"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment." -Dorothy Parker
5:30 AM, April 27 2004
Chicago, IL
The apartment was empty when Hotch and Reid arrived. It was a large, spacious loft, decorated in bright, sunny colors. Now, like the cheerful studio in D.C., it was left abandoned.
"She's gone. Looks like someone packed in a hurry," said Reid breathlessly after a quick search of the apartment.
"We need to check the club she works at. It'll be empty now."
The drive was only five minutes, but it felt like an eternity to Hotch. He felt an unexplained sense of dread in his stomach. All he wanted was for this whole gruesome case to end, to go home to his wife and his bed and to sleep for days.
His phone rang as he drove, and he answered with his usual laconic "Hotchner."
"You haven't found her yet, have you?" Gideon sounded uncharacteristically agitated.
"No. We're headed to the Casanova Club now."
"Hotch, we were wrong."
"What?"
"I was completely wrong. She's not the unsub, but she is in terrible danger. Listen... "
Hotch and Reid listened, alarm rising in Hotch's chest. We've got to find her before they do.
The Casanova Club did indeed appear to be deserted when they arrived. Hotch and Reid approached the blue door cautiously. They could hear nothing from the other side of the door.
Gun in hand, Hotch knocked, steeling himself. But there was no preparing for what he saw when the door was wrenched open.
Helena trembled and gasped, collapsed on her knees in the ashes and dust that covered the barroom floor. Her legs had given out five minutes ago and since then she had simply been kneeling, staring at the revolver lying in her blood-soaked hands in numb horror. All she felt was a dull, throbbing pain near her left eye.
How had this gone so wrong?
She gazed around the room unseeingly, her eyes moving over the two bodies pushed up against the wall of the room.
Despite her profession, she had never killed before. Her eyes fixed on the head of Katerina, still set like a gruesome ornament upon the bar. Curiously, the sight of it, which had paralyzed her hours earlier, now braced her shattered nerves. It reminded her of the one thing she could still hope to salvage: Vasil and his wife were still waiting for her call, and by God she would get them out if it killed her.
Shakily, she dropped the gun and forced herself to her feet, kicking off her one remaining heel. The other lay soaked in the pool of blood next to the overturned table at which she and Igor had sat four hours ago. The table on which he had-
She cut herself off sternly. Pull it together, girl. No time to sulk over things you can't change.
She approached the payphone at the far corner of her room and cursed as she realized that the dress she was wearing had absolutely no place to keep change. Glancing around, her eyes landed on the corpses.
Robbing the body of your rapist. New low, Blythe.
Gingerly, she reached into Igor's jacket pocket, averting her eyes from his contorted face and from the gaping hole in his neck.
There was nothing else you could do. It was you or him.
She fished a out a few quarters. Somehow, it disturbed her profoundly to think of the dead mobster carrying something as pedestrian as spare change. In death, he appeared more human to her than he ever had while he was living. Now that he posed no threat, the act of killing him corroded her humanity in retrospect.
She crossed back quickly to the phone, the silk train of her dress dragging through the pool of blood next to the hated table. Before her rampant conscience could paralyze her again, she picked up the receiver and began to dial. She was interrupted, however, by a rapping at the door.
Fuck. That was all her mind had to offer. Fuck fuck fuck.
Igor had told her that he had had closed the bar indefinitely. That no one would come until he told them to. Until it was too late for her.
Maybe he had invited some of his preferred thugs to share her? No, that wasn't his style. He had cut Grisha to death just for asking for a turn.
She had been lucky, really, that Igor had wasted so much time on the foolhardy lieutenant. That even as he destroyed her, he craved more power over her. She didn't feel lucky, though. She just wondered whether the blood could ever be washed entirely out of her skin.
Retrieving the gun, she approached the door slowly and pulled it open abruptly, holding the dainty little weapon in front of her like a lantern.
The face she saw was nothing she had ever expected. The voice she heard said words that filled her with so much surprise and relief that she could not move or speak.
"Helena, my name is Aaron Hotchner with the FBI. Lay down your weapon. You're safe."
