A/N: This is the last story in my trilogy. The first two stories were 'In the confines of darkness' and 'down by the river'. You can read those if you want, they'll give you a pretty good understanding of what is going on with these guys now. All three are a crossover with LOSVU, however, in this story the SVU characters are in it solely for friendship purposes, not for a case. Also, since I ventured into AU terrority, I decided to take a lot of liberities with this one.

Rating: T (M for selected chapters)

Warnings: Ah, same as always: murder, violence, language, adult situations, and adults consenting to doing adult things, and adults consenting to doing stupid things...lol.

Disclaimer: I do not own anything associated with Law & Order: Criminal Intent. I'm not Dick Wolf. However, I do own what I've created.

Summary: "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." - 'The Lord's Prayer'

Enjoy!

It was getting too hard to run as his shoes kept slipping on the snow. Every few steps his legs would snag a fallen branch and he would tumble into a tree or to the frozen ground. He face felt numb as his chest burned from the freezing air that he desperately inhaled as he raced against time to find the road, to find a house, to find anything or anyone that could help him. The visibility was getting denser making it hard for him to see the path that would guild him out of the dark woods that surrounded him.

He had to keep moving, keep going, or else he wasn't going to make it out of there alive. Pounding one foot in front of the other, he forced his heavy tingling legs to not slow down even though that was what his body wanted him to do. It wanted him to give up. He was feeling physically sick and drained because the gnawing fury of pain that was in his abdomen was excruciating.

Keep moving. Keep moving. You will not die. Not here, not now. Not like this. He listened to the words in his head as he stumbled to a stop at the foot of a incline. The hill was steep and from what he could barely see there was no way around it. He had to go up. Taking the death grip off his stomach, he felt the warm stickiness on his hand before he grabbed onto a tree and pulled himself up as he started to climb.

His legs kept sliding out from under him and he would slip to the cold snow as he tried to reach the top of the hill. It took some time as he pulled his tired, sluggish body up the hill using one tree after the other for support. The top of the incline was finally in sight and a small smile grew on his face as he spotted a guardrail. That meant there was a road up ahead. A road meant cars and with cars came help. And right then he needed all the help he could get because he didn't have anything. Not even a cell phone. Everything he had was stripped from him right before a gun was shoved against his abdomen just before the trigger was squeezed.

He had to keep moving; now his shoes slipped on ice covered pavement as he journeyed down the long dark road in search of help. There was no time to rest, or to breathe as he looked down at the blood that had spread over the entire front of his blue dress shirt. Blood was slowly seeping out of the bullet hole; his right hand was pressed firmly against it trying to stop the flow. Gritting his teeth at the pain he closed his eyes as he felt the ice cold wind shake his whole body, even his bones.

He didn't want to die out there. He couldn't hear a thing, see a thing, or smell a thing. There wasn't anything, only trees, snow, and the animals. The animals were around even though he couldn't see them; they were there and they wanted to devour him, tear him apart.

He pushed a little harder into the bullet wound as his breathing slowed. How did it get this fucked up? He was still in shock at what happened. That he had once again put everything else above and beyond his own safety. In the moment it took him to pull his gun to actually shoot somebody, he knew he had made his ultimate and maybe his final, fatal, move. Robert Goren was not the kind of cop to pull his gun and do something stupid. Yet, tonight, he had to do exactly that.

And it wasn't the first time.

Things had gone from bad to worse in just short month. Things that he still couldn't wrap his head around. There was a time when he felt safe, when he felt centered, and things were just fine. Then one day, it turned wrong. Everything changed. It was hard for him to adapt to change. So, instead of adapting, he got angry. His anger had damaged his relationship with his partner, his lover, his best friend, all of which were the same person: Alex. He had pushed her and made her leave him. Made her unwilling to forgive him.

And he didn't know how to deal with that. He didn't know how to deal with Alex, with the abduction, both his and hers, or with his work. He had found himself lost.

Lost.

It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling for him. He had felt that many times in his life, most of which in his much younger years. However, not once did he ever feel as uncertain and afraid as he had been a month ago. It was then that he left everything and everyone behind by accepting the offer he had been given.

Suddenly, he was feeling very tired of moving as his legs buckled, sending him stumbling into the guardrail. He doubled over as the pain ignited a fire within his gut. As his knees hit the black colored snow at the edge of the road, he knew that it had all come down to this.

A month ago he wondered if he had made the right decision. Now, staring down the rural deserted road in the middle of Staten Island, and with no lights or sounds of life anywhere around him, he knew the answer to that. Even if it ended like this, with him dying right there, it was the right decision.

After this, hopefully, he would finally get redemption.

TBC…