A/N: I'm sorry this chapter took so long. I've been busier than usual with work, classes, and family. I was also sick (thankfully not Covid), but I'm feeling better and up to writing again.

The good news is that I'm about halfway through with the next chapter so it shouldn't be too long before the next update.

Chapter 30

Jeremy liked scaring people. He couldn't make people like him, but, if he wanted, he could make them do things out of fear. It was fun for him to have that kind of power over someone else.

His mom hated him. She had always hated him. But she loved Carrie though. She would say anything, do anything to save her perfect little angel.

The last time Jeremy had Carrie right where he wanted her, he made his mom finally admit how she really felt about him. She admitted that she hated him before he was even born.

He didn't know what he would make her do this time.

Apologize? Beg for forgiveness?

There was nothing she could possibly say that would make him forgive her. She would beg, but not for forgiveness. She would beg for Carrie's life. Oh, he would enjoy the look on her face when the blade of her own kitchen knife sliced her little angel's neck open.

He just had to find them first.

When he finally got out, he went back to the house he grew up in, only to find a different family living in it.

Finding his mom and Carrie was a game to him. Hide and seek.

He didn't think they'd be too hard to find. It was a small town. There was only one high school; but, after watching the school for a week and never once seeing his sister, Jeremy wondered if they left town.

They could run, but they couldn't hide.

At first he thought he could find them on the Internet, but all of the searches he tried came up frustratingly empty. It was almost like Kendra Sayer and Carrie Sayer had vanished off the face of the earth.

What if they changed their names? What if the FBI set them up with new names and a new life somewhere where he would never find them?

The asshole fed that showed up at his parole hearing hated him. Jeremy wouldn't put it past him to help hide his mom and sister.

Derek Morgan. That was the name of the asshole fed. It was in the court documents from his first parole hearing. And, unlike his mom and sister, Derek Morgan was all over the Internet in news clips and articles about the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit - articles and news clips that Jeremy spent hours going through.

It wasn't hard to piece together which feds had been part of the BAU when they arrested him – Jennifer Jareau, Aaron Hotchner, David Rossi, Spencer Reid, Derek Morgan, and Emily Prentiss.

Jeremy recognized Emily Prentiss as the bitch who held his mother back when he had Carrie.

He'd been so close, only to have the stupid feds ruin everything.

Personal information about the feds was harder to come by, but he'd gotten good at Internet searches and he had all the time in the world to do endless searches until he found what he was looking for.

He got Savannah's name from the online archives of a marriage announcement in a Chicago paper. It was Savannah's social media that gave Jeremy the information he needed to find Derek Morgan's happy family.

In one of his many Google searches for "Aaron Hotchner," Jeremy stumbled across Jack Hotchner's name and picture on the soccer roster of a D.C. high school website. Hotchner wasn't a common name and the location of the high school was promising.

He found the other feds through a combination of persistent cyber stalking and, once he made his way to Virginia, actual stalking. Some of them were harder to find than others – Emily Prentiss was practically a ghost on social media. Jeremy took it in turns to follow the agents when they left Quantico at the end of the day before focusing in on just the ones who had kids.

Parent-child relationships fascinated Jeremy Sayer. When he was younger, he used to watch his mom with Carrie and wonder why she didn't love him like that. Then he started watching other parents with their kids. He was always amazed that they all seemed to think their kids were so perfect.

As an older kid, Jeremy took a kind of vicious glee in telling on other kids for any wrongdoing. He would wait for the love in the parents' eyes to turn into the disgust and hatred his mom had for him, but it never happened. All it ever did was make everyone else's parents hate Jeremy.

Everyone hated Jeremy.

He couldn't make anyone like him, but he could make them do what he wanted.

By now Jeremy knew where all the feds lived – or at least he thought he did.

After following Jack Hotchner to Jessica's house one day after school, Jeremy jumped to the conclusion that Jessica was Aaron Hotchner's wife, not his sister in law, and that Jessica's house was their house.

When he was following Emily, he saw Hannah shuttled from Emily's condo to Steve's house. He thought Emily and Steve must be divorced parents who shared custody of Hannah. He couldn't have known what their relationship really was.

Jeremy had been watching all of them, some of them more than others, as he determined his next move.

This wasn't going to be like it was last time. He wasn't thirteen anymore. He didn't look like a scared, vulnerable kid. And, even if he did, these were feds, not unsuspecting mothers who would take pity on him and take him home with them like some stray dog.

The only way he was getting into the homes of the feds would be by breaking in. His time in their homes would be short-lived unless he could get the upper hand.

