The single factor she'd forgotten, while unintentionally letting herself fall half into maybe more than lust with him, was that he was still a pack alpha in a dirty little den of criminals. And not even just every day criminals. They were downright murderers, liars and thieves. But she'd let herself forcefully forget it because there had always been a gracious leniency in him otherwise, a lay of patience aching in brown eyes. And she'd maybe been mistaken for seeing what she thought was sadness in a beautifully scarred face. Because on the unscratched surface, he really was damn beautiful. Especially when he smiled. And even when she'd itched a little deeper and drawn up a hint of a possible raging, he'd still been a gorgeous leather wrapped gift of possibility. A possibility she unintentionally had let herself momentarily believe was real.

And letting him sleep beside her had maybe been the singular worst mistake she'd ever made in her career. The sex hadn't necessarily been the point that had broken her down toward weak willed. It had been great sex, sure. But sex was really only the pact they'd made to move closer to the sun without ashing up on each other. Close but not too close to burn.

Sex had never been a problem between them.

The problem had always laid warmly in the long strong stretch of him beside her for hours at a time.

It had been the fact that he had unguarded his center just long enough to close his eyes and find some kind of rest. Because when he slept, he'd reached for her instead of all the things she was supposed to protect people from. Him included.

And now the stacking up of death upon death, damn near every one somehow connected to him… it was making a mockery of her and the fact that she had stupidly thought that maybe she could save just a little bit of that beautiful.

As far as she was concerned, a threat to add her to the list of the dead - no matter how bitterly veiled it had been - was the bell rung demise of anything she'd ever found gently loving in him.

He truly was a murdering bastard among thicker than blood brothers.

And it didn't bother her that she'd fucked him while knowing where his hands had been.

It bothered her that she'd damn near been in love with him despite it.

"You hear me, LT?" He was extraordinarily young and the concern in his voice as he cocked his head at a tipping angle ridged against her patience, "Lieutenant?"

"I heard you, Mac." She blinked rapidly, shaking her head as she stretched her hand into the way he was offering the paperwork to her. "Thank you."

"You okay?" he seemed genuinely concerned by her vacancy and she couldn't help but lay an appreciative smile over him in return.

"I'm okay." She nodded before flipping past the preliminary report that was on top, intentionally searching for the next one without a breath between. "This is all they sent over?"

"Processed evidence and possessions are coming in with the transport of remains. I told them that was fine. They're securing it by sending an officer with." He was still searching her face with a worry that made him seem even younger and greener than she would have liked.

"Seriously. Stop it." She tipped over him, a brow arched into the way he was studying her. "I'm fine."

"I know you liked him." He shrugged over the way she was holding the reports coming out of Oregon, her fingers paused against the pages.

And because 'him', in her mental vocabulary, was still categorized by an accent and leather and lust – she flacked a suddenly piercing glance over the young man's face.

"He was a good cop." He nodded to her softly, voice shunting low at the fluxed way she was staring at him. "I know you liked working with him."

"I did." Ally exhaled the words out on an unexplainable relief that had him studying her confusedly. "Guess I'm still in shock, ya know?"

He was just watching her.

And it was very soon going to put him in a position he didn't deserve.

Unless he'd been one to go running to Patterson to lay her ass on the line.

But then his too innocent eyes made it seem like an unlikely bet.

"I want everything that comes in on my desk. Everything. I don't care how small time it seems." She was already turning away from him, the papers drawn up into her chest as she moved away from him.

"You were off duty two hours ago, Lieutenant."

She ignored his now seemingly too personal concern, keeping her back on him as she moved toward her office, "Everything, Mac."

The world felt suddenly very welled wide and slanted to an unexplainable and undecipherable angle. Because even the knowing of what had happened and what had been coming, the sure assumption that all the things he'd been told would play about… not one nothing could have set him still and readily prepared for the fact that his family had been halved in the short hours of one un-ended day. The whole week had felt as long as one frayed up day, and just as short as one too. And he'd suddenly lost four people into emptied hands.

