Chapter 11
Firstly thank you so much to all my amazing reviewers. Thanks you all you of I passed the 100 review mark on my first story and it feels like a huge accomplishment. I am amazed by the great response this story has received and so honoured you choose to take time out of your days to read this. Thank you to EVERYONE!
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. – Mark Twain
"Why didn't you tell me Reid was in trouble!" JJ's voice rose to a shout.
"JJ," Hotch tried to keep his voice even but inside he was breaking. "You need to calm down. This just happened, no one except our team and police know yet not even his mother. Reid's going to be fine but time we spend on you is time we're not spending trying to find him."
She opened and shut her mouth then nodded. Hotch breathed in deep. His words had been direct and sharp but his logic was infallible.
"Can I stay and help. I have to try and help." Her voice was small. He nodded kindly.
"Of course. Now Garcia," He turned his focus to the tech goddess who nodded, sniffing. "I realise you couldn't track them as the IP address kept changing but is there any way you can tell me who was speaking on camera?"
"I can try sir." She said beginning to type again. "But the odds of finding anything workable, even if I did have something to match it to which I don't, are thin."
"I understand. Try anyway." Hotch's mind was moving a thousand miles a minute. S much so that he barely notice the young nurse standing in the doorway.
"Sir there's a police officer here to see you." Hotch's head shot up.
"Send him in." The nurse nodded and disappeared, reappearing moments later trailed by a dark haired man in his late thirties.
"SSA Hotchner, I'm detective Black the man in charge of the sweep of 5th street." He shook his head sending longish locks flying. "Nearly everything that might have been useful had been contaminated by the time we got there by pedestrian traffic but we did find one thing.
"And?"
The man pulled out of the black briefcase he was wearing a needle in a clean evidence bag. Hotch's eyes grew wider.
"It was all alone sitting in an alleyway but there were signs of someone being dragged and it's too big to be a druggy's," the Detective explained.
"Has this been printed yet, and has the substance inside been identified?"
The man shook his head and Hotch shot the poor detective one of his famous glares. The detective gulped loudly.
"No sir, it was only just discovered and you said to bring anything we found right to you–"
"Morgan." Hotch's tone was all business.
"I'm on it." The burley FBI agent jumped to his feet. He'd been resting on the edge of Hotch's hospital bed.
"Thank you detective, you can go." The man seemed relieved to be out of the firing range of Hotch's laser eyes. Morgan followed after him, needle bag in hand. The sun was just ducking behind the trees. They all stifled yawns and kept searching for something, anything, they had missed.
XXX the next morning XXX
Reid hurt all over so bad, especially his stomach. He tried to move his feet and groaned. No, he took that back. His knee made it feel like all his stomach needed was a Band-aid.
But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was the need pulsating through him.
He hadn't felt like that in so long. Not since…
What happened before he passed out came rushing back to him. He let out a small groan and forced his eyes open. All his hard work over the last few years. All his time clean, gone. Just like that. One hit and he wanted more so bad it made him feel sick.
Once an addict, always an addict.
She was right.
No! Realisation hit him. His team, they'd seen the whole thing. Even if he got out of this alive they would never look at him the same way again. They'd be worried about him relapsing, about being a liability. And they'd be right to be worried.
At least he hadn't screamed. No matter what, keeping his team safe would be his priority. He couldn't let them suffer.
No matter what his captor did to him, or threatened to do.
Then, like his thoughts had called her, the devil herself arrived.
"Don't you dare go near my team!" Why was it so hard to get his mouth to move? Why did his eyelids feel so heavy? This wasn't all just from coming down from a high.
She smirked at him and raised an eyebrow.
"Well good morning to you too Dr. Reid. And how are you feeling this fine morning? Weak? I know you've lost a lot of blood and coming off of the high only makes it harder. Craving any more yet? I have enough stored away to make sure you never need to come back down to this hellish reality."
He had never hated himself as much as he did in that moment. He hated himself because the damn offer was tempting.
"Go to hell." He enunciated each word. She came closer and he kicked out at her with his good leg as far as he could manage tied up but his movements were too sluggish and weak to do much of anything. She stepped back lightly out of the way her eyes turning hard and cold.
"Apparently you're a fighter." She gripped his shattered knee, nothing but a bloody pulp, and squeezed hard sending waves of pain coursing through his body and his eyes to go black at the edges. He focused on breathing in and out and his vision slowly returned to normal.
"You aren't as strong as you believe Dr. Reid…" She walked behind him so he couldn't see what she was doing but there was some shuffling of what sounded like metal objects which made him nervous and then total silence which made him doubly so. Then she stepped back in front of him with a flourish holding a hammer in her hands.
"But you still have spunk, and I like that about you."
Her smile was carcinogenic.
"It makes breaking you all the more fun." She gave a quick glance down and Reid realised in horror what she was about to do.
"Please." He whimpered. His captor just shook her head.
"You know you really should watch that knee. It may never be the same again." Then, she brought the hammer down as hard as he would on his bad knee.
Spencer Reid couldn't take it any longer. He screamed before the awfulness of what he'd done even hit him and then blissful black oblivion took him.
XXXXXXXXXXX
The team, all except Morgan who was overseeing the tests on the needle personally, had loaded up on coffee and were continuing to sort through the massive number of cases Reid had played a sizeable part in.