He knew he could get the upper hand if he could just get to their kids. If even just one of their kids was at his mercy, the feds would give him whatever he wanted. And what he really wanted was to find his mom and sister. Until then he was enjoying messing with the feds. Taunting them was half the fun, but he was tiring of anonymous notes and phone calls. It was time to step up his game.

Jeremy had realized by now that it would be too hard to get his hands on one of the little kids. The toddlers didn't really go anywhere without their parents. He wouldn't be able to get little Hank alone. And, although Jeremy would never admit it, he knew he was no match for Derek Morgan physically. With Derek ever-present, Jeremy wasn't getting anywhere near the asshole fed's only child. No matter how much Jeremy hated the kid's father, little Hank Morgan wouldn't be his trump card in the game he was playing…not if he was playing to win.

Before he moved on to one of the older kids who actually left mommy and daddy's side, Jeremy had one last thing in mind to mess with Derek though.

Jeremy Sayer crept around to the back of the empty two-story house. He knew from scoping it out that the house had an alarm system. Of course it did. It was the house of a fed.

Jeremy figured the alarm would go off immediately if he broke in through the front door, but he didn't do that. He used a rock to smash the window on the back door and reached in through the broken glass to open the door. The alarm would still go off whenever it detected motion inside the house, but Jeremy would be long gone by the time anyone – cops or feds – showed up.

This wouldn't take long.


For only being in the house ten minutes max, Jeremy Sayer sure did a lot of damage.

There was no question that it was Jeremy. Derek's doorbell camera caught the smug little bastard on his way out. Jeremy didn't even try to hide his face. No. Instead, he looked right into the camera with his middle finger in the air. It was one big fuck you to Derek.

The family room looked like a seriously pissed off kid had thrown the world's worst tantrum in it. The glass from the picture frame that had been on an end table was smashed, shards of glass sticking out in the carpet. The picture of the proud new parents holding their newborn son that was in the frame had been ripped right down the middle. The pages of one of Hank's children's books – The Giving Tree – had been torn out and ripped into tiny little pieces of paper that littered the floor.

The destruction of the family room was nothing compared to Hank's bedroom. The room Derek and Savannah had painted blue for their little boy looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Maybe that was because a bomb had, in fact, gone off in there. Hank's favorite teddy bear had been blown to smithereens, along with most of the little boy's treasured toys. Derek's hand was curled into a fist around what was left of the beloved bear's brown fuzzy head.

"It was a small pipe bomb," Derek told Rossi and Reid, both of whom had come as soon as he called. Emily was there, too, but she had stepped out of the room to make a phone call.

Neither Hotch or JJ were coming – they didn't want to leave their own kids in case they were next on Jeremy's list, and Derek couldn't say that he blamed them.

Tara and Luke were halfway to Nebraska– a trip that was unnecessary now that they had Jeremy Sayer on video. Still, maybe they would learn something new from their interviews with Jeremy's cellmate, the prison guards, and the warden at the prison where Jeremy spent his teenage years.

It honestly hadn't occurred to Derek to call Matt Simmons since he barely knew the guy.

Emily hadn't called Matt either. It was 5:00 pm on a Friday. She knew he was looking forward to dinner and a game night with Kristy and the kids. She didn't want him to have to come back in when they didn't need him. As it was, there were three agents at Derek's house – herself, Rossi, and Reid – plus a former agent who still had the experience and skill set to be an asset at a crime scene. They didn't need any more people there right now. Derek had taken one look at the amateur pipe bomb and told her there was no need to call in the bomb squad.

"Kid stuff," Derek continued with his assessment of the pipe bomb. "Anyone with access to Google could make this thing."

"He's never used explosives before," Reid said, referring to Jeremy. "I wonder if he knows about your expertise in that area."

Instantly recalling the number of past BAU cases that involved bombers, Reid knew it was feasible that Jeremy found an article or news clip where Derek had spoken to the press about one.

As a rule, bomb threats generated a lot of press. It was usually the Unit Chief who spoke to the press for the team – a role Derek occupied for a while – but it wasn't uncommon for any member of the BAU team to be interviewed. It was just a matter of reporters catching them at the right time.

Reporters gathered outside the homes of victims and known suspects and lay in wait like vultures outside of police precincts. If they got wind of FBI involvement, they assumed there was a story there and they didn't stop until they got their story.

"If he did, he may have seen detonating a bomb in your house as some kind of sick joke," Rossi said.

They all agreed that was what Jeremy intended with the pipe bomb in Hank's room. He had to know that no one was home to be hurt by it. It was nothing more than a juvenile prank on an authority figure, an act of angry defiance against the agent who ultimately caught him when he was the ripe age of thirteen.