Except they weren't emptied enough to allow him a taste of grief's acidic bitterness yet. Because as he'd settled into Jackson's empty house, let himself sit to a lonely couch, he'd pulled the patch into his fingers again. And he didn't know how long he stared at it so despondently blankly. But the accusation of responsibility it was staring back at him was more than enough to keep him from leaning into grieving yet.

Of course, it would come.

Of that, he had no doubt.

He battled it back with a strained and stricken swallow, stripping the cut and laying it to the table, the President patch settled softly to it before he moved the sharp ached bones of his body off the couch. Chibs searched soft and quiet through the kitchen first, keeping his gloves on and touching only what he needed to in search for needle and thread. And halfway through the searching he realized that Tara was still breathing somewhere around him. In every shifting sound of an otherwise silent and near dark house. She would have kept them somewhere else. Not here in her organized kitchen drawers. She would have kept them in a cluttered up drawer of miscellany that she didn't need to keep catalogued in her too hurried mind.

And his heavy hearted boy wouldn't have changed the way she'd left such things.

They'd still be the same.

Jackson would have kept her close. As close as possible.

And with his gloved hand still clenching an open drawer handle he sharpened down another swallow, head shaking into the realization that jealousy was a sudden swilled dankness in the back of his throat. Clogging the balance of his breathing. A jealousy of their too easy proximity and their too true honesty.

Because Jackson had always kept her too close to where she should have been standing and it had gotten her killed by his own mother's fierce love. And Jackson had been the one to remind him not to keep too close to the one something that he could have held near on for years if she'd let him.

And now Jackson was dead. Left him to pick up from nothing.

And it'd all gotten her gone anyhow.

It was halfway through the sewing, fingers shakier on it than he'd meant, that his vision had blurred up bright in the shadowed living room. And it had been because he'd let himself see their faces in the blind spot vacancy of his vision as he'd pressed a needle through tight leather. He'd let himself lay guilted apologies of prayers up to each and every one of them as he'd tried to follow a straightened up line.

He didn't know what the hell he was doing.

He didn't know how the hell he was going to do what the boys expected of him when he couldn't find even breathing through putting on a patch.

He wasn't even sure how he'd find any sleep.

Not that he necessarily believed that he was deserving of it any night soon.

Chibs raggedly dumped the half sewn cut onto the table, shutting it away from his shaking hands as he roughed back onto the couch, slumping his hips low as he laid his cheek into the fabric of it. He may not have been able to find sleep, but his exhaustion had found another source for burning tears. And he was just self loathing enough to try and stop them from coming, trying to block the release of anything sorrow tinted from inside him – because something else in him wanted to hold onto it for as long as he could – because then at least he still had a portion of everyone he'd lost in the sweep of a sun's day.

"Ortiz, Gemma Teller, Marks, Barosky, and Wayne Unser. And I don't doubt for a second that there are more of them we don't even know about or can't connect." The thudding sound of a stack of folders on a cleared desk was essentially the same sound that had been shunting down on her lungs for more than a day. "Evidence implicating Teller can be traced to all of them."

It was the sound of some sort of end.

Heavy and deafening after.

"Teller is dead." The other woman's head angled in an airily condescending tone.

"I'm aware of that, District Attorney." She didn't have the patience to sit yet, it wasn't in her to bow down again in such a short distance of time. "What would you like me to do about it? Charge the truck driver as an accomplice?"

"He did all of this on his own? Before driving himself into an eighteen wheeler?" the older of the two tipped a look up over Ally and arched her brow into the slow and calculated questioning of her tone, "How did his crew react to the news? About him? And the mother and Ortiz?"

"I don't know." Ally shook her head down, swallowing the dryness on her throat as her shoulders twitched forward in admittance. "I sent a deputy."

"You didn't deliver this news yourself?" Patterson sharpened over her, leaning into the desk with a stretched hand and a silent implication that she'd missed an opportunity.

