A/N: I'm thoroughly upset. I was certain that episode 3:13 was supposed to air TODAY. And now we have to wait at least another week. This is a cruel world. Anyway, I was so disappointed that I felt the need to write my own take on the events. So...

SPOILER ALERT! Major spoilers for 3:13! Consider yourselves warned.

This story shouldn't be terribly long. It'll be somewhere between 2 and 4 or so chapters... I think. I would love reviews if you have the time, seeing as this is my first attempt at a Castle fanfiction.

Disclaimer: NOT mine. Yeah, I'm crying.

He just... sits there.

Looks amused, even.

Sits atop the hard metal table of the interrogation room, swinging one leg. He's easily the biggest man she's ever seen in her life.

Glances at his fingernails. Then looks up, straight at the mirrored wall. The corners of his mouth twitch.

He must know she's watching him.

She begins to swear under her breath, starting in Russian, but progressing to English when the foreign words don't feel potent enough. Castle shifts uncomfortably beside her.

"Beckett…" he murmurs softly but doesn't say anything more. He's a writer, and yet there is nothing he can think of to say.

She clamps her lips together but doesn't take her eyes off of their… suspect.

Suspect isn't the word she'd like to use here. He is so obviously guilty that she's proud of the fact that she can stand here without plucking her firearm from her hip.

"Detective?"

Beckett can't ignore her boss like she can Castle. She turns, reluctantly, tearing her eyes away. "Sir?"

"We can get someone else to perform this interrogation, if you'd like," Captain Montgomery says quietly, without reproach. "Maybe that would be better."

She idly wonders if her swearing was loud enough to reach his ears. It would definitely be the better, more professional decision to ask another detective to help her out here. She's always been very polished and professional.

Not this time.

"No, sir. I can do it."

"I know you can, Detective. It's not a question of that."

Turning back around, she stares through the glass with an almost hollow expression. A minute passes. She looks back at him over her shoulder. "I need to," she says roughly.

He should remove her from the case. That's his job, as captain of the precinct, and they both know it. She has no business interrogating this man.

But Montgomery nods, sharply and so jerkily that it's more of a bob than a nod. "Detectives Ryan, Esposito, a word?" he asks, opening the door and stepping outside of the observation room. They follow him, Ryan shooting one last glance back at Beckett, who's gripping the ridge at the bottom of the pane of one-sided glass so hard that the tendons in her hands and wrists are raised.

"May I come in with you?" Castle asks quietly once the door has clicked shut.

She blinks, surprised. She'd already expected him to follow her in to the interrogation room, as always. Glancing over at him, she sees his expression in the dim light. He's pale but has the most sincere look on his face that she's ever seen. In a different situation, it might have made her offer a reassuring smile. All that she can manage is a nod as abrupt as Montgomery's.

Beckett turns back to the glass.

He's still just sitting there. Stretches lazily, tilting, raking his eye across the ceiling and extending his arms out as he yawns. Brings his head down and stares straight at the mirror, almost directly into Beckett's eyes.

Grins.

A wide, arrogant, ear-to-ear smirk.

Her stomach swoops like she's on a roller coaster, drops, and she pushes backward off the wall, whipping around. She can hear her heartbeat in her ears and feel it pounding against her rib cage.

Blindly, she stares straight ahead, unseeing. It's almost like a haze is draped across her vision. This man is a murderer. An unrepentant one. Her mother's murderer. The man who had hired a man to kill her mother. His may have been the last face Johanna had ever seen. Why did she think she for one moment that she could handle this interrogation?

"Kate."

The low whisper brings her from her daze. Castle is there. She'd nearly forgotten him entirely. He puts a hand on her shoulder, squeezing, bringing her back into reality. She doesn't even notice that he's just called her by her first name.

"You can do this," he says, staring right into her eyes. "You can."

A long moment passes. "…Okay," she whispers, not really believing him. She just needs to get this over with.

They exit the room, squinting as the brighter light hits their eyes. Ryan and Esposito are nodding slowly to something that Montgomery is saying, but Beckett ignores them, ignores the recording technician who steps into the observation room as she exits, stepping quickly over to her desk and grabbing the thick manila folder laying in the center.