The change in MO was troubling because it made Jeremy's behavior harder to predict, but it wasn't the first time Jeremy's MO had changed.

Jeremy Sayer was a family annihilator. He killed families. And yet one of his victims was a single man - a reverend who made the grave mistake of offering a vulnerable thirteen year old hitchhiker a ride.

Jeremy's weapon of choice was a knife, but it hadn't always been that way. Mrs. Sayer said there was one Thanksgiving when he tried to poison the family's Thanksgiving dinner.

All of Jeremy's crimes up until now were crimes of opportunity. If he had the opportunity to hurt someone, he took it, and he used whatever he could get his hands on to do it.

It wasn't such a stretch that he would take out his rage on Derek Morgan in this destructive manner when he realized he couldn't get to Hank.

Jeremy made a mistake in letting the BAU know he was coming. Now that they knew someone was going after their kids, the agents were all on high alert. It would be harder for Jeremy to get anywhere near their kids now. It showed Jeremy's stunted emotional maturity level that he had been unable to resist taunting them with the photos and prank phone calls. He had only made things harder on himself by giving them a head's up.

When Emily ended her phone call and returned to Hank's bedroom, she caught Derek's eye. "We're going to move you, Savannah and Hank to a hotel. Your protective detail will meet us there."

"A hotel?" Derek shook his head, turning her down without a second thought. "Thank you, but no. I'm sending Savannah and Hank to stay with my mom in Chicago."

He decided that the moment he saw the destruction of their home. He didn't want his wife or son in the same zip code as Jeremy Sayer.

Penelope got them on the next flight to Midway at Derek's request. Savannah was already on her way to the airport.

"What about you? You're not going with them?" Emily asked him.

"While Jeremy's still out there?" Derek said incredulously. It wasn't that Derek didn't trust Emily and the rest of the team to catch Jeremy. It was just that now it was personal for him. "Emily, he came into my house. He detonated a bomb in my son's room. There's no way I'm walking away from this now."

"Okay," Emily conceded, having expected no less. It wasn't technically his job anymore, but Derek Morgan was an alpha male who believed it was his job to protect his family. That was what he was doing now. She was trying to give him an out, but she knew he wouldn't take it. She still had to try. "You know, you can still take the hotel room and protective detail, even if it's just you."

"I'm staying right here," Derek insisted stubbornly. He wanted to fix Hank's bedroom. He didn't want Savannah or Hank to see it like this. "And if Jeremy comes back here, I'll be waiting for him."

No one missed the threat there, but if anyone had asked Derek if it was a threat, he would have said no. It wasn't a threat. It was a promise.

"I don't think he will," Rossi voiced his opinion. He didn't say it, but he thought Emily and, more specifically, Hannah would be next on Jeremy's list for no other reason than because Hannah was the only girl and the closest in age to Jeremy's sister. Emily already knew Hannah was in danger. She didn't need Rossi telling her what she already knew. His MO might have changed, but they still knew what made Jeremy Sayer tick. Now that he had gotten his childish revenge on the agent who arrested him when he was thirteen, Rossi expected Jeremy to fall back into old patterns. With that in mind, he turned to Emily. "You think you can swing a protective detail for Hannah, Jack and the LaMontagne boys?"

"Believe me, I tried," Emily told him. As the leader of the BAU, it was her job to keep everyone on the team safe. She had fought hard for a protective detail for everyone Jeremy had targeted, but she had lost that fight before it even started. She averted her eyes before continuing in a disheartened tone. "But there's no evidence linking Jeremy to the voicemails or the photos. And even if there was, it's not enough for Cruz to justify a protective detail for everyone. The only reason he could justify it for Derek is because of what happened here today." She was repeating what she was told, but it was obvious she was bitter about it herself.

"I didn't think so," Rossi said with a knowing expression. Protective details were expensive. Before they would pay someone to sit on the BAU kiddos round the clock, the higher ups would have to be convinced that Hannah, Jack and the LaMontagne boys were in clear and imminent danger. Otherwise, they would see it as paying big bucks for a protective detail who would essentially be waiting for something that may never happen. David Rossi didn't have to like it, but he knew all-too-well how the Brass could be. There was a reason he had never wanted the Unit Chief job. He didn't think he could stomach dealing with bureaucrats and red tape day in and day out the way Emily had to. "So we're on our own," Rossi summed the situation up grimly.

"Unfortunately," Emily said.


Between JJ and Will, Henry and Michael had two law enforcement officers, both of whom had weapons, to keep them safe. Jeremy Sayer would have to be an idiot to try to break into the LaMontagne home, and no one thought Jeremy was stupid.

