Almost fifteen years. Fifteen years and she hadn't been forcible taken off a case. With the exception of Matthews murder, but that was completely different circumstances and Hotch hadn't removed her, he had removed the entire team. Not that she and Rossi had listened, but Hotch's intention was there. Anger washed over her in waves as she paced her hotel room, running her fingers through her hair, putting her hands on her hips, muttering and cursing under her breath. She had done something reckless, she knew, but Hotch was way out of line. Reprimanding her like that in front of the team, pulling her from the case after she had actually gotten their suspect to talk. That wasn't a professional decision, the irrational part of her mind was saying, that was personal. He'd been waiting for a reason to reprimand her all day, an opportunity to take out his frustrations on her for her actions of that morning.
"Dammit." Emily cursed, kicking at the bedpost out of frustration. As it turned out, the thing was made of solid wood so the only result of that action was a sore foot. Limping over to her bed, Emily lay down on the mattress which - this could have been her mind making it up - she could have sworn wasn't half as comfortable as the bed she had shared with her husband the night before.
Ex-husband. That irritating little voice in her head, which sounded disturbingly like her mother, reminded her.
Not yet. The, occasionally even more annoying voice, of hope whispered from somewhere in the recesses of her mind. Emily scoffed, aloud. She was definitely divorcing him after today, after he had made such a show of her. She had never felt so humiliated. Well...that was a bit of a stretch, but she'd never felt so humiliated by one of her team members. Least of all by Hotch.
Her thoughts refused to stop whirring around in her head, so she got up. If Hotch had taken her off the case, that meant she had no reason not to let loose a little bit. Resigning herself to the rebellious act of going to get a double vodka-soda from the bar, she grabbed her handbag and stalked from the room.
Everyone she passed on her way down to the bar regarded her with a wary expression. No doubt she looked terrifying. She wasn't in any mood to act pleasant, so there was that; the fact that she was stalking around so heavily that her heeled boots announced her presence about five minutes before she turned each corner didn't help. Nor, she assumed, did the pursed lips and the fact that her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. She had no use for them, but she didn't want anybody to meet her eyes and think it acceptable to make small talk. Ordinarily, Emily was a thoroughly pleasant and polite person, but now she wasn't in the mood for pleasantries. She wanted to be left alone to her anger and her hateful thoughts of Hotch.
OK, maybe not hateful. But they were most certainly not pleasant thoughts. Unless you counted the memories from last night that crept in every now and then when she felt a muscle twinge or nudged the tender bruises his lips had left on her body. They had a rule about hickeys and exposed skin. Basically, anything anybody else would see was a major no-go area. It had been that way since they'd first started dating and Emily had come in with several on her neck and chest; Morgan hadn't let it go for months. He'd had an absolute field day teasing her, and the others had had their fair share of fun with it, too. To be fair, she probably shouldn't have worn the top she did at the time. But that was wholly besides the point.
"Vodka soda, please." Emily said to the barman as she sat down. "Make it a double. On the rocks."
He set the drink down in front of her and held out his hand for the case. With a sickly sweet smile, Emily produced her FBI badge. It was a cheap trick, but there were few places that would deny a free drink to a federal agent. She was in the kind of mood where, for the rest of the day, she required things to go her way or she was going to snap. Big time.
"Somebody got kicked to the curb, huh?"
Exactly what she needed right now. With a roll of her brown eyes, she shoved her sunglasses on top of her head and swiveled her stool around.
"You're not done here, yet?" Her greeting was somewhat less polite than usual, but she couldn't have cared less in that moment. Rawsons' expression told her that he wasn't expecting that response from her and there was a tiny, pathetic pang of smugness inside of her.
"Unfortunately not. But believe me, I'm so ready to be done here." He said, in his classic British accent that she had somehow come to associate solely with Mick Rawson. Emily turned back to the bar with a wry smile. She didn't want this conversation right now. She didn't want any conversation right now.
But, the voice of her mother said in her head, If you're going to have a conversation with anybody, let it be with somebody who gets Aaron's blood boiling with jealousy.
That much was painfully and embarrassingly true. Emily had, unfairly and on infrequent occasions, used Rawson as a tool to force Aaron to get a little creative in the bedroom. That wasn't an insult to Aaron at all. Things there were more than satisfactory, and, once upon a time, they had been mind blowing - fireworks, volcanic eruptions. After ten years of a relationship, however, occasionally he needed a little kick start to ride the way she wanted and when Emily was feeling like she didn't particularly want to be treated like a china doll, she would throw in a little comment about how she sometimes wished she'd let Rawson ravish her. Hotch knew her game; he knew that she knew that had been jealous all those years ago, with the Brit flirting with her, and he knew that she knew that saying those things would rile him up. It wasn't quite hate sex, but it was hot enough to pass as it. And Hotch played it just as dirty. To this day, Emily couldn't stand the thought of him with Beth.
