There was something off about the way the woman was acting. Maybe he should have picked up on it sooner, but from the moment he saw JJ huddled inside the ambulance he couldn't seem to focus on anything else. She was alive. Last night he'd barely slept, his mind going over every possible thing that could be happening to her and imagining her face on every dead
body he had ever seen.

He'd been the one to help the young brunette from the car, but Andi was doing most of the talking. He'd only been listening, and barely that. The feeling that something was wrong was barely an itch at the back of his mind until her hand swung up and she was pointing a gun at him. He didn't even have a chance to draw his own weapon before the stickiness of blood splatter covered one side of his face. If Dave had been any slower it would have been his blood.

"Renee was last seen with a woman," Andi commented as they both looked down at the pool of blood on the concrete. Half of the woman's jaw was gone, where the bullet had exited. "It never occurred to me..."

"It's extremely rare for a group like this to be dominated by a leader who is female or young, let alone both. I don't know that I've ever seen or heard of a case like this one." Despite all that he'd seen there were still so many things he couldn't understand. How could a young woman be responsible for the torture, rape and death of people her own age? People who, like Renee, must have trusted her. She was the reason JJ was there was well; it wasn't the blood or disfigurement that turned his stomach when he looked down at her.

"If you'll excuse me." He barely nodded at Andi before stepping around the corpse. He crossed the yard in his normal strides, though he was tempted to run.

"She's dead," he said unnecessarily as he stopped a few feet shy of the ambulance's open back door.

"Good riddance." The only thing Rossi regretted was the pile of paperwork Strauss was going to make him do. That, and the fact that the psychopath hadn't suffered more.

"I'm going to go check in on the others." He touched JJ's shoulder lightly, and nodded at Aaron.

"Thanks, Dave." The words were paltry considering what Rossi had done, but they were more than enough between friends. Rossi only quirked the corner of his mouth up in acknowledgement before he walked away, re-holstering his gun as he went.

"How are you?" he asked JJ when they were alone. Two months since he'd seen her, he should have been able to manage something better than that, but his brain wasn't working well. She had the blanket wrapped tightly around her but as he'd been walking towards her he'd seen a bruise on her calf and there were dark smudges under her eyes. He wondered what other injuries she was hiding.

"I'm thinking of having the words 'I'm fine' tattooed on my forehead." She sighed a little. The air between them grew thick with silence as they watched police cars leave one by one, carrying away the perverts that liked to maim and kill, and the ones that bought and sold human beings. JJ didn't speak until the last police car drove away, and SWAT began to follow them out. "I'm sorry."

"What?" Hotch looked at her, confused. Why was she apologizing to him?

"I didn't like lying to you, about this. I'm sorry you had to find out from Andi."

"I understand why you did it." That didn't mean he had to like it, though. She wasn't wrong about some of the things she said in her letter, but that didn't make it easier to take.

"Why you didn't tell me," he clarified. He still didn't really understand why she'd taken Andi up on her offer after turning her down once.

"There were two files that crossed my desk last September. Two missing college students, but they were in different parts of the country with nothing to link them. We get so many cases, so many other places we're needed, that all I could do was pass the information onto Andi. A week later there was another file, a twenty year old woman away from home for the first time." Her hair had been long and blond, paler than JJ's own. She was older than Alice had been, but there was something about the eyes that reminded JJ of her sister. "In the last year I've flagged over thirty files for Andi. Two were found dead. One was found alive. The others... I had to do something, Hotch."

"You do something, every day. People are alive and families are reunited because of the work you do at the BAU." He hadn't appreciated just how much work that was, until she'd gone and he'd tried to take it on himself.

"It didn't feel like enough, not when they kept vanishing and Andi was there giving me a chance to help stop it."

"JJ..." He wasn't sure what he was going to say, and was almost relieved when Morgan came up to them. Hotch took half a step back.

"All the buildings have been cleared. The crime scene techs will come in the morning; until then a patrol will stay out here to keep an eye on things. We're ready to go." He turned to JJ, looking her over in the better light; it made her being here all too real. "I didn't get a chance earlier to say how much I've missed you. Any chance I can get a hug?"

"There's every chance." Her smile, for the first time in over a week, was a genuine one as he wrapped his arms around her.

It was such a private moment that Hotch almost felt like he should turn away, but he couldn't. He felt, among other things, jealous; not of the friendship between Morgan and JJ, but of the easy way Morgan was able to ask for, and offer, comfort. Any thoughts about his own inability to let people close was derailed when the blanket, not held as tightly while JJ hugged Morgan, slipped down. There were bruises on the back of JJ's shoulder, four small oval bruises in a perfect row. Someone had held her down so tight that they'd marked her. Ten different ways she could have gotten bruises in just that place occurred to him; he hated every single possibility.

"I'll let the medics know you're ready to go." His hands, as he walked away, were clenched so tightly they turned white.