Hotch stared at the blood-soaked creature that stood before him, looking like the ghost of a murdered jazz singer. He took in every excruciating detail of the woman before him in a split second. The youthful beauty of the girl he had met was marred by an ugly black bruise on her left cheekbone and blood splattered liberally over her shoulders and down her slinky green dress. She was barefoot, her hair a tangled mess of copper matted with red, and there were angry red bruises in the shape of enormous hands on her arms and neck. The sight of her inspired in him a surge of mingled pity for her and rage against her attacker, which he suppressed with difficulty. Neither would be of any use to her right then.
"Helena," he said, in his gentlest and most reassuring voice, "my name is Aaron Hotchner with the FBI." She stared up at him uncomprehendingly, a .22 caliber revolver held loosely in one small but miraculously steady hand. "Lay down your weapon. You're safe."
Her eyes stayed on his face, exploring it as though she had never seen another human being before.
"I remember you," she whispered, letting her arm fall limply by her side and the gun slip from her listless fingers. "I know your face."
Her knees gave out and he caught her as she crumpled, dropping his own gun as his right arm encircled her tiny waist. Everything about her was so small. How could they send such a fragile thing into that den of monsters?
"You're safe," he murmured again against her hair, which smelt of blood and orange blossoms. Pressing her forehead to his chest, she took great, shuddering breaths in his arms as though resurfacing from deep, cold water. "Are you alright?" he asked her after a moment, pushing her away slightly but keeping both hands around her waist to hold the girl up.
"Oh." She looked down to examine herself. She smiled weakly. "Yeah. Not my blood." She appeared suddenly reinvigorated.
"I need you to take me to a police station and bring in Vasil Antonovich Kashirin and his wife, Nina Guryevna. They live not far away and they'll be killed if we don't move fast." Her voice was suddenly forceful and assertive.
"Slow down. Our most pressing goal is to get you to a hospital." He still held her by her waist, but now it was to restrain her. Reid stepped forward from behind Hotch, making his way carefully into the the club's foyer and then the dark room beyond as Helena wrenched herself from Hotch's grip and frowned at him.
"I told you, the blood's not mine. Call a medic to patch me up at the precinct, but my injuries are superficial." When he didn't move, she sighed in frustration. "We need to get Vasil out before they figure out what happened here. It's only a matter of time before they realize who the moles were."
"Hotch?" Reid's voice as he called out from the depths of the Casanova was sharp and urgent. Hotch glanced down at the obstinate spy before him.
"Come on," she said. "You should see this."
As he entered, the smell of blood hit Hotchner like a blow to the head. It wiped out his senses for a moment. When he managed to look around, the scene before him froze the blood in his veins.
The mutilated head and appendages of an elderly woman were lain out as if for display on the bar. In the corner, the bodies of two men were slumped in pools of blood. One of the corpses, the younger one, looked as though he had been tortured for hours before he had finally been allowed to die. The other, a bearded behemoth, had suffered only one wound, which appeared to have punched bluntly through his carotid.
"The one with the beard is my work. The other two were his own."
Helena's voice, clear and cold, cut through the stench and the horror. She was surveying the destruction as though evaluating a mediocre art show, but Hotch sensed that her detached veneer was spread thin over a deep well of anguish.
"That woman?" She pointed at the severed head. "The one who's now serving as a decorative bust? She was one of my informants. He tortured her mercilessly before he finally beheaded her and hacked up the body. That's what will happen to Vasil and especially Nina if we don't recover them."
Hotch nodded, casting his eyes again over the carnage. This time, he noticed something new. One small, glittering woman's shoe. The long, severe point of the stiletto heel was soaked completely in blood. He looked up at her.
"You used your shoe?"
She nodded expressionlessly.
"Sometimes it pays to dress to the occasion."
Bound hand and foot to her chair, Helena had watched, helpless, as Igor finished off Grisha with a quick jab of his knife between the boy's ribs. The shestyorka had shuddered one more time, cried out, and fallen back, finally, mercifully dead.
Then the man had turned slowly to look at his prize. Helena had dropped her head and let her tears flow freely over her cheeks. Broken. His hands had roamed over her already-violated body as he cut her ties and dragged her back to the table by her throat, setting her on it and reaching once again for his belt buckle. She had slumped sideways like a rag doll, one hand dangling down near her feet.
"Poor kitten," he had purred as he unzipped his trousers. "A woman is nothing after she has been used up by a strong man. If you would just give up the names of the other agents, this could all be over."