"It's been made pretty clear that they don't want to see my face right now. I wasn't going to antagonize them. Not when it comes to what they consider family." Ally finally dipped into the chair that was spaced across from the other woman, her knees bending in a rush as she slacked her shoulders back.

"I was under the impression that you had a fairly strong footing with this crew." The District Attorney's voice was suddenly so knowingly accusatory that she hated the fact she'd leveled them at all.

"Your impression was wrong." She blinked succinctly into the response, feeling her jaw slack as she exhaled and shook her glance away from Patterson's.

"My impression wasn't wrong, Lieutenant. My impression had internal evidence to support it and you know it." There was a shift forward in the other woman's body as she dipped her jaw, the intimations she'd made earlier suddenly plainly played out by the reveal, "You cut ties, didn't you, Althea?"

"Would you rather have a good cop who works straight for the information or a shitty cop who can't tell the difference between the two anymore?"

She'd snapped tight to the point where she couldn't lay a care to respect or rank or bureaucratic bullshit anymore.

She was tired, she was alone, and she was suddenly the favored target of everyone around her. And if they were going to pull on her she wasn't going to question a draw back.

Patterson's eyes thinned slowly. "Too close, Ally."

"I know that." She nodded in a jerked response.

"And how'd it play out for you?"

"Not especially well." A ratcheted breath came off her lungs, a sort of despondent laugh laying off her lips as she shook her glance to the side again, "Considering he was next in line after Teller, I don't doubt that I just gave the new President of Samcro a damn big target for his rage."

"Do you need out?" A visceral sympathy sheathed the older woman's dark features.

"I dunno yet." Ally shrugged into it, not knowing that she'd even considered that there may have actually been one. "Maybe."

Patterson gave her hopefully questioning look, "You don't think it's salvageable?"

"I think that in a day he lost what he considers a son, a mother, a brother and the woman he'd been fucking, District Attorney." The intentionally played despondency had spread into the flattened out gravel in her voice. "No. I don't think it's anywhere near salvageable. Salvageable is when you fight over who does the laundry. He's gonna be completely untethered now. Telford's not… he's emotional. But he's also calculating. He'll have more power than he had before and he's shut me out. Because I defied him."

"Do you need an out?" Patterson repeated softly, blinking into a lightened shrug, "Because I think you routinely underestimate yourself."

Ally shunted a glare into the lip service. "I think you overestimate my ability to not get dead if I keep putting myself in his face."

"Which is why you sent the deputy."

She let out a shuddering exhale, a constriction in her throat that was suddenly making the room overly warm. "Which is why I sent the deputy."

"Carry this out, Althea. You don't need him to make it work." Patterson gave her a squinted glance. "I think it'll reward you in the end if you stay right where you are."

She knew the look she raised toward the other woman was distasteful and disgusted.

She didn't much care as she shifted from the chair and left the room.

"Hey." He lifted his head into the intentional softness of Rat's voice as the younger man leaned his elbows into the bar, catching Telford's glance on a worried smile that never reached the darkness of his eyes.

"Hey." Chibs caught a squeeze against the younger man's hand before drawing his fingers back over the bar, reaching for a pack of cigarettes as he upped his jaw. "Let it out, boy. You'll bust if y'don't."

"Sheriff's office called."

He tried to pin down on the accusatory glance he laid over his glasses at the younger man but he couldn't help the darkness it shaded along his scruffed jaw as he pried out a cigarette and palmed for his lighter. "Aye? And?"

"We can pick up the possessions if we want." Rat's voice caged soft and a bit nervous as he lifted his shoulders back, palms skiffing the table, "I mean, I can go and get 'em if you want. I don't - "

"No." Chibs laid out sharply, flicking open the Zippo and lighting the cigarette to avoid the searching glance that was rising and running over him, letting himself exhale slowly as he shook his head to the side. "I'll go."

"You don't have to, Prez." Rat offered in a soft placation that drew a suddenly sharp blackened glance from the other man, forcing him to lift his hands in slow defense. "You want me to ride with?"

