"Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul."-Maxim Gorky
Hotch watched Blythe leave with Lucinda Potts, the young policewoman to whom he had spoken earlier. She had scoffed at him when he asked her whether there was a shower and a change of clothes that Helena could borrow.
"Honey, she can come to my place. It's just around the corner."
"That's very generous. Thank you."
"Is it true that she killed Igor Tikhonov?" Hotch nodded in confirmation.
"With her shoe," he elaborated. Potts gave a low whistle.
"Well, that woman can have my first-born child for a public service like that. And I love my babies," she said emphatically. "I'll get her my spare shoes."
The two women left together, already deep in conversation.
Hotch returned to the conference room to find Reid on the phone again. He put it on speaker when Hotch walked in.
"-AugustineAwakened is incredibly active on the message boards. He gives a lot of advice to newcomers to the site. And get this: he's had extensive contact with usernames that trace back to IP addresses belonging to to each of the victims' homes and/or places of work. Unfortunately, no luck tracking back Augustine's IP address. He's using exclusively public computers in places with no security footage."
"Does that mean-"
"That's right, you gorgeous piece of nerdy-if-technologically-challenged man-meat. I think we've found our unsub. He's targeting men who leave the Catholic Church and come out of Narnia. And this site is how he finds them."
"Does he arrange meetups with them, Garcia?"
"Not on the public forums. I was trying to get the site's managers to hand over the private messaging data voluntarily. They're being prudes about it, so a'hacking I will go."
"Thanks. Could you also track down all the other people who have been chatting with Augustine and run background on them?"
"On it. Hey, is Helena there?"
"She left to get cleaned up. Did you have more questions for her? I've given her my phone for the time being."
"No, it's fine. She's just more fun to flirt with than both of you put together."
"Sorry to disappoint. I'll have her call you when she's less covered in gore."
"I look forward to it."
The line clicked and Reid and Hotchner returned to work, but they found themselves going in circles.
"So…" Reid began, flopping into a chair and smoothing back his unruly brown mop of hair. "Do we have any idea what Blythe's mysterious mission is?"
"From what I gather," Hotch said, speaking deliberately, "They're targeting Volkoff's human trafficking ring. I've heard years of speculation that the Chicago mafia was stealing girls right out of their homes, brainwashing them, and selling them into slavery over multiple continents. If Andrea Swann's unit is running this mission, there's a good chance that they're aiming for that ring. From what she said on the phone, they're close to cracking it."
"Why did Blythe ask us to bring the jewelry box?" Hotch felt a deep, corrosive disgust in his gut as he answered.
"Several of the girls were affluent debutants snatched from high-society gatherings. It looks like Helena's admirers stole the abductees' accessories and used them to ply her favor. I recognize the red one from a photo of Brittany McHale on the night she was taken."
"How do you know all this?"
"I consulted on it a few years ago. There's a strong psychological component to how the girls are treated. In fact, I interviewed one of them."
"They recovered one?"
"In a manner of speaking. A CIA agent code-named Canary was sent in undercover. After a year in Moscow, she fell completely off the radar. She was gone for months. The CIA searched high and low for six months and found no trace."
"Volkoff snatched her?"
"At the time, the CIA assumed that she had just been killed. But one day she walked into headquarters at Langley. She said that she had been sent by her 'father.' That's when they called the BAU."
"I interviewed her. It was the most thorough mind wipe I've seen, before or since. She was a sharp, skilled agent when she went under. When she turned herself in, she had regressed to the mental capacity of a five-year-old and she was completely pliable. She would follow any order that was given to her."
"Brain damage?"
"Not due to any physical trauma. But her brain activity showed serious decay. We spent two months examining her, interrogating her, testing her."
"So what happened?"
"One day, we gave her a pen and paper and told her to write down everything she remembered about her life from her very first memory. I wasn't in the room, but I saw the footage later."
"Oh no-" Doctor Reid appeared to be genre-savvy enough to know roughly what happened next. Hotch nodded grimly.
