AN./ My apologies! I would've finished this chapter sooner but I've been busy making super exciting plans for a friend to visit next month! Remember to leave a review if you're enjoying this story. You have no idea how much I appreciate those of you who do! And I do see the traffic stats, by the way, so I'm assuming the other several thousand readers are just shy. In which case, you should say hi anyway because I'm very friendly! ;) –Bec xx

Chapter 14

Leaving Morgan to sleep on the couch, I discovered that my go-bag (like myself) had been whisked away from Quantico to the room I now shared with Emily. The cupboards were additionally stocked with blankets, nondescript sweats, and the sort of underwear you buy in ten-packs. My weapon, I found nestled between my own clothes and, checking the drawer in Emily's sidetable, I found hers as well. I followed her lead, placing my gun within reach, and sourced a pair of flannel pajama pants and a plain white t-shirt from my go-bag.

Emily rolled over and locked eyes with me as I began to undress, giving me a sleepy yet sultry appraisal.

"Bit racy for a place like this," she commented on my underwear, sounding amused.

I hid a smile. "Well," I replied, "Given that I know this isn't what I was wearing at the hospital, I'm going to assume that you're the one responsible for the inappropriateness of my undergarments today."

"Guilty," Emily chuckled unabashedly. "Hotch had me grab you some extra clothes—and… get you ready to leave." She punctuated the last part with a sly wink.

Raising an eyebrow, I removed my bra, refusing to turn away in modesty if she'd already seen me, and pulled the new t-shirt over my head. "So you've been back to my apartment then?" I gathered.

Emily's expression clouded slightly. "It's a mess," she warned. "I hope you weren't attached to anything in there."

Well fuck, it was my home. I was attached to almost everything about it.

"It's fine," I replied, sounding more dismissive than I felt. As I climbed into bed and leaned my back against the headboard, Emily sat up too. I sighed gratefully as she slipped her good hand into mine and leaned into my side. "Really, Em, it doesn't matter," I promised, feeling her silent concern enveloping me. "You were the most valuable thing in there for me, and you're okay. That's enough."

Without labouring the point, I turned my head to kiss down her neck, and immediately felt her hand lift to weave through my hair, pulling me closer.

"You scared the hell out of me," Emily murmured, and I hummed softly, trailing my lips down her collarbone, into the hollow at the base of her neck. "You weren't waking up. Hotch was furious; I thought Morgan was going to beat Curtell to death. Pen was in hysterics, of course, which didn't help..."

"Em, let's not talk about it," I whispered into her skin, but her hand slipped from my hair to my jaw and tilted my face up seriously.

"I know you were doing it for Reid," she told me, "But, Jen, you and I have both got to start taking better care of ourselves than this."

Emily had also changed into a t-shirt to sleep, and her most recently applied bandage was clearly visible, along with a litany of bruises now tinged yellow-green around the edges. I eyed her arm soberly until Emily's thumb, stroking my cheek, redirected my gaze to her face.

"Jayj—"

I kissed her before she could apologise. Slow and soft and smooth, only pulling away for as long as it took me to repeat myself: "Let's not talk, Em..."

"Can't you just listen, Jennifer?" Emily pleaded, pulling back again. Her hands framed my face, holding me just far enough away to separate our lips. I saw the dark gravity building in her eyes and didn't argue. Of course I could listen, if that's what she needed. "I know what I did today was fucked up. Cutting myself while you were in the other room and Morgan was outside steaming about me doing it at all? Please don't patronize me or pretend I'm not a mess."

My eyebrow quirked upward of its own accord. "Emily, I would never dream of suggesting you're not completely fucked in the head," I replied unflinchingly. I think I almost got a smile for that too.

"I am though," she murmured. I could tell from her voice that she believed it.

"Come here," I offered, shifting so that we could lie down properly. Gently, I enveloped Emily in my arms and pulled the blanket up to our shoulders, cocooning us together, warm and safe. Laying my forehead against hers, I stared into her eyes, hoping to convey my earnestness. "You listen to me, Miss Prentiss," I dictated. "There is nothing wrong with who you are, as you are. Okay? There are things that you do and feel that are damaging, but they aren't wrong or fucked up. There are just better solutions."

I shushed her attempt to interrupt me here. I was on a roll. "Of course I know you're not okay. I'm not deluded or making excuses for you. I know we're going to need to work damn hard to get you through this, because right now I'm scared. I am fucking scared that I'm going to lose you, and I'm not the only one either. But you need to know that I'm not going to let you go; that you will never be so fucked up that you're not worth the effort for me—no matter how you feel. I'm not going anywhere, so please talk to me."