Chibs swallowed as he noted the concern in the other man's long and lean face. "Sure. Yeah."

"Okay." Rat gave him a flushed smile of agreement. "Okay, gimme five."

He'd finally felt the stroke of her eyes as he'd straightened up from the desk, caught into the way she'd been watching him through her office window as he'd signed off on the paperwork that had been laid before him. Chibs let the pen scatter carelessly onto the deputy's desk as he cocked his head into the way their eyes trapped up against each other. He exhaled slowly, unforgivingly still as he watched her turn away from the window with a shake of her head. And the far away turning of her flicked a switch of frustration on him that he'd barely been keeping a choke hold against. His fist grappled into the three evidence bags that had been left for him to take, prizing them up into one hand as he angled past the desk, regardless of the way one of her officers cautioned against it.

She was damn well going to face him in this.

Whether she liked it or not.

And he was feet from her office before he was stalled up in his steps by two deputies who had seen the direction of his movements maybe before he'd even realized where they were leading. Chibs snorted a cocked glance between the two of them.

"Y'think so, boys?" he bit the words out on a manic grin that laced with disdain.

"Guys." Her voice pieced out behind them, soft and soothed and something like what he remembered on his skin. "Relax."

"Really, Jarry?" There was a danger in letting his tone bank so brackishly angry and low and she knew it, even as two deputies blocked up between her and the scruffed darkness of his jaw, "This is how you want it t'be? This is your play? Sending a boy to do your job and locking yourself up in here? I expected better from you."

"It's fine, guys. Really." Her voice stayed soft in the face of his intentional baiting, eyes narrowed dark as she searched over him, letting her glance dip to leather and back up along his face, "The new President obviously has something to say to me."

She felt his height and strength at her back halfway to the office and the very insistent heat of him at once put her muscles into a tight caution and an aching for the warmth that always tended to generate from the center of him. Swallowing was more difficult than meant to be as she stepped into her office and offered the chair, glance riding his shoulders as he slacked into the seat, not at all concerned that he'd left himself open. Her hand went tentative against the door before she slid it closed, fingers wiping off the door before she stepped around him, angling past the desk so that she could lean her hips and hands back against a shelving unit.

He looked blankly despondent and worn in exhausted.

And she hated herself for letting it pull at her sympathy.

"Are the Teller boys safe?" she asked quietly, letting that sympathy bleed into the murmured softness of the question.

"Nothin's gonna reach those boys." He darkened at her on a racked up tone, a jaded surprise lightening his eyes. "They're fine."

"Padilla?" she asked quietly.

"None of your business." Chibs relayed softly, his eyes calmed dark.

"It is my business, actually. And Children's Services eventually." Ally exhaled slowly, her eyes following the furious thinning of his, "I'm assuming Wendy is with them. Which is why I haven't done anything. Jesus, I made it as easy for you as I could, Filip. I sent the Deputy to keep things peaceable. I didn't call you. I had my office call to give us space."

His distrusting snort of derision shook his glance away from her as his jaw firmed into a long twitching line. "You hid. Like a coward."

"I did what you told me to do when you threatened me, President." She snapped back into his accusation as the designation drew his glance sharply back. "And if I hadn't, you would have been just as pissed at me for showing up. You would have raged either way."

His shoulders angled back in the chair as he studied her, hips laying lower into it as his hand dropped down beside himself to grip into plastic.

"Seem t'be missing something." He slowly and methodically thumped all three evidence bags she'd signed off on to her desk, eyes holding hers throughout the movements of his hands. "A hole damn bag of somethings."

"Are you serious?" Ally's voice was bottomed by disbelief and a flush of sudden rage that pinked the pale of her cheeks in a way that he couldn't help but watch, "You… you only want those things to… don't pretend you gave a shit about him. Every one of you let him twist. I don't doubt that he's dead because he tried to help her and don't tell me that you would have stopped Teller if you'd been there. Don't you dare."

The accusations she was threading between them had his skin tingling hot and he couldn't help a bitterness rising in his throat, "Don't pretend to know who I give a shit about or don't, Lieutenant."

