**A/N: I hope that this will become something of a Season 4 Project for myself, with two more "episodes" in the works (in my head, anyway) so I've tried to write as closely to how an episode might be structured as possible, cinematically and thematically. The title is modified from a chapter in A Study in Scarlet, in keeping with the episode titles given in the BBC series. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my betas-MizJoely and luckbringer-for their help in getting this story ready! Totally dedicate this to you both. Enjoy! ~ Lynzee**

December 28, 2014
Bethnal Green, East End
Late Afternoon

It wasn't the threat she'd been expecting, not the one he'd prepared her for the last time she saw him. But Molly knew. The moment the television in the morgue flickered and she saw his scheming face frozen on the screen, his taunting words echoing against the stainless steel equipment and cold tile floor, Molly knew.

Jim's words—words he'd spoken before, recited at the beginning of every phone call, the ones he'd greet her with when he met her at the morgue or at the door to her flat—were meant for her.

She was far more calm about it than she expected she would be. In all the times she had imagined this very scenario—when she'd rehearsed it as she'd been instructed, going over the steps in her head in the dead of night as she was so wont to do—she always imagined herself in a dizzying panic, probably crying, most definitely sweating. Now, however, she was plagued by…nothing. Unruffled, she tidied the lab and sent the email that had been sitting in her Drafts folder for nearly three years, since the day she'd been made to write it and save it for this very moment, the one they both hoped would never come.

Then she replaced her lab coat with her trench coat, grabbed her purse and keys and mobile, switched off the lights, and proceeded to the leave St. Bart's hospital.

Banishing the visage of her sudden tormentor from her mind, his instructions filled her head instead. Do not deviate from your routine, he'd told her. Do everything exactly as you would do. So rather than flagging down a Hackney and heading for Meena's—as she might have been tempted to do otherwise—she proceeded to walk the one-third of a mile down Giltspur, up Newgate, and then around again towards Paternoster Square and St. Paul's Underground station.

Keenly aware the entire time that a large man with a shaved head was following her.

The long walk afforded her many opportunities to leave a trail, and as she meandered deliberately down streets crowded with post-holiday shoppers and vacationing Americans, their heavy Nikons bumping against their vast rotundity, she left clues that she knew he would find. Because even though she knew he was leaving on one of his brother's missions—she glanced at her watch then and realized that, at that very moment, he was likely already in the air—she figured he would have certainly heard about the jammed TV signal, and he would abort his mission. At the very least, he would have received her email. It didn't matter that they'd fought—stupidly—over his sobriety. It didn't matter that that he hadn't brought a case to her in months, not since that autumn day in her lab.

She knew he would come after her. In time, she knew he would.

Now was the time to be smart. She had to lose her tail, if she could; if she couldn't, she had to stay sharp, focused, and safe. Attracting attention or alerting the authorities would only tip them off, and they likely wouldn't be so easily deterred, anyway. If you're being followed, don't do anything suspicious. Lose them in a crowd if you can. But proceed directly home.

She had agreed to this. She had to be ready.

Once in the station she debated, briefly, about whether to take the Hammersmith & City from Barbican to Whitechapel or the Central from St. Paul's to Bethnal Green, and once again his words haunted her: Wherever possible, get home as fast as you can. H&C ran every ten minutes; Central was running every three. She hadn't lost her mystery man, but was confident that she may be able to in the throngs that crowded the Tube at this time of day during the busy Christmas season.

Running on adrenaline, the three stops to Bethnal Green left her no time to think of her escape plan once she arrived. She simply followed the crowd up from the trains level to Cambridge Heath Road, hoping it might have been enough, and for a while she thought she had succeeded. Still, she dropped her breadcrumbs, little messages that she knew he would pick up on.

Near the corner of Braintree and Malcolm Place, she bent to tie her shoelace and tore a section of her floral shirt to affix to the top of a construction marker—'CAUTION' it read, which seemed an obvious enough sign—and noticed a white Toyota crawling up the street nearly a block behind her. She took the railway underpass, blending into a gaggle of jogging moms with baby strollers, and quickened her pace as she turned onto her street, leaving her final clue as she began knocking furiously and obviously on the door to her landlord's suite on the main level of the multi-unit townhouse.