With Hank on the next flight to Chicago's Midway International Airport and everyone agreeing that the LaMontagne boys were higher risk targets for Jeremy, that just left Jack and Hannah.

After they split up at Derek's house, Emily went straight to Steve's townhouse while Rossi made one pitstop before showing up unannounced at the Hotchner residence.

When Hotch opened the door, he gave Rossi a questioning look. "Dave? What are you doing here?"

"It's been too long since we hung out." Rossi tried to deflect, knowing Hotch wouldn't appreciate him being there for the Hotchner men's protection. Rossi held up the pizza box and six-pack of beer he brought with him. "Come on," he said cajolingly. "I brought pizza and beer."

Hotch knew there had to be more to it than that but invited Rossi in anyway. The two old friends made their way back to the kitchen, where Rossi deposited the pizza box on the kitchen counter and put the six-pack in the fridge after handing Aaron one and taking one for himself.

When they both had drinks and were seated comfortably in the living room, Hotch tried again. "Do you want to tell me what you're really doing here?"

Rossi sat back a little and glanced at Hotch, knowing the other man wasn't going to let this go. "Look, I just figured you could use a little extra firepower if you get any unexpected visitors tonight."

"And by that, you mean Jeremy Sayer," Hotch deduced easily. "Did Emily send you?"

"Emily, huh?" Rossi said with a big grin. He finally had the chance to ask Hotch about something he had noticed since they'd all been working together again. "No, she didn't. I volunteered," Rossi answered Hotch's question before moving on to his own question. "Since when is she Emily? Don't think I haven't noticed that you're not calling her Prentiss anymore." He didn't want to call his friend out on that in front of everyone, but now it was just the two of them. Jack had just gotten home from practice and was in the shower.

"It's her name," Hotch said dismissively, trying to downplay the significance.

"It is," Rossi agreed. "But that's never stopped you from calling her Prentiss before."

In fact, Hotch had almost exclusively called Emily 'Prentiss' the entire time he was Unit Chief of the BAU.

"That was when I was her direct supervisor and we were on the job," Hotch pointed out. "Right now I'm not her supervisor. I'm her friend."

"Just how good a friend are we talking about here?" Rossi asked somewhat suggestively. The switch from 'Prentiss' to 'Emily' wasn't all Rossi had noticed. He saw the way Hotch had been looking at Emily when he didn't think anyone else was paying attention, the younger man's eyes subconsciously telegraphing his newfound interest in her. David Rossi was enough of a ladies man to know what that look meant. The only real question was if Aaron Hotchner was going to act on it.

Rossi thought Hotch had been alone for far too long. Aaron Hotchner was a good man and deserved to find someone who would make him happy. If that someone was Emily…well, she could do a lot worse. Rossi loved both of them and just wanted to see them both happy. That was why he was meddling.

Neither Aaron Hotchner or Emily Prentiss were the type to take risks with their hearts. They might need a little help in that department. That was where Rossi came in.

David Rossi had an ulterior motive when he showed up at Hotch's front door with pizza and beer.

He was going to find out what, if anything, was going on between Hotch and Emily. And if nothing had happened yet, Rossi was going to give Aaron the push he needed to make something happen.

While Rossi was busy needling Hotch, Emily was parked in front of Steve's townhouse. That was where she would stay, keeping a silent watch over the house unbeknownst to her daughter or her daughter's adoptive father.

A/N: As always, thank you for reading. I did the best I could writing Jeremy's point of view, but I'm not going to lie…it was a struggle. I think that's part of why this chapter took me so long. As you can probably tell, I'm not a profiler or an expert in psychology. I hope the things Jeremy's doing in my story make sense for the character and feel at least somewhat plausible.

When I was planning this story line out, I went back through old episodes, looking for an unsub that I could see (a) realistically being released from prison by 2018/2019, (b) targeting the children of the profilers instead of the profilers themselves, and (c) potentially going after Hank Spencer Morgan, Jack Hotchner, and / or Hannah. I also didn't want it to be immediately obvious to the profilers who the unsub was or which kid(s) had the biggest targets on their back. I wanted there to be a few possible unsubs. I think it was probably semi-predictable, but hopefully not so predictable that it's an awful story line.

Anyway, I'm really curious what you think of how I'm doing with writing the first real bad guy of this story. Did you like seeing Jeremy's point of view? Constructive criticism is welcome. It can only help me for the next bad guy because we do have more bad guys coming later.

We're getting close to the end of this particular story line (not the story, just this story line), and the next chapter will be pretty action-packed and hopefully will be worth the wait for everyone who stuck with me. Thank you again for reading!