Selling drugs is a craft. Kidnapping children is a fine art. Ransom is pure lunacy.

That's what I thought about when I was sitting in a van in the driveway of a beautiful home in Alexandria, Virginia. Lunacy. If it weren't for the locked ankle bracelet on my leg that recorded my movement, the fact that I was not allowed to hold onto my fake ID, and the fact that I had absolutely nothing and was in the US with no hope of a contact that could help me, I would have bailed on Embry. I would have taken off in that van.

There were rules my family had followed so we wouldn't get caught. The street kids were easy to lure, easy to take. They were bold in their unfortunate independence, walking confidently through alleys, hanging out in parts of towns where people tended to look the other way. The "chosen" children each year were a challenge, and we each had our own way of going about it. But there were rules we never broke. Rule number one: Look for children from middle class families, families without a lot of connections or resources. Rule number two: Never go into a home to take a child. You could get blindsided by someone in the home you didn't expect. People had cameras. People had alarms. You could leave an errant print or DNA behind even with the best preparation.

Embry broke all those rules last night.

He and Marietta are both loose cannons; Marietta compelled by revenge and the need for money, Embry compelled to follow anyone who gives him an order, and an underlying desire to avenge Robert - Bobby's - death. And I'm stuck here in the middle between their inexperience and insanity. I've only found one possible positive end in this for me, which is to get Marietta to trust me enough to remove the ankle bracelet and allow me to roam a little more freely. Then I'll run and never look back.

After Marietta and Embry helped me escape from the courthouse - which I considered lunacy as well and we all just got lucky it worked - Marietta drove us to the very outskirts of the UK. She and Embry both had guns. We didn't stop to eat, I wasn't permitted to use the restroom. We were nearly in Scotland before she pulled the car off the freeway and winded her way through quiet country roads. It was dark when we arrived at the isolated home, and I no longer had my bearings. Perhaps we had crossed into Scotland by that point. There was the house that was a shadow against the sky, and nothing else for what seemed like miles.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"My home," she said simply.

She unlocked the door and I followed her into the house, Embry flanking my back. I tracked her as she turned on lights and walked to the kitchen. The home was lovely, well-decorated, and looked like something straight out of the English countryside. Marietta toed the lock on the wheel of a rolling shelving unit and pushed it aside. She took out her keys and began the task of unlocking two dead bolts on a thick wooden door behind the unit.

"Come," she ordered me as the door swung open.

I followed her down a flight of stairs and into a cellar. Though it was diminutive in size compared to the underground properties Adrian lived and used that I'd spent ample time in in the past, it reminded me enough of those years that my stomach fluttered nervously.

There was an open space and three doors in front of me. Marietta patted the first one, "My play room. I'll show it to you later," she said with a snake-like grin.

She skipped the second door, saying nothing.

She unlocked the third door and opened it slowly. I could see from where I stood the well-decorated, bright space. There was a young girl in there, blonde hair, pale face, maybe sixteen years old. She had a collar around her neck, but was dressed comfortably besides that.

She looked up at Marietta and then bowed her head.

"How did it go?" Marietta asked, almost kindly.

"Just fine ma'am, but it was hard for him to be down here for two days. He did okay though. We made up games."

Marietta patted the blond hair gently. "You've done well, Holly."

Holy smiled slightly and then bowed her head, clasping her hands together in her lap.

I watched Marietta's body shift and I stepped closer to the doorway. This room was nice, comfortable. I could see a bathroom and a small kitchen area, a couch and a nice bed, no windows. And a crib that Marietta was leaning over. She picked up a small body and turned to face me. He was maybe two years old, with red hair and green eyes like Marietta's, but everything else about his face was Adrian Stancu.

"Adrian Junior," Marietta said softly while kissing the boy's sleepy cheek. "I'll bring you up to your room, my beautiful boy," she said softly. If my assessment of his age was correct, she was either very pregnant or had just given birth to him when the family went down.

She didn't look back at Holly, and I followed her out of the room. She handed me the keys and nodded at the door. I locked it again. It was my first clue as to how completely removed she was from reality. She obviously loved her little boy, as much as a woman like her could love another, but she'd left him here in a locked cellar for two days. If something had gone wrong at that courthouse in London, little Adrian and Holly could have both eventually died down there.

Once Adrian was settled in his crib upstairs, I watched Marietta close his door.

"Hungry?" she asked me.

I nodded. I was both starving and nauseous, but I needed to eat and keep my head clear.

"We just need to take care of one thing," she said as she led me back down the stairs.