The man, known only to his sub-letters as Mr. Delacroix, answered the door in a huff. "Miss Hooper, I'll kindly remind you once again that, unless your flat is in immediate danger of burning our building to the ground, one knock is sufficient."

She smiled, as openly as she could, while noticing that the Toyota had stopped, half a block up.

Surround yourself with people. As long as there are witnesses, you'll be buying time.

She put a hand on his shoulder. "Mr. Delacroix, I'm…I'm going on holiday for a bit. I was hoping to ask you for a favour?"

"You won't be asking me to feed your cat again will you?" he asked. "Because the last time you did—"

"No, nothing like that," she laughed, keeping one eye on the Toyota. The bald man was in the passenger seat; the driver, she noted, had dark hair and a stubbled chin. She committed their faces to memory.

"Would you come up?" she asked. "I'm in a bit of a rush."

Mr. Delacroix grumbled but Molly knew he would not deny her such a simple request.

"I can give you five minutes, love," he said. "But I've got a roast cooking and my show starts soon…"

Five minutes…Molly wondered if it was enough time to get help. But who would she call? Ringing DI Lestrade would mean a cavalcade of police cars, and the men they'd be looking for would have been tipped off by their associates and made their getaway long before Lestrade's squad could even make it halfway across the distance between the Yard and her front door. She could call John, but what could he do, realistically, against an enemy like this? The one person she knew could help was at least several miles away on a military airbase, making his way back into London; at worst, he was in the air over the Channel, heading for Continental parts unknown.

He wants me, not you. You'll be nothing but bait in a trap he sets to get to me, he'd told her. But I can use you to get to him, if you do what I tell you…

Molly realized, all too clearly and with a finality that sank her stomach into the soles of her shoes, that it was vitally important that she allow herself to be taken. The thought brought stinging tears to her eyes and cold waves of fear to her veins. But she steeled herself. For him—this man, the one who told her once that he needed her—this was what she had to do.

Mr. Delacroix locked the door to his own flat and trudged up the stairs behind Molly, who had already reached her front door and was whirling through her flat like a dervish, putting her plan into motion.

"Miss Hooper, is everything all right?"

"Fine!" she said, as she pulled out volume after volume from her bookshelf, flipping through pages and highlighting as she went before replacing the books on the shelf.

"This is rather odd—"

"I have a friend who will be coming by to look after my flat and Toby," she said as she scoured the page of another book before returning it to its spot, glancing at her watch as she did so. "He's—er…working on his…doctoral thesis, and…I told him he could borrow any books he needs as well, so…"

She stopped, briefly, as a wave of panic finally did hit her. What if this wasn't enough? What if he didn't know? What if he couldn't pick up the trail she'd left? Her heart sank as she looked around the room, wondering if she should leave a note instead, something more direct. Clues, Molly, are all I will need, he'd told her. If you can, leave me clues. But nothing obvious…

"Miss Hooper?"

The moment passed. She smiled. "Please tell him I said it's okay to peruse my book collection. Can you remember that?"

"Yes."

"No, I mean, exactly as I said it. It's okay to peruse my book collection."

"Right, I—"

"Eugene," she said, using his first name for the first time in all the years she'd known him. He snapped to attention, and she smiled to soften her commandment. "Please."

He nodded, swiping his tongue over dried lips before speaking. "It's okay to peruse your book collection."

She smiled again and hurried to replace the last book just as the doorbell rang. Her heart thudded in her chest and a surge of panic and bile rose in her throat, but she let out a giddy laugh. "Goodness! Here already! Well, I should go let them in. Thank you. Mr. Delacroix, you've been most helpful."

She ushered him down the stairs and into his flat before he'd had a chance to utter a coherent reply, and once his door was shut, she opened the front one.

Sure enough, the men on the threshold were the same ones from the Toyota. The first man, the bald one, grinned at her.

"Been expectin' us I suppose?" he growled, careful not to be overheard.