"She smiled sweetly at Gideon, waved, and put her own eyes out with the pen."
"That's… how would someone drive a fit, healthy agent that crazy?"
"I have no idea. They couldn't save her eyes. She was committed to a sanatorium, but she died a few months later.
"At the time, the ring was run by another pakhan, or patriarch: Gogol Kolesnikov. Arkady was just his second-in-command, a position known as the sovietnik. I didn't know of him when I was on the case. I was too focused on figuring out the girl. Gideon filled me in on the background this morning in the car."
"So what happened to Kolesnikov?"
"Apparently he very publicly killed himself in the middle of a crowded street in Moscow two years ago."
"Brain-washed."
"Exactly."
"So Volkoff is the real power."
"Most likely. I'm beginning to think that he may even perform the psychological torture himself. No one else would have that kind of access to the pakhan."
"Hotch… by now they're figured out that Blythe was an infiltrator. Do you think we should have sent her away with one person for protection?"
"I-" Hotch's stomach twisted into a knot. Reid was right; Blythe was in terrible danger until they apprehended Arkady and his entire Chicago network. "Call her. She has my cell."
Reid dialed and put his phone on speaker. Each ring seemed to last for hours. One. Two. Three. Four.
"Hello?" The voice of Officer Potts came through the other side of the line, chirpy and bright. Relief flooded the two men.
"Sergeant Potts, is Agent Blythe still with you?"
"Yeah, of course. She's got a hell of a job washing the blood out of that mane of hers." Then, calling to Blythe: "Hey Lena, looks like your G-Man is missing you already."
"Just… be on the lookout. Keep your weapon on you and stick together."
"Got it. And she says she misses you too. Bye."
The line clicked and Hotch and Reid turned back to work, Reid struggling to hide the smirk tempting the corners of his mouth.
An hour later, a thoroughly-scrubbed Helena re-entered the station dressed loosely in a set of too-large lounge clothes. In Lucy Potts's sweatpants, tank top, and sneakers that flopped absurdly on her tiny feet, Helena relished the escape from Vivian Grant's restrictively glamorous wardrobe. Lucy had kept her thoroughly entertained on the walk back to the precinct with stories of her three young children, distracting her from the dark considerations that threatened to overcome her.
Plenty of time to mourn after this is over. Stay on target.
Lucy Potts's last and most-appreciated act of generosity had been to give Helena the two cigarettes remaining in her pack and a plastic lighter. She twirled one around her fingers as she surveyed the police station.
"Agent Blythe!" The skinny young man whom Hotch had introduced as Doctor Reid (though he couldn't be much older than twenty, or twenty-two at most) stumbled up to her with a preoccupied air. "We have more questions for you if you're up for it."
"Sure. Can you ask them outside? If I don't smoke soon I think I'll probably kill again."
"Um," he stammered, "yeah, that should be fine." He looked frightened. Okay. Limit the sarcasm around Doctor Reid.
Hotch and Reid followed her outside and they talked while she lit up a cigarette and sucked at it with immense pleasure.
"So… If I understand correctly you're looking for a couple who frequents Catholic congregations in the D.C. area. The male is very large and very virile, so hyper-masculine that he may give the impression of compensating for insecurity. The woman is completely submissive to him, but intelligent, medically trained, capable of engineering a logistically complex operation… Fuck."
"You know a couple like that?"
"Yeah. I met a woman at UPenn… she was in the nursing program at the time. Very clever, very promising, but incredibly insecure. She had a series of terrible boyfriends. Finally she married one of them and dropped out in her last year. He was a brute. Extremely religious, too. He wouldn't tolerate an educated wife."
"Do you remember a name?"
"Mary and Ian Cavanagh."
"Did you get all that, Garcia?"
Helena lit the last cigarette, the restlessness unsettling her again.
"You betcha, chief. I'll send Flynn and Morgan to their place tout de suite."
"Have all the potential victims been notified of the risk?"