She falters only once, right before she opens the door to the interrogation room, then straightens up, swallows, and carelessly pushes the door open. Castle follows.

"Good afternoon, Mr.—" she flips the folder open to the first page and pretends to consult it, "Atkins," she finishes smoothly, casually, as if this interrogation means so little that she has already forgotten his name.

He glances lazily at her from his perch on the table. "Well what do ya know. A female cop," he smirks again, that callous and confident grin, and Beckett feels her blood run first cold and then red-hot.

Atkins slowly gets to his feet and straightens himself out. He towers above her by at least a foot, even in her heels, and is twice as wide.

"Detective Kate Rodriguez," she flashes a brief, fake smile, "And this is my partner, Rick Martin."

Castle blinks, then takes his turn with a smile as Atkins glances his way. He hopes he's the only one who noticed the tiny pause between their first and last names. Idly, he wonders where she came up with those two names. He didn't know any Rodriguezes...

"Won't you have a seat?" Beckett gestures towards the chair facing the mirror.

"Don't mind if I do," Atkins won't stop smirking as he deliberately sits in the chair on the opposite side, back to the glass.

Without missing a beat, Beckett takes a seat in the chair across from him. "Now, Mr. Atkins…"

She proceeds to lay out their grounds for "inviting" him in; runs theories past him; explains the series of similar crimes, robberies, break-ins, murders, and kidnappings; and shows part of their evidence against him, all the time prodding subtly at him, with a combination of all the interrogation methods she's ever been taught. He responds to everything with a witty or condescending remark, a raised eyebrow, or amused silence.

After an hour, she's exhausted. After two, she starts to feel desperate. Castle watches as the polite smile never leaves her face, as her voice never falters, and as she never rises to Atkins' bait.

"Oh, Detective," he says finally, shaking his head, broad smile stretching across his face. She wishes she could beat it off of him, wishes she could shoot him and leave his bloody corpse in a public place, wishes to torture him slowly. "I think we both know that if you could arrest me," he leans forward, "you already would've."

"I don't about that," she replies casually, "you see, there is one more crime I have yet to bring up." Beckett flips open her folder and pulls out the picture from the very back. She's delayed this moment, hoping, praying, that something would happen before she got to it.

But it hasn't worked that way.

"This woman was murdered about twelve years ago. Johanna Beckett," she says with a calmness born of sheer desperation, slapping the photo down upon the table.

Atkins watches her, unimpressed.

She leans forward, "You see, we have three, independent witnesses whose stories about their involvement in this murder have to do with you." She slows down the last part of her sentence, making each word drop as dead weight.

He glances down for half a second, then back up to Beckett, brown eyes meeting green. His eyebrows dance. "Sorry. I've never seen her. Now, really, if you aren't going to charge me, I believe I'll be leaving."

He pushes back his chair and stands up.

Beckett's anger has morphed into a numb sensation of dread and helplessness and rage. He's just been playing with her this whole time. And she can't do anything because they have nothing to tie him to the crimes, nothing that would stand up in court, at least.

Actually, she could probably get him for one of the break-ins. But that wouldn't necessarily merit any jail time whatsoever. So it was pointless.

"You're going to tell me that you have never met this woman?" she asks, her voice raw with suppressed emotion.

Atkins blinks, the first unplanned reaction she's got out of him this entire time. Then his grin grows even wider. "I thought you looked familiar," he says delightedly.

She stops breathing.

"The little Beckett girl, right? All growed up now. You were so young," he's relishing in her pain, and at this point it's just too much.

"Tell me" she replies, glaring at him, dropping the façade," you don't remember her."

He eyes her exultantly, searching for the perfect thing to say, "She was so tasty."

A decade and more of grief and pain washes over Beckett in a single moment. Her father's alcoholism, the moment she got the call about the body, the hopeless hours spent in vain at her mother's murder board, the years spent alone, the silent holidays, and the agonizing moments of heartache all combine into one, crushing load.

And he's laughing at her.

The movement is instinctive. She's not sure how she gets out of her seat so fast but suddenly she's just inches from him. The next moment she's throwing him backwards, into the one-way mirror, shattering glass, slamming his head back with a strength she never knew she had.