"Right." It was as though she'd suddenly remembered something extremely important as her head lifted level, eyes coppered brighter in pained distaste, "Because you are extraordinarily good at lying about who you care about and who you don't."

Guilt tasted like a bitter morning after bile and he swallowed on it once again.

"And you're extraordinarily good at passing judgment on the things you don't fucking understand." He shunted back, feeling his throat go sore in its grating of how wrong she may have been in her estimation.

He hadn't not cared.

He hadn't yet been able to move toward letting her know it.

And she hadn't ever had the damn sense to just be patient and let him find the way.

Chibs lifted his eyes over her movements as she turned and stepped to her desk, her movements angrily stunted and rough as she jerked open one of the lower drawers. His jaw came up into the way she pulled another plastic bag from the drawer and let it drop onto the desk, her hands and body shifting quickly back away from him, keeping the distance she'd earlier placed as she nodded toward it in an almost sort of surrender.

"You give him what he deserves or just let me do it." The surety in her demand graced a surprise on him and he cast a glance over the paleness of her face, "He gave you years of his life and got three bullets in the chest as thanks. Please, Filip?"

He shifted forward slowly and laid his hands against the bag she'd slapped down, fingers spread against it as he exhaled, dipping his head into a slow nod before he lifted a silent glance in her direction, shoulders loosening down, "Keep it then."

Ally blinked a slowly confused acceptance into his sudden softness, swallowing as she looked over the way he pulled his hands back, "Where are your rings?"

"I put them away." He answered succinctly before pressing up from the chair, otherwise ignoring the way she watched his hands, focused on their tightness against gathered plastic bags as he started back toward the door. "Do I need paperwork to have the funeral home come?"

"No." she murmured up behind him, "I cleared everything."

"Then I'll leave Unser to you, yeah?" there was a sudden undivided sadness on his face as he turned back, his fist wrapped on the door handle as he angled a gaunt questioning toward her.

Ally nodded slowly, "Yeah."

"You look tired, Althea." She blinked flush surprise into the sorrowed words he'd given her before tugging open the door and leaving.

He knew she had to have heard the bike. She always always had. And he hadn't even made it to the steps before there were two realities staring him in the face. The first that she had a pistol caged in both hands and leveled just somewhere around the height of his groin, her shoulders squared up to the frame of her open door. The second being that, considering she was pulling an obviously trained shooting stance in very small shorts and a too large t-shirt, he still found it damnable attractive. Because as much as it throttled on his lungs, he still found the very length of her striking. The gun was just a reminder that he found her all the prettier when she was angry. It always gilded her eyes and livened up the whole taut muscle stretch of her.

"Y'wanna shoot me, Althea?" he sent the words up the sidewalk quietly, gloved hands lifted at his sides in a low laying challenge. "It's the only chance you're ever gonna get."

"I'm not the one threatening people because they disagree with me." Her jaw turned a fraction higher even as she kept her aim true toward his crotch. "And I highly doubt it's the only chance. The future is uncertain for men like you."

He hashed up a sardonic laugh but his eyes were a sickened ruddy brown in the sallow light that crossed her sidewalk, his boots bringing him a few steps closer to the jut of her steps, "You're treadin' toward threats yourself now, love."

He was close enough now that he could see the flinched hurt that shattered her face at the lay of his voice on the term.

"Go home, Filip." She told him with a slowly devastated shake of her head, hair tipping her shoulders and hands loosening the double hold she had on the Glock, letting it hang to her side uncaringly. "You have no reason to be here anymore."

The turn of her shoulder leading away before the rest of her had his lungs closing up, oxygen unreachable.

"Don't y'walk away from me." The force in his tone was breaking apart, even as he tried to harden it off, his hand digging a glove fisted palm tightly into the front of her shirt, eyes blood shot red as he looked up into the way light haloed her sadly.

He'd expected the gun to rise and lifted the other palm to stall its movement, head angled to the opposite side.

