Author's Note: Okay, so this is the final chapter of this specific fanfic... with the statement that I will probably make a new one that goes along with it as a sequel... I think I'm going to call it "Beyond Expectations"... and I don't know exactly where it is going to go, but some people have given me some ideas. If you have any please PM me or leave it in a review! Thanks to everyone for the awesome response to this fic. I haven't really written much for the Castle Fandom... but I'm realizing that it may be the best one I've ever written for. Enjoy!

The rest of the evening, the team combed through everything that they could, and the Captain kicked the Castles out of the precinct along with Jim Beckett to go home.

"Detective, you need to rest, and I know that will be hard tonight, but you know that we have people working around the clock to help catch the bastard that's doing this. There is nothing more that you can do right now. Everyone is under surveillance, and you have uniforms waiting at the loft for you as well."

Kate takes a hesitant look around to the rest of her team, who was nodding in her direction. Again that battled raged on inside her. She knew that she needed to go home and rest because that was what was best for her and the baby… but Castle was out there somewhere.

"You'll call if anything turns up?"

"We will. We don't want you here any earlier than ten o'clock tomorrow morning." Gates says, starting to shoo the group out of the bullpen and into the custody of some others from the precinct.

When they get home she feels herself deflate a bit. She had kept it together all day at the precinct and the only thing that she could think of doing right now was crawling into herself and crying. She had absolutely no control of what was happening.

"I think I'm going to try to rest… see if I can fall asleep." She says to everyone else, "Alexis, can you show my dad the guest room?"

"yeah, I can do that, Kate."

When she gets into the bedroom, she thinks about last night, sleeping in the comfort of his arms as they have been for the past week or so. For a good twenty minutes she thinks about just that… her sleeping arrangements with her now husband. She wasn't a cuddly person by any means, but with him, she just felt safe. He would open up his arms to her and let his palm rest on the swell of her stomach and all she could do was smile.

Tonight was different though, she thought as she changed into some pajamas and looked at the empty bed. It was then that she let the tears fall, for the first time since the hospital that morning.

Alexis hears it first, and when Kate's father stands to go comfort his daughter, Alexis steps in, "No, let me…"

"Kate?" she hears from the now open doorway.

Kate sits up almost immediately, wiping at the tears and trying to act like there was nothing amiss. "Alexis, what's wrong?"

"Don't." Alexis says, sitting down on the edge of the bed next to Kate. "Don't act like you're okay just for me."

"You know he's probably the only one besides my dad that I ever let see me cry… like really cry. I hate it. I hate that I can be so vulnerable."

"It's okay, Kate. You have every right to be pissed off and scared and… just everything. I know I am." Alexis says, and Kate has to remind herself that the young girl isn't even out of high school yet.

Kate lets it all go then, crying into the shoulder of her stepdaughter as the younger Castle does the same. "Lex, I don't know if I can do all this without him… he… he brought me back, and now I don't know what to do."

"Please don't go. Don't leave… I just got you, so you can't leave." Alexis says then, making sure that Kate knew what she was feeling in that moment.

That is the only way that the two find any rest that evening, sleeping in the same bed with each other. At some point during the evening, Kate had started to hold on to Alexis, one hand caressing her head as Alexis rested on Kate's chest. That was how they were found in the morning by Jim and Martha, finally asleep.

"Her mother is not the best of role models… left when Alexis was very young. I've tried to be there for her in that way, but it wasn't until your daughter came along that I realized how much Alexis needed that." Martha says, pointing toward the closed bedroom door.

"I wish that Johanna could be around to see her as a mother. She would be so proud of the woman that she's become." Jim adds with a smile.

"So what do you think?" Martha finally asks.

"I hope, for my daughter's sake and your granddaughter's sake that she finds him. If she doesn't, I don't think Katie can pull through this."