It was hard to read Emily's reaction in her face, but after a few moments she nodded. "I got complacent," she admitted. "I allowed myself to become so happy with you, and to trust so much in that happiness, that when Reid disappeared… I just don't know what to do, Jen. I can't stand the fact that I was so happy one day and now, just like that, I'm as bad as I've been in years. It makes me feel like there's no point trying…"

Reaching up, I smoothed my thumb against the furrows in Emily's brow before cupping her cheek in my hand. "Our friend is missing," I replied, knowing how she felt about sugarcoating things. "Spence—he's practically a brother to me, Em, and I think to you as well. It's hard to go from seeing him every day to having him gone, knowing he's in danger and not being able to help him. It's okay for you to be affected by that." I paused uncertainly before repeating the words I had said to Tabitha in her teacher's kitchen a few weeks ago. "You know… sometimes people can grow up believing that they need to hide their pain, always put on a brave face…"

At that moment, for the first time since Reid's abduction, I watched tears fill Emily's eyes. When they began to fall she neither brushed them away nor lowered her gaze—a small victory, I thought. "This isn't exactly a brave face I'm wearing now," she pointed out, and even her voice was more vulnerable than I had heard it in a long time. Petal-soft, wavering.

I brushed my cheek against hers, taking on the burden of her tears. "I know," I promised. "Emily, I know." And it meant so much to me that she was opening up; that she was daring to feel her emotions, not chasing them away with physical pain or punishing herself for her own humanity. I had to kiss her, to run my hands through her long dark hair, to taste her and feel her against me. Somehow I had to make her feel how much I loved her…

"You beautiful, beautiful girl," I whispered, and now I felt her smile against my lips.

"Beautiful," she repeated disbelievingly. "With all my scars?"

"With all your scars," I assured her without skipping a beat. "Inside and out; past, present, and future."

Our breakfast consisted of toast—we had found a loaf of reasonable looking bread in the freezer—paired with honey and long-life orange juice. Did you know that honey never goes off? According to Reid, archaologists recently discovered a jar of honey from pharaonic Egypt that was still perfectly edible. Thousands of years old and it still tasted delicious on toast. That was the kind of reliability I felt Emily would appreciate. It made me wish Spence were here to explain it to her properly.

We ate in front of the fire, which Morgan had kept going—thank God, because it was colder this morning. Emily and I had spent the night cuddling and additionally well-insultated by our thick blankets. I still wore the t-shirt and flannel pants I had slept in, while Emily had covered up with a cardigan. I noticed that it was she same one of mine that she'd picked up when Reid arrived that night, and it made me feel warm inside that she had adopted it so casually. A similar thrill had run through me when she first sat down beside me, leaning into my side and pecking me on the lips right in front of Morgan. We still hadn't slept together, but she was making it clear that she was invested in our relationship. Her actions exposed it as something established, a given, which excited me.

Garcia called just as Morgan shoved the last piece of toast into his mouth. He was still chewing as he answered. "What'cha… got, baby girl?"

"Besides charm, wit, and a great ass?" Garcia replied, "I've got one hell of a lead."

The return of Penelope's perky flirtatiousness was even more promising to me than her words.

"Pray tell, sweetness?"

Garcia chuckled lowly, "Oh, anything for you, my love," she hummed. Then she straightened herself out, gained focus. "So, the women's shelter that Winnie Gardner worked for is absolutely the link we needed. Turns out at least five other women who were either living at, or regularly visited the services at, that shelter have since gone missing. It hasn't been picked up on by the authorities or even the staff—except, apparently, Winnie herself—because the nature of those places is that they're temporary dwellings. Women come and go all the time. Some of them move on, make new starts, but most of them go back to their partners. These are grown women, y'know, so there's not much the staff can do about it if they decide to leave, and sometimes it can even be dangerous to contact them if they go back home."

"So, you think there've been five more, plus Winnie and Reid—that's seven abductions?" Morgan counted. "You said the transactions on this computer you hacked totaled in the billions. How do you make billions of dollars by kidnapping seven ordinary people and not asking for any sort of ransom?"

"Sugar, I wish it were only seven," Garcia replied. "On a whim, I checked in with other shelters in the area, and when I did that I checked again across state lines, and it looks like… Well, I can't give you an exact figure, but a hell of a lot more than seven people have gone unaccountably missing from various shelters in the past decade or so. I'm not just talking women's shelters, either—think rehab centres, homeless shelters, mental institutions, you name it..."

"So by preying on people who have a high risk of disappearing on their own, these unsubs are making sure they can't get caught. No one ever realises a crime has taken place," Emily provided.