"Ooooh yes. It was a nightmare getting through the layers and layers of denial."
"Thanks, Garcia. Keep us posted."
Hotch hung up and glanced at Helena, who was puffing away and glaring at the cracked sidewalk outside the precinct.
"Those will kill you, you know," he told her.
"Well they'd better get in line then, won't they? They've got a hell of a lot of competition."
"We'll get them, Helena. We just need to-"
"Has the analyzed data come back yet?" she interrupted. Her fragile good spirits were deteriorating quickly as the tension, fatigue, and grief began dominate her thoughts. She had never been any good at waiting games.
"Not yet."
"They don't know where the girls are being held captive?"
"No."
Helena was filled suddenly with despair. The single, overwhelmingly crucial detail was still missing. Her mission had been worse than useless; it had caused carnage and averted none.
"Then what," she snarled, "was the point of all this?"
Stubbing out her cigarette aggressively, she re-entered the precinct to wait, leaving the two FBI agents to exchange hopeless looks.
"I'll go," said Hotch. Reid nodded gratefully. Angry spies, he decided, were well above his pay grade.
He found her sitting in front of their evidence boards, head lowered into her hands. He moved silently to pull up a chair next to her. In her borrowed, oversized clothes she looked especially small and curiously childlike.
"Keep your wits about you," Gideon had told him. Hotch could not imagine any threat that this depleted little person could possibly pose to him, wits or not.
"He worshipped you," he said in an undertone. She looked up at him, revealing bloodshot eyes.
"What?"
"Your husband. He worshipped you." She laughed sardonically.
"Well, Hotch, I'll let you in on a secret:" she said, leaning in very close and lowering her voice confidentially. "I have never in my life met a woman who would rather be worshipped than loved. Except for me, of course."
"When did you figure it out?"
"Consciously? I came back from my last mission to find out that Sam's father had just died. Jonathan Blythe was a regressive, closed-minded bigot. Sam could never even acknowledge his sexuality to himself until Jon was good and buried. When I saw him with Matt at the funeral, though… well, it was pretty obvious to everyone apart from them."
"He didn't know?"
"He was horrified when I suggested it. Denied it furiously. Told me that I was the only one for him."
"So what happened?"
"So I left. Took the undercover gig in Chicago and disappeared. He would never have given up the security of our marriage if I had stayed. And to be honest, I didn't think I could have let him go."
"You still loved him."
"Completely. I was planning to give up field work and spend more time at home. Maybe have a couple of kids. To be honest, I think I always knew and liked that he couldn't reciprocate in the same way. I liked to be his muse, but if he had really loved me I would have run."
Hotch watched her tired face, unsure of how to help her. Clearly a large portion of the damage to this girl had been done long before Igor Tikhonov got his hands on her.
"You should sleep, Helena," he said. At this point, he had no other helpful suggestions. "How long has it been since you got a solid night's rest?"
"Every time I close my eyes, I see Igor and Arkady chopping Katya into pieces. I can't sleep until I see this through, one way or another."
"Try, won't you? I swear I'll wake you when I hear back from Andi."
"You're a huge nag," she complained, but she smiled warmly at him. "But if it un-knits that stormy brow of yours just a little bit, then I'll try."
She leaned forward to fold her arms on the table and lay her head down on them.
"Thank you," he murmured, running a hand over her back. He returned to Reid, feeling uncomfortably emotionally charged.
"Is she okay?"
"Not really, but I think I've talked her down for now."
"She must be severely traumatized underneath it all."
"I imagine so."
"Should she really be working?"
"I don't think she's fit to do anything else right now."
Reid frowned and nodded. At that moment, Hotch's phone rang.
"Hotchner."
"It's Swann. We're nearly done with the analysis. We should have an address on the girls in thirty minutes."
"That's great news. I'll let her know."
"How's she doing?"
"As well as can be expected, considering everything."
"Is it true that her husband was murdered while she was under?"
"Yeah. She's handling it."