Embry was there waiting in the kitchen, and he raised his gun on me. I put my hands up passively. They didn't break me out of prison to kill me. They wanted me for a very specific purpose I hadn't figured out at the time. So I raised my hands and stared at Embry as Marietta grabbed a device from the kitchen table and bent to put my ankle brace on. She locked it and pocketed the key.

"Just until we get to know each other again," she whispered as she patted my back. She kissed my cheek and then continued in a soothing voice, letting me know that if I strayed too far away from where I should be, the ankle bracelet could be remote detonated. "You won't get far on one leg, bleeding out, Patrick," she said as she licked my ear.

Fantastic. I think I'd prefer prison.

It was later that night that I found out the plan - a plan they wanted to execute immediately, before concrete DNA evidence came back on the body in that courthouse bathroom and my face was plastered all over the news.

Marietta took me to her playroom and strapped me on a table. I'd experienced both the giving and receiving end of this particular type of play before, and I'd enjoyed both. But it had been over a decade. I hadn't so much as caught the scent of a woman in all of that time, and I let the sensations of a naked Marietta take over. She was marking me, trying to make me hers, lashing me and then trying to sooth me. I wouldn't let it work, but I faked it well and did enjoy her while it lasted.

And then she took me into the second locked room in the basement. Her naked, flushed body stood in front of a computer on a desk. There was a table on the opposite wall that had a small arsenal on it - a few guns, a couple of bombs that looked similar, but larger, than the one that we used in the courthouse, and a stack of cash - not much, but some.

There were also pictures on the wall. Pictures of an elderly man and a woman, a small sailboat, a large house, a small cabin. A little boy, and a biracial baby girl. And her parents, a black man and a caucasian woman - Emily Prentiss; Emily Morgan now, I learned. I recognized her from the newspaper I'd seen two years before. And there was still something about her face.

While Marietta told me about who Derek Morgan was and who the little boy was and then went on to detail her idiotic plan that was nothing more than a suicide mission in my mind, something clicked in my head. I looked away from Marietta's crazed eyes and looked back at Emily's face.

She had blond hair back then, and she wore far more makeup and far less clothing. But I was almost positive Emily was a woman I met in a club and invited to partake in a private club and room with me on a few occasions. Her name was Katarina and she had a Russian accent. She was also a lovely piece of ass, if my memory served me correctly. She must have been undercover back then. As Marietta talked about the details of exactly how the family went down, great fuck or not, Emily was likely lethal as hell.

This is all going to go to shit, I thought as I stared at her picture on the wall.

And go to shit it did.

Marietta wanted me because I was a pilot, and commercial aircraft would not do for her plan. She didn't have much money left; Adrian paid her a handsome allowance every month, but what she'd saved was running low after two years of nothing coming in. She had some artillery. She had a plane, a plane that Adrian had used when he visited her that none of the family knew about. Embry had spent several months surveilling the Morgan family, so she had the pictures. And she wanted those two children. She wanted to emotionally destroy Emily and Derek Morgan by making them suffer for some time while their children were gone. She wanted money from them, and when she had that, she'd return the two very broken children back to their parents, and we'd be long gone.

It was more likely we'd all be dead long before we got any money, but I said nothing. I nodded at her. "I can fly. It's been awhile, but you never forget." I said this optimistically and enthusiastically. I needed her to trust me.

Which was how I ended up with Embry in a van at the Morgan house less than forty-eight hours later. Marietta stayed in the UK. Embry had a gun. Embry had the detonation device on my ankle bracelet. Embry was dumb as fuck.

He was going around back and going into the home and he told me to wait in the car. "The old man will have gone back to his cabin. The old lady is probably asleep on the couch. I'll tie her up and get the kids. We can't risk you leaving anything of yourself behind."

I clutched the steering wheel and nodded. I was transport only - the pilot who would get these two kids far away from the United States before anyone knew to look beyond the roads.

What the hell ever, I thought as I sat in that van. I figured I had a ten percent chance of getting out of this alive, possibly with some money and the means to start over with a new identity. I had a ninety percent chance of dying very soon.

And then it all happened very quickly. I heard the faint sound of sirens from the open van window. A flood light came on in the front yard, and about twenty yards from the van stood the little boy and the baby.

I got out of the van. My instinct was to tell the little boy to run like hell. Apparently prison can change a man. Before I could utter a word, Leon was already running like hell. Before I could do anything, the front door of the house opened and Embry came barrelling out with the old lady - Fran - unconscious in his arms. The sirens were getting closer.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I asked.

