"Well, you look like shit," Ariel declared, as she swept into Emma's home the next morning.

"You would too, if you were living my life right now," Emma mumbled back, while she closed the door behind her assistant.

She'd been awake half the night - again. Every time she closed her eyes, the images of those bodies flashed behind them once more. It had taken her one-and-a-half bottles of her best whiskey, and three hours, before she'd finally fallen asleep. But as the alcohol had worn off, the dreams had started, and Emma had once again bolted awake as her nightmares returned.

"You need to shower before the team gets here," Ariel instructed, while making herself comfortable on the sofa. "We have two interviews to record this morning, and a live performance to get through. Do you think you can manage that?"

"I'm perfectly capable of that, thank you." Emma knew that everyone thought she was going through some kind of breakdown. She also knew that because of her age, they all seemed to think that they knew what was best for her. But Emma's patience was at its limit, and she was in no mood to be treated like the stupid child everyone assumed her to be.

"We don't have all day."

She bit down on her tongue as she turned on her heels to head for the comfort of her shower. The last thing she wanted to do that day was promotional work. She wasn't ready to deal with people after everything that had happened recently. But Emma also didn't want to let her fans down. She knew that they were excited about the new single she was releasing at the start of the following week. And they were even more excited about the tour that would soon be following it. If she cancelled all of her promotional work this close to the opening date, they would begin to worry.

And that was not how Emma wanted to repay her fans for all of their support.

Before she could leave her lounge, there was a sharp buzz from her front gate that signalled someone else's arrival at the house.

"I'll get that," Ariel declared, as she rose from her seat. "It's probably just the stylists arriving a little early. Go and shower."

"Yes, Ma'am," Emma mocked, as she rolled her eyes in her assistant's direction, and headed for the privacy of her bathroom. As much as she wasn't looking forward to spending the majority of her morning pretending that everything was normal, the idea of washing off last night's dream was highly appealing to her.

When Emma eventually left her bathroom, she was dressed the way she always was, when she knew a team of stylists would be waiting for her. She'd left her hair damp, to hang in loose waves around her shoulders, and she'd pulled on a pair of nude panties, before wrapping a white fluffy robe around her body.

"Okay. I fucking showered," she declared to Ariel, as she made her way through to the lounge. "Are you happy now?" But Emma stopped dead in her tracks when her eyes fell on the man sitting next to her assistant on the sofa. He was certainly not part of her glam squad.

"Um, Emma… there's an FBI Agent here to see you," Ariel explained, as she looked between the two of them curiously. Emma could already see the questions forming in the redhead's mind.

"Special Agent Jones," she greeted. "Has something happened?"

"Good morning, Emma. Do you think we could maybe speak in private?" he asked, as he rose to his feet.

Killian flicked a brief look over to where Ariel was still sat, before bringing his eyes back to the young woman he had come to see. Her assistant didn't look too happy to be dismissed so easily, but she left anyway, closing the door to the lounge behind her as she went.

Killian gestured for Emma to take a seat on the couch he'd just risen from, and waited until she had carefully arranged herself, and the robe she was wearing, before he took his own. "I know this isn't the best timing," he began, as he picked a spot on the wall just over her left shoulder, and fixed his eyes on it.

Of course the pretty young popstar would be walking around her house in nothing but a short bathrobe when he arrived.

That was just his luck.

"But we'd like to see the fan mail that you've kept, if at all possible?"

"The good stuff?" Emma wondered. "Why?"

"There's a small chance that our offender could have begun his obsession by sending you sweet messages, and then progressed into the more aggressive and unstable ones you've recently been receiving, when he felt he wasn't getting enough of your attention. If that's happened, then we can use those letter to build up a clearer image of the mentality of the person we're looking for. We're also hoping that in the past, this individual might have been a little more careless with their correspondence, and left some kind of clue as to their identity in their messages."

"They're um… they're in my studio," she explained, pointing to one of the doors behind her shoulder that Killian hadn't been through, the last time he'd visited the house. "Do you want them now?"

"If I could."

Emma watched as Agent Jones averted his eyes while she stood and tightened the belt on her robe, before he followed her down the hall to her studio.

"I um… I have some promotional work to do today," she told him, feeling the need to explain why she was dressed the way she was. "I thought you were my team of stylists. There's no point getting dressed for them when they're just gonna undress you as soon as you get in the room."

"I wouldn't know that. I'm probably the least stylish person in the world," he joked, hoping to keep the tone light.

Although he'd never say it, Killian could see the haunted look that still lingered behind Emma Swan's eyes. Without makeup, the circles underneath them looked deeper and darker. And he had spotted the two empty bottles on top of the liquor cabinet in the lounge too.

"Oh, I don't know," she teased, as she turned back to look at him over her shoulder. "That black sweater's doing a lot for you right now."

Killian looked down at himself and frowned. The sweater he was wearing was nothing special. It probably cost less than anything Emma had ever owned in her entire lifetime. But it was easy to move in, and cheap to replace if he ended up putting holes in it. For that reason alone, he had an entire closet full of them for work.

As Emma pushed open a heavy looking wooden door, he snapped his mind away from fashion, and back to the job he was supposed to be doing. "Jesus fuck," he muttered to himself, as he took in the soundproofed room he was now stood inside of. Killian would be willing to bet that the recording equipment alone cost more than everything he owned, including his beloved car. It didn't seem fair to him that a twenty-four-year-old woman had managed to build such a top-of-the-range recording studio, in her multi-million-dollar mansion, while his brother was struggling to decide between paying his rent or buying food for his daughter that week.

"This is everything I've kept," she told him, as she pointed to one large wall that had been covered in letters, drawings and pictures.

Killian was rather touched to see the amount that she had pinned to it, after his initial thoughts about her approach to fan mail. There were well over a thousand items on that wall, and it was going to take him a while to get them all down, and bagged for evidence.

"I'll um… I'll get these back, won't I?" Emma asked nervously, as her eyes flew over the shrine she'd built to her fans.

"Yes, of course. As soon as the investigation is over, we'll bring them back to you."

"Good." Emma nodded her head decisively, but said nothing else as she watched Agent Jones browse the top layer of letters and pictures. "I um, I should probably go and start getting ready. Will you be okay here?"

"Yeah. I'll take good care of everything and get it all down as quickly as I can for you," he promised.

"Thanks." Emma left without another word, closing the door softly behind herself as she did.

Killian sighed as he brought a hand up to massage his temples. Fucking David had been teasing him all morning about his supposed crush on Emma Swan. Killian was a thirty-two-year-old man, he was too old to have a crush on a pretty blonde popstar.

Especially one that was caught up in the middle of what could become one of the country's worst serial killing sprees in modern history.

"Focus on the job, and not on the girl," he told himself, as he reached into his pocket for the stash of evidence bags he always carried, and another set of latex gloves.

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