"Ever feel like we would be so screwed without his massive brain?" Emily sighed pushing another case file to the side. Hotch had filled them in on his theory that t main captor was a woman but that still left her with at least one male counterpart which really didn't narrow things down much. It didn't make sense either. Hotch wasn't being sexist but he knew from experience that when it came to submissive/dominant partnerships the male was almost always dominant. Yet it had been clear that in this case it was different and until they knew more about the unsub it was impossible to know why. To make matters worse, Garcia's attempt to match a name to the voice on the video feed had been unsuccessful.
Rossi groaned. "Aaron, this is hopeless. We have nothing." Hotch clenched his fists.
"This is Reid we're talking about, we can't just give up." Hotch actually raised his voice, a serious rarity. Rossi studied him silently for a moment something akin to sympathy flashing in his eyes.
"I'm not saying we should give up, I just don't think–"
At this point they were all interrupted by a knock at the door. JJ motioned the man in with a warm smile but the others froze when they saw the brown envelope in his hand.
"A package for one Aaron Hotch–" He never got to finish his sentence. Rossi ripped the package from the man and glared at him.
"Where did you get this!" The man looked a little frightened.
"I work in reception. I was coming in for my shift when some man outside asked me to give this to you –"
"Is he still there!" Seaver was on her feet and Hotch was struggling to do the same. Emily was holding him down.
"No!" the man half shouted in alarm. "He got straight back in his car and drove away."
"Did you get a licence plate?" The man shook his head.
"I wasn't looking." He sounded glum, as he came to the realisation that he'd done something seriously wrong even if he wasn't quite sure what it was yet.
Hotch slumped and stopped fighting Prentiss as he realised there was no immediate action he could take.
"Garcia ask to see the hospital security system. Bring this man here with you and see if he can identify the man and/or vehicle for you. The rest of us," for some reason his eyes met Rossi's, "The rest of us will open the envelope together." Garcia nodded and her breath hitched in her throat a little. Her and the hospital receptionist left the room together.
Each person in the room seemed to hold their breath as Rossi stuck his thumb through the tape and broke the seal. He fished his hand inside and pulled it back out.
"There's a dvd." He pulled it out and no one could miss the note attached to the back of the case. He flipped it over.
Having fun yet? I know I am.
As you'll soon see, it appears Spencer wasn't quite as strong as he hoped to be.
A shame really, one of you 7 will pay for it…
I'm sure he'll feel just wonderful about that.
Or maybe he'll be too high to care…
A special welcome to Jennifer Jareau by the way,
Hope you all enjoy the video. I suggest popcorn…
Slowly, Rossi opened the case and with fingers he tried to stop shaking and failed stuck the video into Garcia's DVD drive.
PLAY.
A moment of darkness and then they could make out Reid's image. He appeared to be alone in the room and he was thrashing back and forth. Several times he whimpered or whispered half incoherent sentences. Hotch bit his lip. This was the other side of Reid, the darker side that had serious addiction problems. This was Reid high to the point where he seemed to be almost more like having a nightmare then really, truly, awake.
All at once the thrashing stopped and Reid opened his eyes, groaning. Moments later, the same woman appeared. She didn't have the mask on this time, but she kept her back to the camera.
"Don't you dare go near my team!" Hotch was amazed their youngest teammate was thinking about anyone except himself considering how he had to feel, how much pain he had to be in.
"Well good morning to you too Dr. Reid. And how are you feeling this fine morning? Weak? I know you've lost a lot of blood and coming off of the high only makes it harder. Craving any more yet? I have enough stored away to make sure you never need to come back down to this hellish reality." Hotch clenched his fists, she was taunting him, making him sweat, that was all. But he could see how the taunt tore Reid apart, could see the addict already resurfacing and the self-loathing in Reid's eyes.
"Go to hell."
"Good for you Reid." Emily whispered. "Tell her." And Reid did. He tried to kick out at her when she came closer. It was good he had the energy to fight still but the fact that the move was so slow, so sluggish and uncoordinated, that had Hotch worried.
Bloodloss…
"Apparently you're a fighter." The unsub had that right at least. Reid was a fighter, he was a fighter or he wouldn't have even lasted this long.
The woman squeezed Reid's knee in retaliation, and Hotch watched the pain nearly overwhelm him. Then she said some bullshit about Reid not being as strong as he thought he was.
Don't listen to her Reid.
Hotch watched the unsub go behind Reid for a moment, dig through a pile of weapons he couldn't see clearly, and come up with a hammer. She came back around front again but always with her damn back to the camera.
"But you still have spunk, and I like that about you." Hotch knew what was coming next, even before she talked about breaking him, and being a genius Reid did too.
"Please."
God, Reid was pleading. Hotch felt as if his soul was being ripped to pieces. It should have been him there instead of Reid. Reid had been through way to much already.
The unsub said something back, but Hotch didn't even hear it. He was too busy watching as the unsub swung the hammer as hard as she could at Reid's already mangled knee.
Reid screamed, and it was so loud and so long it seemed like it would never end.
Hotch didn't blame the kid for screaming, any of them would have.
But he knew that Reid would blame himself.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. – Thomas Pynchon
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