller then. Softer. Slimmer. Trim. Clean when he stretched it out to her - his brother, the prince, having stalked away from this tediously boring command performance to pull the wings off flies she thinks. Clean, the hand that stayed after; its skin, its nails, its upraised palm. Clean and smart to wait the way it did, steady in the sunlight, endlessly suspended, collecting every dark suspicion she owned. He couldn't know that the last hand she'd seen, truly seen through those bangs, those eyes, had been soaked in her mother's blood. Bad hand. Wicked hand. A hand that had stolen a songbird's voice and, like as not, made off with hers as well through the sheer horror of the deed. He couldn't know that then. But perhaps he suspected? It's possible he'd detected this wreckage of a child trembling on the sand before him was a product of something his mother had done. "Alexis, is it? My name is Stefan." But it's not, it's not, it's Natasha, it's not...her father squeezes her shoulder, orders this "cousin" to take her in. Even so, even with that god-like, warrior's decree booming out over the cacophonous sea, this Stefan boy's clean, slender-soft hand waits for hers to take it. Waits like he'd wait for an eternity just to give her the chance to choose; a chance to decide to begin. That's the hand she wanted to see as she craned her neck from the corner of the couch toward the flickering screen of her TV. But it wasn't there. It was never there. No matter how often she replayed this scene, that hand was never there. It was invisible. Slack. Tied twice-tight by a rope behind his back. And where was her hand? Was it lifting? Reaching? Poised to wait through an eternity for his? No. It's just folded in her lap. She plucked another tissue, the last one in the box, and began to cry...again. "This apartment is amazing, you know. Dining room, living room, kitchen, nursery...and if you look hard enough, I mean really, really look, I bet you'll even find it comes with a bed." How he could inject such a seductive tone into the hush of his baby-on-board voice had always been an enigma to her. Where she was a squawk of harsh whispers and shushing, he was resonant, mellifluous and, at times, achingly sensual. She longed for him as she brushed away a tear, yearned for his lips, his butterfly kisses, his heat, his weight, his love; the life of him inside her - hungered for the vagrant trace of his touch, the way he filled each empty, emotional space; his tender stitch of every open wound. He frightened her so. And in this weak, weak, vulnerable moment she unthinkingly admits it. "You scare me, Ric." "Sorry, I didn't mean to," he advanced apologetically, mistakenly believing she meant only in this instant; only with this one intrusion. He'd remain behind her now, still in the shadow of the entryway, gauging her mood from a distance if she didn't expressly lure him in. She imagined him there - such a dangerous thing - gifting him the navy silk pajama pants that rode so lightly at his hips; his bare chest, those bleary eyes, that tousled hair she could never resist running every finger through. Her sleepy man. Her intensely erotic sleepy man. "I'm almost done," she offered, though she hadn't even started. It had been difficult to remain objective this first time around. "Looks like three releases, total. Dillon never appeared on camera, Lydia's gone and Zander's dead. Luke owned it and sold it, so we'll assume his permission's implied. While I'll ask, I don't think Lucky will want any part of this. That leaves Nikolas, Emily and myself as the injured parties, all of whom will appear on the complaint." "Sounds like you're ready to sue," he observed, coughing softly to remove the fatigue from his voice. "Do we have a defendant yet?" "Not really, no. I thought...for a minute, maybe." The stems of her reading glasses threaded over her ears as she reached across the sofa for the legal pad, flipping back from its tear-stained page to the notes she'd made in the front. "I tracked down Luke's buyer; a fly-by-night entertainment corporation called Phat Boy Productions, owned and operated by the one and only Phat Boy Melvyn Stemple who, while admittedly overweight, clearly left his boyhood and whatever hair he had behind him in the mid-to-late sixties. Mr. Stemple is the man we have to thank for the snazzy packaging and distribution." She lifted the tape case into the air and waggled it from side-to-side, a small smile twitching at the sound of her husband's sardonically-muted huzzah. "As fate would have it, Melvyn, known to his closest associates as a hard-line huckster who never met a corner he couldn't cut, recently suffered a series of debilitating legal setbacks due - surprise, surprise - to his failure to obtain the right to manufacture, distribute or in any way profit from roughly eighty-five percent of his inventory. In a last-gasp scamper to limit his rapidly-mounting fiscal liability, he began to sell off his catalogue to equally shady characters and corporations with a similar disinterest in the law. Cassadine Takedown was one of the many titles the woefully misguided judicial system of a country he's loved since birth has so unfairly forced him to part with." "I don't suppose he told you who he sold it to?" He'd crossed the room on cat's feet, arriving at the back of the sofa to peer over her shoulder at her notes. She ran an indicative finger across the line that answered his question. "Bete Noire, Inc.? That's what...the black beast?" he ventured, struggling to translate the French. "It's a metaphor. Bete noire. A pet aversion. A personal torment." She met his puzzled expression with a calculating tilt of her head. "Call me paranoid, and you wouldn't be the first, but I detect a hint of the Cassadine in that." "Really?" A brow lifted and she watched the wheels of his mind begin to turn. "This is getting interesting." "Isn't it, though? Couple that with the fact it was the only title they took off poor Mr. Stemple's hands and I think we've got ourselves a little mystery." "And there's so much to be said for little mysteries," he concurred, flashing her a look of careful concern; his gaze ranging over her face for a sign of how she truly felt about this. A hand came to sweep the hair from her eyes and ran down the slope of her cheek, lingering at her chin. "I could handle this, if you want. File the motions, negotiate the settlement, take it to trial, whatever works for you. If it's cutting too close to the bone, Alexis..." "It's not, no. No," she insisted, wondering if that was a lie. "I have to do this. I just have to do this." "I know that's how you feel, baby, but..." "No buts," she admonished, pulling back from his touch. "It's nothing I can't handle." She drew her glasses off and folded them neatly, setting them atop the legal pad she dropped to the coffee table. "I believe you said something about a bed?" "Did I?" he murmured through the hitch of a decidedly mischievous grin. "I don't remember that." And he was already in motion, already prowling like a panther over the arching spine of the couch to loom threateningly above her; to force her back and imprison her to the flat of its cushions. She tried to laugh this off, tried to squirm out from underneath him, but a hand came to pin her wrist and a trapping leg enclosed. Still suspended from the frame, his mouth descended to steal its kiss and the tensile strain of maintaining that balance made it harder and hungrier than it might otherwise have been. Made it perfect, in fact, to tease the fire her brother had set burning in her soul. Perfect to incite the predatory passion she worked so hard to keep under control. His urgent lips, his avaricious tongue, the heat of his breath, his bite, his moan - the crushing weight of his hips as they fell to grind in rhythm against her own - might have overwhelmed Alexis, but to Natasha it was like coming home. Poetic Attributions (The Introductory Lines): Chapter 25 - from The Men's Harbour, by the poet John Burnside. Chapter 26 - from On the Beach, by the poet Jane Hirshfield. Chapter 27 - from Ultima Ratio Regum, by the poet Stephen Spender.