A/N: Life has been crazy with school, so I apologize for not updating as frequently as usual. With that said, I should have more time to write from now on! Let me know if you have any suggestions, ideas, or questions about this story so far. Reviews mean the world to me!

DISCLAIMER: As usual, this story contains violent imagery and is very dark. Proceed with caution.

Spencer Reid cursed himself for not taking the vials out of the bag. For not ever kicking the final training wheels of his addiction. For not knowing better.

"Reid," Emily asked carefully, looking up at the items in Tom's hands, "What is that?"
Tom grinned. "Yes, Spencer. Why don't you tell them what I've got?"

Spencer pleaded hopelessly with his eyes, silently begging Tom to spare him. Hit me, he thought, or cut me. But please, please God don't make me use again. Please.

And yet a quiet voice in the back of his mind craved the blanket of numbness the drugs would provide, especially in his current predicament. There was something unquestionable lovely about not feeling anything at all.

"It's Dilaudid, isn't it?" JJ asked quietly, staring at the concrete floor.

"Yeah," Spencer choked. "Yeah, it is."

Emily's face went dark. The cool air became dense, only broken by Tom's sick, yellow-toothed smile.

"So how bout it, Spencer? Slowly die of dehydration? Or feed the beast? Up to you, big guy. This one's all on you," the man spat, moving his face very close to Reid's.

If it had been just him in that musty cellar, Spencer would have chosen thirst in a heartbeat. But two of the people he loved most in this world would suffer due to his choices, and that he could not have. He reached a shaking hand towards Tom's. The unsub slapped it away, shaking his head.

"I'll do it for you. Giving captives sharp objects doesn't usually end well," he taunted, slowly inserting the syringe into the vial and filling it with clear liquid. Once it was loaded, he gripped Reid's bony arm with a thick hand.

"Spence," JJ pleaded. "Don't do this." She had seen the dark path he'd once been slipping down, after Tobias. The thought of him ending up there again was sickening.

He gave her and Emily a sad smile.

"I'll be okay."

The needle found the crook of his elbow and his eyes slowly glassed over as the narcotic seeped into his bloodstream.

Reid felt the familiar liquidity of his vision and closed his eyes, exhaling deeply. It was terrifying, how relieved he felt, how much he was already infatuated by the airiness in his veins. He felt his body sink back into the wall.

Emily and JJ looked on in horror as their friend was taken by a demon they had thought could never get to him again. Tom just grinned and climbed the stairs again.

2 hours later.

"How is he?" JJ rasped, trying to position her broken body in the most painless way possible. She couldn't get a good look at Reid without feeling like her ribs were shattering all over again. A half empty water bottle lay on the floor by her feet. The rest would be for Spencer, once he was conscious enough to be able to drink it.

"Still knocked out," Emily replied dejectedly. Reid looked like shit. His brown locks stuck to the sweat on his forehead, despite the fact that the basement was rather cold. He whimpered in his drug-induced haze, mumbling incoherencies to no one in particular.

"What the hell do we do, Em?"

Emily turned to her friend, feeling a wave of burning shoot through her wounds.

"He's beaten Dilaudid once. He can do it again," Emily said as firmly as she could. The truth was, she didn't know. She didn't know if the psychological stress of this event was going to leave the three of them with any semblance of stability. She didn't know if Reid would turn to drugs to cope.

Then again, she also didn't know if they were going to make it out of the basement alive, so there may be no need to worry about the future.

JJ sighed, her profiler instincts picking up the twinge of doubt in her best friend's voice. She knew Tom would be back soon, right on schedule. There was another atrocity planned for one of them, another way that their attacker would break them down. She didn't think the image of Tom's scruffy and acne-scarred features would ever leave her mind. Let alone the smell of his breath in her face. She shivered as she remembered his hands on her, and his hands on Emily. The objectivity he showed to them, as if they were no more than Barbie dolls he could abuse. It was scary. And Jennifer Jareau was not easily frightened.

It was almost worse that they had such extensive knowledge of the case. They knew fragments of the torture to come, and roughly the timeframe in which it would happen. There was one particular aspect that she knew Emily was thinking about too. She turned to the brunette, with wide eyes, silently asking the question she was too scared to voice.