"There was another alarm panel upstairs!" he said breathlessly.

Fucking idiot. Fucking amateurs.

He shoved the old lady in the back of the van and got in the passenger seat. "Drive," he said.

"Marietta's going to kill us both," I said as I casually pulled the van out of the driveway and drove in the opposite direction of the sound of sirens.

"They'll pay for the old lady, too," Embry said, but he looked frightened and his voice shook. I glanced over as he pulled over his ski mask and took note of the bright red, bleeding scratches on his neck.

I bumped my chance of living through all of this down to about one percent, and even that was optimistic.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"Here," Clyde said to me before I could get on the jet.

I glanced up to the open doorway on the plane where Declan and Louise were waiting for me. "What's this?" I asked him, taking an envelope from his hands.

"A couple of additional identities and some cash. With our jobs, it's best not to leave ourselves unprepared."

I smirked at him and reached into my purse, pulling out my own brown envelope.

He grinned. "I've taught you well. Keep them all. You can never be too safe. Call me if you ever need anything else."

I remember nodding at him, still reeling from my experience with Doyle. I didn't hug him, even though I wanted to in the moment. It seemed weak, and I had not time for weakness. I took the stairs up to the plane and didn't look back.

I wish I could call you right now, Clyde.

I'm an absolute mess. I'm sure my eyes are puffy and my makeup smeared. I'm sitting on the floor of our den, picking my nails for the first time in over two years. There's a faint scent of urine on me, because when I got Leon in my arms out on the boat, he latched his wet legs around my waist and his arms around my neck and wouldn't let me go.

I stare at the grass stains on my knees and the dirt caked on my fingers and the paper and brown envelope in my lap.

Hotch is here at the house, overseeing evidence collection. Reid is at the hospital with my father, in case he wakes up during the night. The rest of the team, JJ, Derek and our children are out Rossi's house.

When Leon first managed to speak on the boat, with his head on my shoulder and his lips near my neck, he said he recognized the voice of the man in our house from when he was with Adrian Stancu. Derek called Hotch immediately, and Hotch went toe to toe with the Alexandria Sheriff's Department, telling them the FBI would be taking this case. Hotch, who is usually so diplomatic with the local police was having no bullshit. He talked to the group of police officers at our house and stated very clearly that if any of this ended up in the paper, he'd personally have their badges.

We wouldn't be putting Fran's picture out there just yet until we knew what we were dealing with. That was our starting point, but over the course of the night, we had a pretty good idea of what we were dealing with, and none of it was good.

I received most of the news via phone calls and texts while I was waiting at the hospital for my father to have an MRI, wishing I could split myself in two, wanting to be there for him, and be with Derek, Leon and Rory at the same time.

I made some middle-of-the night calls to the Director of Interpol and to Marcus Klaus. Apparently the explosion at that courthouse in London two days prior had resulted in massive carnage of three people - A guard, an attorney and the man everyone presumed was Patrick. However, they'd not found any of Patrick's DNA.

I knew they weren't going to. That was confirmed a few minutes later when I sent Derek a picture of Patrick, and an exhausted Leon confirmed that he thought that was in the man in the driveway at our house.

I looked at Reid in that hospital waiting room, Reid who is a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge about past cases. I asked him how many children Adrian and his family auctioned off that were never recovered.

"Twelve," he said. "But only four would be in their twenties right now, possibly old enough to pull this off."

"We never found the other man who held Derek. There was Robert and Peter Daniels, and another younger man in his twenties."

Reid nodded.

"There can't be that many involved in this," I mumbled to myself, wishing I had Clyde right there in front of me to bounce this around with. "Three to five, at most. Amateurs. They didn't expect my father to be in the house still. They'd been watching us for quite awhile. Why would they want Patrick? It was a huge risk helping him escape. What did he have to offer to the group?"

I watched Reid close his eyes for a second, reaching into the recesses of his brilliant memory. He'd read every word of the case reports, every document recovered from Adrian's computers, every profile on every "family" member.

Reid opened his eyes and looked at me. "He had a pilot's license."

Anger and fear surged inside me. They churned and percolated immediately. Only once before had I ever felt like that, when Doyle was threatening the lives of the BAU.

I wanted to be an agent again, with a gun. No, that wasn't quite right. I wanted a gun and resources, but I didn't want to be an agent. I didn't want to have to follow any rules at all. In that moment, I wanted to find Fran and put an end to this once and for all, get our lives back to what they were. I was enraged that someone would do this to us. I was enraged that there was a crime scene unit going through our happy home with a fine-tooth comb.