"That poor girl. I'm glad it's you with her. I don't think I'd know what to say."
"She'll want to participate in the bust. Is that okay with you?"
"I'll leave that up to your judgment."
"Alright. we'll call in a SWAT team and be waiting for your call."
He hung up and turned to Reid.
"Get a SWAT team ready and find us vests. I promised to tell Blythe when we had something."
"On it."
When Hotch re-entered the evidence room, he indulged in an uncharacteristic fit of profanity. The room was empty but for the evidence boards and a truly vexing note on the table, laid neatly next to what appeared to be his own wallet.
"Gone to get cigarettes. Back soon. IOU $5."
He recognized the leftward slant of Helena's beautiful cursive script. A thought surfaced through his rising panic and anger: No matter what, no one can ever know that she managed to pick your pocket.
Helena strode down the sidewalk, savoring her small vacation. Her ill-fitting clothes and the angry bruise over half of her face drew stares from passersby, but none of them hindered her as she searched for a kiosk or liquor store.
Stealing from a federal agent, Blythe. Pretty sure that makes you a full-fledged junkie.
She smiled, imagining Hotch's brows drawn together in stern disapproval.
I'll buy him a drink when this is over.
"Helena Blythe, I take it?"
Amidst the many mingling conversations in the city, one genteel voice cut through the collective, addressing her in purring Russian. She spun around to see the man to whose downfall she had devoted her every waking moment for the past year.
"Arkady," she breathed.
"You've been very rude to my son, Helena," said the pakhan reproachfully. "Taking advantage of him. Of his stupidity."
He was not a tall man, nor an especially distinctive one. He stood a few inches taller than Helena, with narrow shoulders and small, active hands. His round, greasy face was dominated by large, thick lips and clear gray eyes. He had a habit of redundantly smoothing his impeccably tailored suit when he spoke, tugging and adjusting his sleeves and trousers constantly.
Not by any means an imposing figure. Helena, however, found herself frozen in fear. In those delicate hands, he held the gun she had brought to the Casanova. No one around them seemed to have noticed.
"I realize, of course, that your own life means very little to you. However, I count three children under the age of ten currently within shooting range. I do not take pleasure in killing children, but they would not be my first."
"What do you want?" she snarled.
"Drop your phone. That's right, the one in your pocket." He watched as she slowly, grudgingly obeyed him. "My associate has a car parked two blocks down. We will both move in that direction. You will sit in the passenger seat and keep very, very quiet."
As they walked, he continued to speak.
"I am informed that you have taken an interest in my menagerie." She whirled on her heel and he paused three feet away, the gun pointed towards a little girl with brown, curly hair.
"Don't call them that."
"Oh very well, I'll indulge your high-minded quibbling. The poor girls. Is that better?" She turned and kept walking. "You wanted to rescue them, didn't you? That's why you risked everything? That's why you turned my own wife against me?" She heard the anger through his pleasant facade when he mentioned Katya, his best work. The girl he had kidnapped from her fiance and family thirty years ago and broken to pieces, rebuilding her into the perfect domestic wife.
"I turned Katya against you because you had fucked with her mind the same way you destroyed Canary's. They both deserved better."
"But as it turns out, my influence was the stronger one. She came to me in the end. She confessed."
"But she didn't give me up." She turned her head to see the spasm of annoyance that flitted across the small man's face. "You're not as powerful as you think you are, Arkady."
"Well, now you will have a chance to see my methods in person. I am so looking forward to working on another agent, Helena. Your kind is such fun."
They had reached the car, and Helena climbed in with her blood boiling.
Suddenly, she remembered Hotch admonishing her as she lit her cigarette: "Those will kill you, you know."
I really fucking hate people who are always right.
The gargantuan man at the wheel did not acknowledge her in any way. Arkady climbed into the back and set the cold barrel of the gun against the back of her neck.
"We'll see," she murmured.
Every thought save one had drained from her mind.
No matter what, Arkady, I will watch you die.