Rawson sat down at the bar next to her. Her vodka remained untouched as it would for the rest of the evening; if they broke the case, Emily knew Hotch would call her in and she wouldn't risk clouding her mind, just in case that did happen. "Scotch, on the rocks, please."
"What are you doing here, then?" He looked at her like he was a little concerned about why she was asking that and she waved a hand, clarifying. "Here in the hotel, not here in California."
"Oh," He smirked. "I thought I was gonna have to cut you off then." He nodded at the untouched drink and she put a smile on her face. Fake as it was, he didn't seem to notice. "I kind of pissed Cooper off. Made some comments I probably shouldn't have, but we're all just frustrated that we haven't gotten a break in this case. We have nothing."
"What makes you guys think there's a trafficking ring? In California, of all places?"
"We broke a case down south and found a freezer full of body parts. Those that we could find DNA matches for all came from Cali. Whole mix of people in there, too. Victimology was all over the show. Wha-Why are you looking at me like that?"
Emily was staring at him, wide-eyed. When she'd seen him, she'd made a comment or had a thought, at least, about how odd it was that the FBI had two teams working in California, both in Mariposa. How unlucky it was. She hadn't even considered that their cases could be related - as far as she was aware, none of them had. How could they have been so dim?
"Come on," She said, grabbing her bag from the bar. "We've got to go."
He glanced at his untouched beverage before letting out a groan and getting to his feet, following her out of the hotel. "Emily, you really think our case is your case?"
"We found five mutilated bodies. All Californians. All missing limbs." She told him, as she climbed into the SUV she had hijacked from the station. "I can't believe they didn't put this together at Quantico - who is working case files at that place?"
She ran into the room where the rest of the team was talking, out of breath and sweating slightly. They all looked at her with shocked expressions.
"Emily?" Hotch was confused at first, then concerned. "What are you doing here? Is it Ava?"
She was shaking her head no as Rawson came into the room behind her. Hotch's face lost it's concern and went back to stoic. He raised his eyebrows, unimpressed and questioning.
"They're here working a trafficking case." Emily explained to the team. "They broke a trafficking case down in Arizona and found a freezer full of body parts." The team exchanged looks of shock, but she wasn't done. "They ran DNA tests on the limbs and guess what? All Californians, all unsolved missing persons cases and no ring leader or murder site. We don't have two cases here, Hotch. This is one big case, and it's bigger than just a gang. It's a trafficking ring and they're trafficking human body parts.
"Where is it?" Morgan demanded as he and Rossi walked into the interrogation room where Caspar Finch sat. His pale face was a lot more impassive than his nephews; his expression was one of cool smugness. He was, they could all tell, ready to lawyer-up at any time, and he knew he could do it. His eyebrows did go up, however, at Morgans question, as if to say, 'Where's what?'. "The warehouse, you smug son of a bitch. The freezer. You gotta be keeping the body parts here in Mariposa somewhere before you move them across state lines now where are they?"
"You're going down, regardless of whether you tell us this or not," Rossi explained. "We have proof that it was you and your nephew who abducted Claudia Lewis; not only was it your vehicle but we've been able to match both of your heights to two of the abductors that night. It might not be concrete, but it's enough for us and it's enough for a judge. You're guilty, you bastard, now tell us where the rest of your buddies are so you can at least take them down with you."
At that moment, Garcia's voice came through loud and clear into everyone's headsets.
"We don't need anything from him, guys. It took me a while but I pulled up road camera footage and tracked the van from the convenience store as far as it would go. I lost them off the Golden Chain highway. There's only one turn off between the cameras where I lost them; it heads down towards a vineyard which, I discovered after hacking into some locked up files, belongs to Caspar Finch's late father-in-law."
They were already on their way out of the room and heading towards the car park, stopping only to grab their vests and extra ammo.
They piled into the vehicles and, automatically, Emily slipped into Hotch's passenger seat. He looked at her, as JJ, Rossi and Reid climbed into the back of their SUV, and she nodded as he started the car.
"I know, I disobeyed a direct order. I'm sorry but I really think that-"
"Thank you." He cut across her, unceremoniously. She looked at him in surprise. "Thank you, for disobeying me."
He turned his eyes to the road ahead as he pulled out of the car park and began the drive. The others in the back were quiet. Emily nodded at him and finally dragged her eyes away from his silhouette; his eyes were planted firmly on the road ahead. She put her fingers to her lips, biting at the nails out of habit. One of his hands lifted from the wheel and, without even looking at her, he pulled at her wrist to tug her hand away and gripped it in his own.
Not knowing what they were about to walk into, that was comforting. She squeezed.