I knew they wouldn't find a damn thing. Fran and my father did put up a fight, trying to prevent the man from getting up the stairs, a fight that bought Leon enough time to escape with Rory, for which there isn't enough gratitude in my heart or in the world. My father did have blood on his hands, and they were bagged and sampled. I think there will be a DNA match to other cases in the system, specifically two little boys who were raped and murdered in New York a little over two years ago, but it won't give us an identity. That's all they'll find.

And as I sat there in the hospital after it struck midnight and it was no longer my birthday, I knew without a doubt that Fran Morgan was no longer in the United States, and probably had been in the air not too long after the BAU showed up at our house.

When I got word that my father looked like he would be okay, that he had a concussion, but was in no serious danger, I left Reid at the hospital with him. I wanted to get to Derek and the kids, but I needed to make a pit stop first.

Hotch said nothing to me as I walked into my own home, avoiding the crime scene technicians. I felt his eyes on my back as I went into our den and closed the door. I first went to a box at the top of the closet. It was a box of random things I'd never found a place for in our home - my high school diploma, some commendations from the FBI and Interpol, and one small envelope.

I grabbed the envelope and then knelt on the floor and opened the safe. I sifted through our legal documentation that was in there until I found the single piece of paper with Clyde's handwriting; a list of names he'd left me concealed in the binding of a book. One man's name was starred, and the country code for his number told me he was in London.

I now contemplate both the list and the envelope.

Yes, Clyde, you taught me well.

Inside that envelope is not one of the ID's from my Interpol days; it's one of the ID's JJ gave me in France, along with about five thousand dollars. It was what was on me when I flew back to DC back in 2011, and I should have handed it over to Hotch, but I didn't. And he never asked about it. I tucked it away, because in my line of work, you should never leave yourself unprepared.

I glance around the den and my eyes land on drawings on the cork board hanging on the wall, pictures Leon's drawn. I take those in, and then my eyes shift to Rory's exersaucer, something she rarely wants to be in anymore since she can walk now. If I close my eyes, I can see her there, bouncing and giggling while I check my email. My computer is still on and the screen saver is scrolling through pictures. There's a few from the previous weekend at my birthday party with the team, and one floats by of the four of us, grinning around the birthday cake Fran made me, and then the image floats away on the screen.

I blink back the tears in my eyes. I can't do this. I can't be hard and soft at the same time. I don't know how - I never have. I couldn't be an agent, FBI or Interpol, and have a relationship. And I couldn't have a relationship and eventually a family and be an agent. My heart and mind don't work that way, and I can't focus on the softer parts of me that have been my existence for the past two years and do what I need to do now.

I want my children to grow up with their father, and hopefully me. I don't want us to have fake names in a different country away from our friends and family. And I know we will never be able to pull ourselves together and recreate anything normal or good again if Fran dies. I also know that the odds of us getting her back alive without intervention is slim to none. They wanted to emotionally wreck us. They wanted the kids, and I can see a scenario where they returned them in exchange for money, damaged but alive. But I can't wrap my mind around the idea that they'd return Fran.

I promised. I promised both Clyde, and later Derek, that I would never go undercover again. But none of us ever considered this contingency. Clyde only thought of me, and Derek thought of him and me when those promises were made. We didn't consider a family. We didn't consider a life like this that needed to be put back together once and for all. It's a promise that I can justify breaking in these circumstances.

A tap on the door startles me from my thoughts. Hotch opens the door and looks at me sympathetically as I sit on the floor of the den. "We're done here. Let's go Emily. You need to get to Rossi's and we can talk then."

I nod and stand. "Marcus and Interpol is sending Garcia all video footage available from the courthouse in London two days ago. I've also asked Marcus to get his hands on surveillance from the two times Adrian's been in the hospital since he was arrested. He never had any visitors in prison."

Hotch nods, his lips forming a thin line. He looks at the paper and envelope in my hand, and I take a deep breath. I turn away from him and grab one of Derek's small gym bags that we store in the closet. I snag Clyde's tactical jacket off a hanger and stuff it in the bag, followed by the paper and the envelope.

I sling the bag over my shoulder and turn back around. "You're going to have to do something for me. Not yet, but soon. I need some more information first, and I need to talk to Derek. But when the time comes, tomorrow or the next day, I'm going to need you to back me up. I'm going to need your promise that you'll let nothing happen to Derek and the kids. And I'm going to need you all to let me go."