It was then that she had sprung up, back from the dead, her once-hated shoe held in her hand like a dagger. Before he could register what was going on, she had plunged the heel of the shoe into his neck. He had gasped and stumbled back, gaping at her uncomprehendingly. He had swung an arm out wildly, hitting her face squarely. Stars and had erupted before her eyes, sending her reeling and temporarily blinding her. When she could finally see again, Igor had died with a last, rattling breath in a pool of his blood.
Sitting in the back of Agent Hotchner's black SUV, a bag of ice over the bruised left side of her face, Helena leaned back and closed her eyes, breathing in and out as deeply as she could.
The relief that she had felt upon the arrival of the two agents had long since evaporated, leaving her with only dread and restless energy.
Hotchner had taken charge immediately, summoning a medic and calling the precinct, directing them to locate her informant. At her behest, they had recovered her-or rather, Vivian Grant's-overflowing jewelry box. At some point the previous night, Helena had remembered with a sickening clarity exactly where she had seen Alexei's ruby necklace before.
Then, guiding her by a gentle hand at her elbow, Aaron Hotchner had led her to the car, his gentle brown eyes fixed on her face, murmuring words of encouragement to her as they walked.
She reflected to herself that she had never liked anyone's voice quite as much as she liked his. It was low, gentle, and musical, with a current of authority running through it. Black velvet draped over steel. He had let his emaciated young partner drive the car and sat instead in the back seat with her, allowing her to lie back against his chest and wrap her fingers around his. He stroked her hair absently as they drove.
"Safe."
Still, even her aquiline protector could not drive away her urgent need to do something; to wade into the shambles of her mission and salvage that one, crucial fragment of information.
"Did you recover the documents?" she asked. If she could not forget, then she would act. She opened her eyes and tilted back her head to see a quizzical look on Hotchner's face.
"The… documents?" Her heart sank. Had they not arrived?
"Yeah, the ones I sent to Swann yesterday evening. Have they been analyzed yet? Do they have what we need?"
"I'm sorry, Helena, I haven't been brought up to speed on the status of your mission. You can call Agent Swann from the precinct."
Helena sat up suddenly, staring at him.
"You're not in Swann's division?" she demanded, the question coming out in a rather more accusatory tone than she meant it to. He shook his head apologetically.
"No, we're with the BAU. We were led to you through a case and we only found out that you were undercover an hour ago."
"Oh." She looked put out and slumped back onto him, wincing at the pain in her bruised ribs. "What does the Russian mob have to do with serial killers?"
"It wasn't the Russian mob that we were looking at," he replied reluctantly. "It was you." She looked ready to launch into a full interrogation, but he was not yet quite ready to tell the wartorn girl that lay in his arms about Samson's death. He held her gingerly, as though she were an injured bird in the palms of his hands. Nor did he want to ask her exactly what had happened to her in the six hours that she had spent with Igor Tikhonov in that room of horrors. The long rips in her once-sumptuous dress suggested a story that he did not want to accept. "We'll talk about it at the precinct, alright? Just rest for now." Apparently she was just tired enough to submit, because she nestled back against him and closed her eyes.
"Oh alright. If you insist." A small smile stole over her mouth for the first time since she had sat down at that damned table with Igor. It seemed so remote now. A lifetime ago. For the moment, Hotchner's strong arms kept the restlessness at bay. She realized suddenly how bone-tired she really was, just as her brain began shutting down all conscious thought. Her eyes fluttered, and she descended into blissful oblivion suddenly and without a fight.
He carried her into the offices of the BAU, careful not to wake her and provoke another flurry of activity.
It was an unexpected blessing that the department had two couches. He laid her down on one of them and smoothed her bloody curls out of her face. With her face in repose, he saw for the first time a hint of fresh-faced Helena Benedict showing through.
"Keep an eye on her, would you?" he asked a nearby female officer, who nodded and smiled at him.
"I'll take good care of her. You can stop hovering."
Hotch left her there, partly so that he didn't wake her with his phone calls, partly because when he stayed by her side, he found himself distracted and useless.
First, he called the medic and postponed her checkup. He had checked for concussion at the club and everything else could wait until she woke.
Next, he called Gideon and apprised him of the situation.
"Reid and I will stay in Chicago until this is resolved. We can work on the case remotely, right?"