Emily returned her grim graze and nodded.

"He doesn't… assault them until right before he kills. On the third day."

JJ nodded and swallowed. They had time. The team could find them before the unthinkable happened.

"Em," JJ whispered, careful to turn her head away from the camera. "The next time he comes down here, he'll probably record it. We need to find out some way to get information for the team."

And so, the two women spent the remainder of their brief moment of peace plotting, trying to give the BAU the best shot possible at reunion.

Spencer Reid opened his eyes to find two things occurring. Firstly, someone was breathing in his face, and it smelled quite unpleasant.

"Ew," he mumbled to himself hazily, scrunching up his face. A hand grabbed his collar and pulled him upwards.

"Welcome back Spencer."

"It's Dr. Reid," he slurred to the blurry face. He squinted to see the man's thick black eyebrows and crooked nose. He looked a tad like a hillbilly Captain Hook. Reid chuckled at the image, his mind lazily wandering from thought to thought, not sober enough to fixate on anything in particular.

He stopped laughing when his eyes focused on the sight just beyond the man's form. JJ and Emily sat in two metal chairs, arms and legs bound with duct tape. They were both staring at him with a mixture of relief and concern.

With the dilaudid high came a lack of inhibitions that Spencer would not normally possess. He glared at the unsub with unadulterated rage.

"Let them go," he snarled, releasing a wave of spittle onto Tom's face.

His words were answered with a sharp punch to the stomach. Reid sputtered and coughed at the impact, doubling over himself.
"I don't appreciate insolence," Tom spat back. He pressed his glock to Reid's forehead and slowly uncuffed him. Dragging Reid by the hands, he made his way over to the two women.

"You're my favorite three so far," Tom said to the agents, keeping his gun trained on Reid. "So when I dispose of your bodies, I'm going to leave the FBI with a souvenir for all of their trouble."

"Tom," Emily said slowly, her eyes focused on the spot on the wall where the camera was blinking red, "What was your father like?"

Emily knew that somewhere far away Garcia was running through a list of every man named Tom in a fifty mile radius. She could only hope that their captor was not using an alias.

"Shut your mouth," he snapped. Emily looked to JJ, knowing that they had to keep pushing, despite the pain it was likely going to cause. Reid wouldn't be much help in his deeply inebriated state.

"Bet he kicked you around a lot. Bet he gave you that scar on your neck," JJ teased. He gave a terrifying glare and reached behind the chair toward her hand. He firmly took hold of her pinky and bent it backwards with a sharp push. There was a crack. JJ could not silence her gasp of pain.

Reid looked horrified, as if he had temporarily forgotten all of the previous toture the three had felt at the hands of Tom.

"You bastard," he rasped, rubbing his sore stomach. This time the butt of the gun hit his cheek. He was so angry he barely felt the ache.

Tom looked back towards Emily and JJ.

"You don't talk about my father. My father provided for all of us. We would have died without him."

Emily forced down a smile. It was not much, but it was something to run with.

"So he beat up your siblings too? And your mom, I bet," she cooed as confidently as possible.

Tom was furious. He reached towards one of the cuts under Emily's collarbone and pinched it. She winced and tried not to let stinging tears fall.

"He never laid a finger on Mom! You don't know what you're talking about, bitch."

He released her and inhaled deeply.

"Like I was saying. A souvenir for when your friends find your bodies."

With that, he yanked up on Reid's shirt, revealing his pale and already bruising stomach. Keeping the gun pressed firmly to the genius' head, Tom pulled a knife out of his pocket. He pressed the sharp metal into Reid's abdomen with one firm slice.

Spencer could not help but scream as the man meticulously carved into his stomach. He wasn't cutting incessantly deep, but Reid could still feel the warm blood dripping out of each gash. JJ and Emily yelled in the background, begging Tom to show mercy.

He was done. Tom stepped back to admire his handiwork, before marching a bleeding Reid back to the pipe and cuffing him firmly. Under Spencer's button-up shirt, there were three large wounds. They formed the letters TOM.

He looked at the girls.

"Don't worry. You'll all be matching in a minute."