Martha thinks for a moment, allowing her mind to drift off to when she realized that her son was in love with Katherine Beckett. "You know, I don't think that the two of them ever really realized how in love with each other they were… he would always pass it off. I called him out on it a few times, telling him that for all the other best sellers he wrote, he didn't need to research every day by shadowing a main character. He admitted that it wasn't about the books, but I don't think that he realized how much he loved her then."

"She would talk about him in a way that made it seem like she was annoyed with the shadow, but it never fooled me. He gave me my daughter back…. It was the carefree Katie that I had missed all these years, and I owe him so much for that. Then, when I actually met him the first time, I could see it in his eyes… how much he cared for her."

"I didn't think they made it like that anymore… love."

They're snapped out of their conversation by Martha's phone ringing.

"Hello?"

"Ms. Rodgers? This is detective Esposito. I didn't want to call Beckett's phone in case she was sleeping, but we got another lead with the patients from the doctor's office."

"Do you want me to wake Katherine?"

"I'm already awake." Kate says, walking into the kitchen with Alexis trailing behind her sleepily.

"Ryan?" she says, grabbing the phone from her mother-in-law.

"It's Espo… we have the doctor's office on the line saying that a man called in to cancel someone's appointment for tomorrow. He left a message though, so we can listen to it."

"Have you been able to get ahold of that patient?"

"We haven't tried yet because we didn't want to spook him if he's there. We're sending someone over to her place first. Can you come down and listen to the recording?"

"We'll be right down." She says, hanging up the phone.

"Show me the patient file and get the recording ready." She says, walking off the elevator and onto the homicide floor at the precinct.

"Go find him, Momma Kate." Alexis smiles hesitantly, whispering under her breath, watching a woman that she has come to admire walk out and do what she thought was the hardest possible thing that anyone would be able to do.

"Angela Bell, 29 years old, single… lives in an apartment on the west side. We've been watching the building, but we haven't seen anything that was out of the ordinary."

"When did the call come into the doctor's office?"

"They found it while they were listening this morning, but the timestamp says that it was 6:00AM this morning." Espo says, cuing up the recording.

"Hi, this is Matt Bell… my sister Angela had an appointment for 12:00 today, but she's feeling sick, so she can't make it in. Can you please call back to reschedule?"

"It's him…. I'm 95% sure that it is." Kate says, straightening up. "Do we know anything about her?"

"She does have a brother named Matt, so we are trying to get ahold of him right now, to see if he really did make the call. Other than that, what do you want us to do?"

"The building… does it have a doorman?"

"Yes."

"Call the doorman and ask if there has been anything or anyone coming in or out that was not normal. If there was a single person that came in there that he didn't know, I want to know about it. Ask him to call in whoever was there last night too. Remember that Tyson liked to employ disguises to help him get where he needed to be. He could very well be dressed as anyone."

Two minutes later, Ryan walks over with a smile on his face, "Brother didn't make the call… we're going to get him."

"So you go." Kate says, looking to the two men that she trusts just as much as Castle.

"We've got this Beckett. We're going to get him, and we'll get Castle back for you and baby Castle in there… after all, my Godson needs to know how crazy his dad is… cause I don't think we could do it justice."

"YOUR godson?" Espo says back to him.

"Oh, it is on."

"Just bring him back to me." She says, tears welling up in her eyes. "I don't want a call unless you have him with you…"

The two nod, grabbing a few other officers that had been helping on the case to go to the scene.

"Why haven't they called yet?" Alexis says first, when an hour had passed and they hadn't heard anything.

"I told them to wait until they had Castle with them… I didn't care about anything else. They have to assess the situation before they can move into anything. We've got the other woman to think about as well, we can't just rush a scene." Kate says, rubbing circles on the younger woman's back as she's trying to calm her own nerves.

She hears the clapping first, and then the unmistakable sound of his voice calling to her. "Kate!"

She hears the voice, and turns her head towards it, seeing him for the first time since that morning and shooting up out of her spot and running towards him.