But she'd stayed brokenly still even as he'd pulled at her, the look on her face so exhaustedly fluxed and torn as she just simply shook her head.

"You wanna kill me, Filip?" she whispered over him with an utterly vacant voice, rolling the Glock on her trigger finger and lifting it like it was a weightless toy between them. "It's the first chance you're gonna get. So fucking take it already."

She shunted the gun flat and so roughly into his unmoving silence that he felt his shoulders lean, his open hand jerking to catch her wrist, pulling her down over him even as she nudged him away. The ride of his boot arch catching the step edge had him driving the front of his body hard into hers as he held them forcefully pried together, eyes searching over her face as she tightened up along him. The intentional distance she kept from his touching had his lungs cracking open a clammy coldness he hadn't realized he was still capable of… He hadn't realized there was still any depth of emotion left. It was humanizing in a way, but only it that it let him break farther down, bottoming through another level into another lowness. And he hated her for it. Maybe much as he near on loved her for it.

"Don't walk away from me." He repeated, too proud to let it lay out as a beg but intentionally gentling the demand of it, letting himself lean into the traced and taunting smell of her as he angled his jaw closer.

"I'm sorry you lost them." The pulling sincerity she whispered to him was enough to force his eyes shut. "I would have waited if I'd known."

He couldn't have her sweetness in this. Not when he hadn't yet come to take it full into his hands and own it.

"Don't."

He couldn't let her press into how much raging hurt still flexed through aching fingers.

"I know you loved them." She admitted as her head lowered over the way he'd dropped his jaw off to the side in avoidance, once again denying her the chance to see any sign of emotion on him.

His fist jerked tightly into her shirt as he closed his palm against the Glock and dragged it to the side raggedly, his head fractioning closer to her shoulder. And the looseness in his one arm seemed to force a farther tightness into the other, drawing their bodies flush as he finally laid his forehead into her shoulder.

"We can't keep doing this." That intentionally forced blankness was washing her tone whitened, "You were right. I won't win. History doesn't lie, remember?"

"I'm changing history." There was a slowly made certainty in the way he lifted his head, eyes glossy in unexpected almost tears. "Tell me y'don't want the money."

"I don't want the money." Ally told him tightly, a guilted grayness layering her features.

His jaw lifted enough that he was too close for her to focus on the sudden regained calmness in his eyes, her head angling slightly down. "Now tell me y'don't want me."

Her head lifted so quickly, so furiously, that he suddenly remembered exactly what it was like to hear her moan against his jaw.

"Go home, Filip." Betrayal was the accusation of her scraped tone. "Go back to your club."

"You tell me, Ally." He nodded as he turned his mouth dragging against hers, not kissing but just letting his lips wipe hers. "Say it again."

"I hate you." She was shattered and swallowing glass shard words.

He'd broken her as close to crying as he'd been.

"I know." The nod he gave her was as gentle as the weight of the words against her mouth before he leaned into a kiss that gave him the taste of the moan he'd been missing. She wasn't as pliant in her return as she'd been before but the stroke of his tongue on hers had her leaning into his pulling hand and he shuddered a breath into the way he pulled his mouth from hers. His forehead rounded down against hers before he breathed himself still.

"I needed t'know." The accent shaded the words slurring as he loosened his fist from her shirt, reaching for her hand and laying the gun back into her palm.

Her fingers closed against it but loosely and he dropped both palms to catch her other hand up as well, shifting quickly as she slackly watched him in a tired vacancy of emotional energy. He dug a gloved palm into his pocket, drawing out the rings she'd questioned him about, closing them into his palm and squeezing against them a moment before laying them into her waiting hand. The sharp exhale she made against the movement had him lifting his head to catch her sad eyes with his.

"Whether I want you or hate you?" she begged the question into the way he leaned his hands off her slowly, letting one boot break him down to the sidewalk, leveling her above him again.

"Both, I suppose." Gloved fingers traced her bared wrist before he turned away from her, his shoulders slung achingly low as he moved back toward his bike.