Penelope wrapped her coat tighter around herself as she rang Rossi's doorbell. She waited a moment, shivering at the chill night air, but no one came to let her in. She rang the bell again.

"My lovelies?" she called, "Are you just going to leave me out here to freeze?"

No answer came, despite the lights still on throughout the mansion. Resolving to try a different tactic, Penelope knocked hard on the heavy front door.

The door creaked open a few inches, unlocked and unlatched. That was odd. Rossi would never leave his front door open like that, and even if he did, the rest of the team was too paranoid not to close it.

"Guys?" Penelope opened the door the rest of the way and crept into the house.

That was when she saw it.

Red.

It was pooled on the expensive hardwood, splattered across the lavish wallpaper, even sprayed onto the fancy crown molding.

Her teammates were lying in the middle of it all, bodies slumped and sprawled in the unnatural positions of death.

They were covered in the red too. It was matted in their hair, soaked into their clothes, smeared across their skin.

Penelope stumbled back into the wall and her hand hit something warm and wet.

When she looked, it was red.

The room was red.

They were red.

She was red.

Everything was red.

Red, red, red!

Penelope hardly registered the scream that ripped itself from her throat.

•••

The perpetrators were caught a few days later. Three men that Rossi had arrested as accomplices to a murder, and that had just been released from prison. They had come to Rossi's mansion looking for him, and found the team instead. It was only by a cruel twist of fate that Sergio had managed to get out of Penelope's apartment on the same night that the men had come to take their revenge.

It wasn't luck though.

Luck would have been the team happening to have their guns on them that night.

Luck would have been them not being just drunk enough for the men to get the drop on them.

Luck would have been Rossi's neighbors living close enough to hear the shots and call the police.

No, the only luck that night had been on the men's side. They were going back to prison, this time as murderers, but in their sick, twisted minds they had still won.

They left two children without parents.

Three mothers without children.

Two sisters without a brother.

A man without the love of his life.

A woman without her family.

They fired six bullets, but they destroyed far more lives.