"Rick! Oh God!", she launches herself at him and he groans loudly at the sharp pain from her embrace.

"What happened, oh God, are you okay?" she asks, frantically looking over his body.

"We're pretty sure that he has a broken collar bone, but he wouldn't let us take him to the hospital until he came to see you. Other than that, they don't think that there was anything else wrong." Ryan says, smiling between the pair.

"You're okay though?"

"I'm going to be fine." He says.

Everyone appears all at once to welcome him home, but Kate can't help but be curious about how everything happened at the apartment.

"Tyson?" she asks the guys.

"Dead." Espo says, simply.

"How?"

She sees the nervous glance between Ryan and Esposito, and their looks to Castle. When he catches their eyes, his flit quickly to Kate's and then she sees him fighting to avoid her gaze.

"Castle, what did you do?"

"He didn't do anything. He was tied to a chair in the living room when we came in and Tyson had a gun on him. The girl was found tied up in the bedroom, but she was fine." Ryan tries to supply what happened at the scene.

She doesn't take her eyes off Castle then, knowing that the guys were trying to cover something that he did as something insignificant, "What happened?"

"He held the gun to my head when the boys came in…I had enough leverage with my feet that I knew I could tip myself forward and give the guys a clean shot." Castle says with a shrug of his shoulder, causing him to wince at the gesture.

"And…"

"I tipped forward and they shot."

"Castle…" she lets out with a harsh breath.

"Richard!" Martha says from her spot near her son, hearing the whole thing transpire.

"I couldn't see it ending any other way. He was either going to shoot me or shoot one of them. He was so nervous this time… he was shaky. I knew that he wouldn't be able to react fast enough to pull the trigger on me before they pulled it on him."

"You…. You need to get to the hospital… get your shoulder X-rayed." She says, choosing to ignore what he told her and choosing to focus on what she could do now which was lead him through the bull pen on the way to the hospital. She wasn't ready to feel all those feelings at once… wasn't ready to accept the real fact that she was that close to losing him.

In that moment though, she had another realization… she had done the same thing… risking herself and the baby to find him. Turning quickly she places a hand on his cheek before leaning in to place one of the sweetest kisses on his lips.

"Ahem." Martha clears her throat, "Maybe while you're there, you can get yourself checked out too, Katherine… you haven't had a blood pressure check since we left here last night."

"What!?" Castle says, turning wide eyes back towards her and glancing toward her stomach.

"I may have had a moment when I realized you were missing, and I may have left the hospital against medical advice, and your mother may have hired a doctor to monitor me throughout the day." Kate says, simply, trying to shrug the whole thing off in the same manner he did just a few moments ago.

When he catches her eye, there is a mutual understanding at the same moment, causing matching grins to spread across both of their faces.

"Oh please do tell me what you find so amusing about all this Richard?" Martha asks, clearly not impressed with the two of them.

"That's why she didn't yell at me about the chair… don't you see mother? We take these calculated risks together, always. I knew in my heart that Espo and Ryan were going to drop Tyson before anything could happen to me." Castle says, looking at his mother, but grasping Kate's hand at the same time.

"Just like I knew that me working this case was what was best for me and the baby, regardless of what the doctors said. I would have been more of a wreck if they made me stay there." Kate says, smiling back at Castle.

"So we go to the hospital and get checked out, and on my way there, you're going to tell me everything that happened." He says, pulling her to the elevator.

"And you're going to tell me everything that happened too."

"Are you two kiddi—Okay, you know what… the two of you are in for it you know?" Martha says, now with Alexis smiling beside her relieved that her father was back with them again.

"Alexis is the perfect daughter… she got all of Richard's good qualities… now this baby… the product of the two of you… Ha… You are going to be on your toes for the rest of your lives if this was any indication."

Castle turns to his wife with a smile then, "You in?"

Returning the smile, with a twinkle of love in her eye, "Always."