She swallowed and nodded, careful not to betray an ounce of the fear that coursed through her as she stood, dwarfed, in the shadows their bodies threw into the ground floor landing.

The second man shuffled his stance behind the first. "You didn't go an' do nothin' stupid, now, love?"

Molly shook her head. "No. 'Course not."

"Good," he continued. "Then you'll be ready to come with us?"

She paused, wondering if there was anything else she could do—anything else she could leave—that would aid in her eventual recovery. She had been right in her descriptions of the men and their car. What more could she do?

Then she heard it—a big clue, spoken in the harried and frustrated whisper of the first man to the second, about London traffic at this time of day and how long it would take to get to their destination—and it dawned on her. She almost smiled.

"Well?" the man asked her, leaning menacingly on the doorframe, his thick greasy fingers gripping the whitewashed jamb.

"Please," she begged, injecting the tiniest amount of controlled fear into her voice. "Please, let me feed my cat. I don't know if anyone will be around for days, and I can't bear the thought of him going hungry…"

The men wavered. For a moment, she wondered if it had done the trick.

"Do you have pets?" she asked. "A moggy of your own? Please. He's just a wee thing, still practically a kitten. Doesn't hunt too well. He'll die if I don't leave out some extra food and—"

The first man wavered but it was the second man who relented. "Fine. But 'urry it up."

She smiled, hoping they could see the tears in her eyes—she hadn't planned that, but spun it to her advantage—and turned to rush up the stairs again and into her flat.

Ignoring Toby's plea for attention, she dashed around the kitchen, dumping three extra large heaps of kibble into Toby's bowl and emptying a can of wet food into a dish from the cupboard. But this wasn't about feeding Toby; not entirely. As the striped feline began digging into what must have looked like a veritable feast laid out before him, Molly tore the label off the can in her hand and set the tin on top of the pile beside the sink. Grabbing a pen from the telephone nook in the short hall between her kitchen and her front parlour, she scribbled one word on the paper—one word, enough to inform but not enough to look like a clue—and folded it up into a neat square, carefully but firmly tucking it into the gap behind the metal buckle of Toby's collar.

She scratched the cat between the ears as he gorged himself. "Don't go tearing around too much," she whispered to him as real tears began to roll down her cheeks. "You'll knock that paper loose and ruin our chance at a reunion."

He purred under her touch and she stroked his fur twice more before swiping angrily at her face and turning on her apartment.

"It's all here," she whispered to the empty room. "All of it, if you know where to look."

I will find you, he'd told her.

She sniffled. "You'd better…"

She left down the stairs and rejoined the men on the landing, who took up position, one on either side of her, as they ushered her to the Toyota. She got into the backseat with the bald man.

As they sped off down the road, he roughly tied her hands together behind her back with a length of coarse braided rope that she knew would chafe and cause marks if she tried to loosen them; they rounded the street corners at dizzying speed until they pulled into a shaded lane between a darkened park and a tall highrise. She was pulled out of the car by the elbow and made to stand at the back of a van.

They were switching vehicles.

She controlled her panic at the thought that her clue about the Toyota might lead nowhere. But there was nothing she could do about that now. As the bald man held her by the elbow, the dark-haired man opened the cargo doors to the van, revealing the dapper and menacing form of Jim Moriarty leering back at her.

"Good golly Miss Molly," he grinned. "Did you miss me?"

Before she'd had a chance to utter a reply, she'd been hauled up into the van. She offered little resistance until the dark-haired man tied her ankles and the bald man secured a long piece of fabric between her teeth, tying it tightly behind her head, effectively silencing her.

Jim's eyes were on her as the two hauled her now-struggling body up and into a large trunk, its lid propped open, at the front of the hold. Her own eyes, for her part, blazed at him as he lowered the lid of the trunk and locked it into place. She heard the engine turn over, and was dimly aware of movement as the van presumably drove away from the alley.

In the close dark of the steamer trunk, Molly breathed deep and even, fighting tears as she clung desperately to the faith she had in the consulting detective she knew would save the day.