"Afraid so, princess." Garcia's tone was beyond unhappy. She was disgusted. She ran a support group herself, after all. The idea that someone could be picking off vulnerable people trying to improve themselves must have nauseated her. "They check in to a shelter, stay awhile; a lot of them seemed to be making progress, and then they disappear. It happens all the time—people do their best but they can't take it, they succumb again to addiction or to the security of a relationship, even a damaging one. People stop taking their meds, stop seeing their psychs. A lot of them end up dead. Others just fall off the grid. Maybe they turn up a few months or a few years later and try again, but usually they don't."

"It's got to be someone's job to stop people from slipping through the cracks," I found myself saying. It was a recurring theme—I hadn't been able to get the thought out of my head the whole time we were in Pennsylvania. "We're talking about human beings—someone gave birth to them, someone taught them in school, someone gave them their first job and sold them their first car, they were somebody's first real love. It's one thing to know and not to care, but how can these people disappear and have no one even realise it."

It wasn't that I was disputing what had occurred; I just didn't know how to process the fact that it had.

"I'm with you, sweetie," Garcia agreed sympathetically. "It doesn't make sense."

"Baby girl, how are we distinguishing these everyday disappearances from the work of our unsubs?" Morgan asked. "They can't be responsible for everything."

"If only," Garcia replied. "Then we could nail their asses and it from happening. No. I'm still sorting through all these cases. In some there's little or no available data. It's meaning a lot of phonecalls for me and not a lot of information coming out of them. When I can, I speak to someone who worked with the missing person at the shelter, but the further I go back, the harder that gets. And there's always the possibility that some of these women are Jane Does lying in a morgue somewhere…"

"So?" Morgan pressed. "Where's the case? What did Reid see that we haven't?"

This, Garcia seemed to have a fledging answer for. "Well, there's this," she began. "I'm still going through the cases individually, like I said, but I've confirmed that in at least thirty, so far, the victim was last seen being taken away by an ambulance—same as Winnie and Reid. Usually it was after some kind of drug-related episode, and sometimes the person involved didn't even have a history of drug-use to begin with. Seems like they get dosed somehow, the 'ambulance' picks them up, which of course no one questions, and they don't come back. Workers at the shelter figure they've either died or their hospitalization has changed their situation, maybe brought their problems to the attention of a family member or a spouse—who knows? They don't come back, and work goes on. There are always more people who need help. Some rehab facilities don't even let you back in if you're caught using during their program. It'd be the perfect way to disappear someone without arousing suspicion: they get kicked out, they disappear. Who'd ever expect foul play? It happens all the time."

"Sounds perfect," Emily mused, "If all you're worried about is the logistics of the abduction. We still need to figure out what's being done to them if they're not turning up dead or being ransomed. They can't all have be being held. You said this has been going on for a decade."

"At least," Garcia confirmed. "It's more than big."

"We could be looking at a human trafficking operation," I suggested, and Morgan's reaction was one of both dread and exhaustion. I gathered he'd had a sleepness night on the couch.

"Whatever this is, Reid doesn't fit the profile," he pointed out. "These guys abduct women. Little boys might bring in money, but grown men? There's probably a market but it's a niche, and these guys know both he and Winnie are onto them. That's not a good sign."

"Hotch… hey!" Garcia yelped, and I got the impression that he'd appeared behind her suddenly, in that awful, silent way of his. "Jesus! …I mean— Sorry, sir."

Hotch's muffled voice filtered across the line, but the connection was too bad for me to decipher his words. Garcia remedied this by placing her phone on speaker as well.

"Emily, JJ, how are you two?" Hotch's voice was flat and unrevealing, but I knew from experience that that didn't mean he wasn't concerned.

"Much better," I supplied, glancing at Emily, who nodded.

"You're going to need to be," he answered. "I'm afraid I can't give you any more time."

Emily nodded firmly. "We're ready," she told him. There was no doubt in her voice.

"Emily, I can't have you in the field with your injuries, but it's time for you both to come home. I'll make arrangements for you to stay nearby on the base, as it's still dangerous for you to return to your homes." Hotch paused here. I think he was wondering whether to tell me what Emily already had—that my home had been ransacked. He decided against it. "I don't think I need to tell you that since you're staying at the Bureau, it'll be two rooms."

"Obviously," I replied quickly, without looking at Emily.

"There will be eyes on you two," he warned. "I'm doing my best to stem suspicions, so don't make any stupid mistakes. A car's on its way to collect you as we speak. Morgan, we discussed the code the driver will use to confirm his identity."

"Yeah, I remember, Hotch."

"Good." A pause. "I'll see you in six hours. This son of a bitch has had Reid too long."