"Doyle has Lucy," Emily said into the phone. She stood before the lighted mirror in Lucy's dressing room, gaze fixed on a picture of Lucy the day she'd been promoted to Principal, in her Cinderella costume, bouquet of roses in her arm, face split by a brilliant smile. The longer she stared at that picture, the harder it was to breathe, chest filling with the knowledge that she might never see that smile again.
"What?" Clyde asked, not quite disbelieving but skeptical all the same. "Are you sure?"
"I'm in her dressing room and she's not here. She's not at the fundraiser gala, her car is still here, and no one has seen her since she came off stage," she listed. "I spoke to her a half hour ago and she was fine."
"Are you sure she didn't just..." Clyde started to ask.
She cut him off impatiently, "Doyle as much as told me he has her."
"What do you mean he told you?" Tsia asked incredulously, voice tinny and distorted in the background of the conversation.
"I sat across from him and looked him in the eye as he told me that he was going to take her from me."
Voice clearer now that Clyde had put the phone on speaker, Tsia pressed, "Why didn't he just kill you?"
"He wants to watch me suffer the way he did," she said without hesitation. She didn't need to question his motives, she knew him well enough to understand that hurting Lucy would hurt her more than anything he could physically do to her. "I think it's time to involve my team."
The pause that followed was filled with hesitation before Clyde finally spoke up, "Are you absolutely certain that's the best..."
"I don't care about protocol, I don't care about clearance, all I care about is my wife," she snapped, interrupting what was sure to be a long-winded spiel. "They can help."
Clyde heaved a weary sigh. "Em, when you went undercover, I promised no harm would come to you..."
"Well, it's not about me anymore," she replied. She carefully plucked the photo from where it was stuck to the mirror, slipping it into her pocket.
"What I'm saying is, let us worry about catching Doyle."
Lucy came to, bleary and confused. She slowly sat up from where she was slumped over in her seat, stomach turning with the movement, threatening to revisit her meagre stomach contents all over the black and gold jacquard of her cocktail dress. "Wh-where am I?" she rasped. "What happened?"
A man's face came into view then, looking concerned, but kind. "You were crossing the street and got hit by a car. The driver fled the scene, but we're taking you to the hospital," he explained.
She raised a hand to her forehead, fingers coming away bloody.
Before she could say anything, he assured her, "It doesn't look too bad, but you can't be too careful with head wounds." He offered her a bottle of water which she accepted with a shaky hand, not entirely sure she trusted it. "Drink," he encouraged.
Deciding that it was probably safe since the cap was still on, she took a greedy sip to soothe her parched throat. "Th-thanks," she stuttered. "What's your name?"
"Ian," he replied. "Don't worry, Lucy – everything is going to be alright."
It didn't hit her right away as she stared out the window, watching the hospital fade into view. "Wait...how did you know my name?"
His smile became less kind. "Oh, I'm a friend of your wife..." he said ominously.
Just as quickly, the hospital was fading out of view in the distance.
"Are you okay?" Garcia asked, approaching behind Emily with uncharacteristic timidness.
Emily stood suddenly from where she was bent over the sink, fighting off the urge to vomit. "Oh..." She inhaled a shuddering breath, attempting to control the threat of oncoming tears before she could see them. "Umm, yeah, I'm good," she lied, attempted a smile that was entirely too much of a grimace for her liking.
"I'm not a profiler, but..." she started.
"Don't start," Emily scoffed, shaking her head. In the laden silence that followed, the heartbroken look that crossed Garcia's face made her pause, guilt sweeping over her like a wave. She sighed. "I'm sorry. I'm..." She shook her head. "I'm gonna be alright."
"Okay," she slowly, tremulously. "I'm just really worried about you. I..." She trailed off, swallowing thickly. "The flu is going around..." A look of realization crossed her face, eyes going wide. "Are you pregs? Is Lucy?"
Emily bit down on her lip to keep the truth from spilling out. They hadn't told anyone yet, but Lucy had started fertility treatments a few weeks earlier, with the intention of trying to get pregnant after the Fall Season ended.
"No," she lied. "No, I'm just... I'm...not sleeping. I'm having this nightmare," she explained. "It's a recurring nightmare – there's a hill and there's a little girl on top of the hill, she's like six years old, dark hair, and she's just dancing in the sun. But somehow I know that she's waiting for me, so I start to walk up the hill, but the hill gets steeper and steeper and by the time I climb to the top, the little girl is gone. And I look everywhere for her and when I can't find her, I start to panic. And I panic because I know what's waiting out there for her. I know what the world can do to a girl who only sees beauty in it."
When she'd told Lucy about the dream, she'd insisted she was just anxious about the idea of becoming a mom. She wasn't entirely wrong about that, but now, Emily feared it went deeper. That she'd somehow foreseen this – she didn't really believe in psychics and foretelling the future, but the dream was so vivid, so real, that it seemed entirely too ominous to not mean something. And, if that were true, that meant there was no happy ending to this story...and that thought scared her more than anything.