"Of course. Do what you have to. We've uncovered a few things about the unsub."
"Could you call Reid? I need to get in touch with Helena's handler."
"Aaron," Gideon said, pulling him back. He sounded concerned.
"Yeah?"
"Be careful. Don't get too invested in this girl."
"We're involved now, Jason. I'll keep working our case, but I have to see this through."
"I understand that, just keep your wits about you. Handling spies is slippery business."
"I will. Thanks."
Finally, he called SSA Andi Swann. He had worked with her once on a trafficking case, but not since she had promoted to head her own unit.
"Swann."
"Agent Swann, this is Aaron Hotchner with the BAU."
"Hotch, hey. Listen, I really can't talk right now-"
"We've got Helena." Silence on the other end of the line. "We picked her up from the Casanova club half an hour ago. She'd been found out by one of Volkoff's brigadiers, Igor Tikhonov and had to fight her way out. We've got people recovering her informant now."
"Oh thank god. She sent us a huge info dump yesterday and told us that she'd get in touch when she could, but that she needed radio silence until further notice. I was starting to fear the worst."
"She's asleep now. But she wanted to know whether all the data she sent has been analyzed."
"Not yet. Our analysts are crawling all over it. It's a lot to get through. You know that she sent the entirety of the financial records of Volkoff's primary business, the Empire, for the last three years? As well as her own notes from the beginning of her mission and the present? I wish I had half the recruiting skill of the CIA."
"They've got good people. We can collude later on how to poach some of them for the FBI."
"You work on Blythe. I'd kill to get her on my unit." Hotch grinned. She had a point. He wondered idly what it would take to tempt Helena Blythe into the BAU.
"I'll call you when she wakes up. Keep me posted."
"Thanks, Hotch. Take care of her."
"Will do."
When Hotch found Reid, the young man had managed to commandeer several evidence boards and plastered them with details of the D.C. killer.
"Oh there you are. Gideon has some fascinating insights on our unsub."
"So I heard. Can you fill me in?"
"So it looks like we're seeking two people, a dominant and a submissive. The submissive has medical knowledge but probably very little physical strength. The dominant exhibits a lot of rage against the victims, so there's something about them that we're missing."
"Do you think it could be faith-based?"
The two men jumped and spun around. Helena stood behind them, eyes flitting between the victim's photos.
"You shouldn't be awake," Hotch told her reflexively, glancing back at the board. In a rare moment of sensitivity, Reid had not put up Samson Blythe's picture. She waved a dismissive hand.
"Nightmares. Tell me about the case."
"You really shouldn't be working this one."
"Help me out here, man. I have to sit around until the evidence is analyzed? I'll go bug nuts." Hotch relented. Her version of "bug nuts" may very well be incredibly frightening. She already looked like something out of Sweeney Todd.
"Why do you say it's faith-based?"
"Well, the one on the far left I've met. Matthew O'Malley. Nice guy, but increasingly conflicted. My husband-Samson-went to church with him." She looked deeply sad staring at the young man's photo, but kept her tone airy.
"Went?"
"They were both in the process of leaving their faith. It can be pretty traumatic, especially with a congregation that strict. They were full-on Saint Bartholomew's Day Catholic." Reid chuckled and Hotch shot him a questioning look. That was all it took to shoot the good doctor into a didactic frenzy.
"The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre was an out-of-control slaughter of Protestants in Paris launched by an assassination attempt at the wedding of the Catholic Marguerite-Margot-of Valois to the huguenot, Henri of Navarre-"
"Got it. Thanks."
"That one in the middle is toying with a silver crucifix. Probably also struggling with his faith. The one on the right? Well… he just looks Irish and miserable. I'm sure you boys know enough about James Joyce to see what that means."
"That's a valuable piece of victimology."
"How were they killed?"
"Beaten, castrated, then sexually assaulted and left to bleed out," Reid answered before Hotch could elbow his protruding ribs.
"Jesus, that's horrible. Poor Matt." She looked so horrified that Hotch had to fight the urge to wrap a protective arm around her shoulders. "That's a hell of a lot of anger. Homophobia, d'you think? I know for a fact that Matt was considering coming out."
"How?"
"Well… let's just say that I had inside information. Last I checked, he hadn't told anyone except his partner, though."
"Helena, was he involved with your husband?" Hotch asked gently. She tore her eyes away from the photo to stare at him in wonder.
"How the fuck did you figure that one out?"
Why, why, why does it have to be my job to tell her?
"Helena…" he trailed off, lost for words. She seemed to begin to understand what he was struggling to say.
"These… these aren't the only victims, are they?" she asked in a trembling voice.
"No, they aren't," he agreed, helpless. He moved forward automatically, but she stumbled back, her delicate frame shaking violently.
"That's why you were looking into me. Because Samson was killed."
"Yeah."
"Did he die like them? Was he tortured like that?" Her voice was so quiet that it was barely audible over the buzz of the station.
"I'm afraid so. I'm so sorry, Helena." For the second time that day, he rushed to catch her as her knees buckled.
"Oh God," she whispered, "oh God why wasn't I there? Why did I leave him there to be slaughtered?"
"There was nothing you could have done. If you had been there, they would have killed you too." She just shook her head, wringing her hands distractedly.
"He begged me to stay. He told me that he couldn't face his family without me. I told him I would stay with him and then I just… took off while he was at work. Begged for this fucking assignment. I didn't even say goodbye. Not even a goddamned note."
"Helena, we need to ask you some questions," said Reid, poking his head out from behind Hotch. "They might help us find the people responsible."
"Reid," hissed Hotch. But Helena seemed to respond better to this than to reassurance. Her tremors stopped and she focused her tear-filled eyes on the young doctor.
"Yeah. Yeah, what do you need to know?"
Reid was already dialing Garcia. He handed the phone to the young widow, who took it with a suddenly steady hand.
"By the way, I probably do have a big, hairy alibi for any night you care to name in the last year," she joked feebly. "I don't think he'd respond very well if you asked him about it, though."
"You've reached Garcia, the Great and Powerful. You in the market for a heart, Tin Man?"
"Sorry, wonderful wizard, just a moderately wicked witch here. Helena Blythe. I hear you have some questions for me."
"Oh golly! It's been a real roller coaster with you, babe. First you were just a widow, then you were a murder suspect, now a latter-day Mata Hari-"
"Garcia." Hotch snapped through the phone.
"Wow, that was super insensitive. Sorry."
"That's fine, darling. Hotchner here doesn't understand humor as a coping mechanism. What do you need to know?"
"First, do you have a password for the desktop computer at your old apartment? Your husband had hella security measures on that thing." At this, Blythe smiled warmly, as though at a pleasant memory.
"He was a cybersecurity contractor. Always ran circles around me in our CS classes in college. Honestly, he's probably changed it. If he has, he's likely to have generated it using a Markov chain based on some randomly selected translation of a Sophocles play, so you're fuck. Last I knew, though, it was 34223606171996."
"Woah. Is that totally random?"
"No, I made him choose something I had a shot at remembering. My measurements followed by the day we met."
"34-22-36? Damn, girl. Way to go." Helena chuckled. Anguish didn't seem to stick to her naturally.
"Thanks. You sound pretty luscious yourself. Anything else?"
"Yeah, do you know anything about a site called "The Apostate's Sanctuary?"
"I think I've heard of it. Sort of an online support community for people thinking of leaving the Catholic Church. It can be rough. Some people lose everyone in their lives."
"Looks like Sam was pretty active on it. Do these usernames mean anything to you? Fiddlesticks42 and AugustineAwakened?"
"The first one sounds like it might belong to Matt. Big Douglas Adams fan, and he tended to avoid swearing by using substitutes like 'fiddlesticks.' No clue about the other one, except that Saint Augustine was a famous convert to Christianity."
"Thanks babe. I'll call Reid if I need anything else from you."
"Good luck."
Helena sat down at the table and frowned.
"So what else do we know?"
"Do you really want to work on this?"
"Do you really expect me to pass up a chance to catch the bastard who killed my best friend?" She paused. "Although I wouldn't object to a shower first," she admitted upon further reflection, sniffing her hair and wincing.
Author's note: I recognize that the story so far has been quite chaotic, leaving little chance for the characters to breathe and interact like normal human beings. I'm hoping, though, that Helena's personality is starting to come through a bit: a survivor in the heat of the moment, but melancholic and maybe a little suicidal when she lets herself sulk. I'd love feedback on anything about the story, but the characterization especially.
