A/N - So very sorry about the delay. It was a hellish week of work deadlines, single parenthood while my better half was at a conference, and food poisoning...the proverbial cherry on top!

Thanks for your patience!

The first two months after Rory was born, Emily fretted over her milk supply. There was always enough, but there wasn't a plethora, and she often wondered if Rory was getting everything she needed. I'm not sure what happened after that, but if I had to pinpoint one thing, it was that when Rory started being more expressive in her happiness with Emily and her life, Emily settled down and stopped worrying so much. As Rory's smiles became more frequent, as her body filled out and little dimples graced her knees and elbows, as her hands started grasping Emily's skin more, looking for sustenance, Emily's body let loose with a deluge of milk.

It was at that point that Emily started wearing nursing bras with pads to bed. That kept up for about a month until I told her I didn't mind if she leaked milk, and I didn't mind if we needed to change the sheets every morning - I only wanted her to sleep comfortably.

I was never the type to sleep through one of Rory's feedings even though Emily would often hush a whispered, "Sleep, Derek." I never did. I can't recall a single middle-of-the-night feeding where I slumbered through the whole process. Emily would feed Rory, and I'd watch them. When Rory was done eating, I'd burp and change her if she needed it before putting her back in her bassinet, and later, her crib in her own room.

And then I'd wrap my arms around Emily and rub her back or run my fingers through her hair until her breathing was deep and even again. The whole time I'd think, "How did I even get you and how did we become this happy and wondrous?"

Emily never really gave up those night-time feedings, even after Rory was quite fine with a bottle. There was one time when she had the flu that I got to feed Rory in the middle of the night. And then there were five nights in the Bahamas where my mother handled the bedtime bottle.

Rory was ten months old before she reliably slept a solid nine hours at night. Emily would nurse her at around eight o'clock, and then again at around five o'clock in the morning, and that had pretty much been our routine for the past several months. Rory's fourteen months old now and Emily is in no rush to end that bedtime and pre-dawn nursing, something I can understand. We both know this is it; there won't be another baby or another opportunity.

Every night, after I tucked Leon into bed, I'd stop in Rory's doorway and watch Emily rocking and nursing our daughter in the faint moonlight. She'd smile softly at me as I stood there and gazed at them.

And now there's this. There's a fussy, disgruntled Rory in my arms looking for her mother or her grandmother, getting angrier and angrier each time I try to give her a bottle, and missing the comfort of her room and her rocking chair. There's my hard chest where she's used to softness, and an ache in both of us for the missing people in our lives.

"Rory," I whisper. "It's okay. She'll be home soon. They'll both be home soon," I say with confidence that is built more upon hope than reality.

Her teary eyes take in my face and I marvel at how her long eyelashes clump together just like Emily's do when she cries. I put the bottle down, giving up on that. Rory had a good dinner, and the bottle is a perfunctory substitute for the comfort of her mother's arms. She doesn't need it for sustenance, and loathes the plastic nipple that is nothing like her mother at all.

I move her from the cradle of my arms and lay her instead along my thighs, keeping my hands under her back so she's lifted softly upright and staring right into my face. Rory and Leon are keeping me here, and it's for a good reason. They need one of us, at least. But I want to be with Emily now more than I can possibly quantify with words. I want to watch her back. I want to kill the people who did this to us. I want to be the one who gathers my mother in my arms and carries her away from the hell she's currently living in...

Another picture arrived earlier today, similar to the last in that my mother was shackled and handcuffed and naked. But this time, her back was to the camera and the angry welts on her back were so red and raw that I could almost feel her pain, remembering my own brief experience under a whip. The message attached read, "You're doing well, playing by the rules and keeping this out of the paper. Tomorrow we'll contact you with instructions to get her back."

I left Rory and Leon with Chris and Rossi for a moment and then proceeded to fling my body into the backyard of this mansion we're currently hiding in. I threw up in the perfectly trimmed rose bushes off the back porch. She doesn't fit their victim profile. They won't rape her. I said this over and over in my head while the fall air and sea breeze settled over me, until I felt reasonably sure I believed it.

When I came back into the house, Leon was sitting in Chris's lap and Rory was toddling around the expansive living room here under Rossi's watchful gaze.

Chris was crying, tears dripping down his wrinkled face, and the deep purple bruise on his forehead seemed to be pulsing in sorrow. Leon had his head resting on his grandfather's shoulder, but he looked up at me when I came in, his eyes sad, but free of tears.

"She saved me," he said softly. "She saved me and she'll save Nana."

There was conviction in his voice, a conviction we were all missing up until that moment, and I managed to smile gratefully at him. I wanted to share in his certainty and in that moment I chose to. There was no reason to believe in anything other than Emily coming back to us with my mother. She was beyond good at this sort of thing, and comparing this situation to Doyle was ridiculous; she went after Doyle cold, with no help, and tried to take on ten armed assassins.

She has help now, and a much smaller group of people she's going after. JJ is with her. Penelope discovered some financial discrepancies that had gone overlooked in Adrian Stancu's files. Namely, he was skimming off the top; not a lot but enough, about fifty thousand dollars a year. And back in 2007, he purchased a young girl at one of his auctions. The records indicated they named her Holly and that she was eight years old at the time. But we never found Holly two years ago, and the money from his purchase never made it into the family's account. The four hundred thousand dollars he'd bought her for up and disappeared, just like Holly. Penelope is working around the clock trying to figure out what he did with that money.

Confident in Emily's abilities and JJ's support and Penelope's skills, I smiled again at Leon and placed a gentle hand on Chris's shoulder. I then picked up Rory and took her out to the backyard to let her run around in the falling leaves for a bit. Leon followed me a few minutes later.

"Will they hurt Nana like they hurt me?" he asked directly.

I placed my hand on his head and pulled him towards me. He'd been through hell and overcome so much and he knew far more about the indecency of some of the human population than he ever let on most days. "No," I replied. "I don't think so. She wasn't what they were after."

He nodded against my waist and squeezed me with his arms before letting me go. "They saved me and Rory. They fought and they gave me time to get away."

"They did," I agreed, grateful and heartbroken at the same time.

"He's sad," Leon said to me while placing his hand in mine.

"Grandpa? I know. He's worried about Mama, but she'll be okay. She'll be back in a few days," I replied to my son as I watched Rory run happily around the yard.

Leon shook his head. "Yes, but he's worried about Nana, too. They're very good friends."

I glanced at Leon. It was true that my mother and Chris had become friendly in the time we'd all spent living on the property, but something in Leon's voice gave me pause. I looked into his eyes and raised an eyebrow.

Leon smiled softly. "I saw them the other night. On Nana's porch. They were looking at each other the way you and Mama do." He squeezed my hand and whispered an innocent, "He kissed her cheek. Grandpa wants Nana back just as much as we all do."

The news stunned me. I'd never seen anything more than friendly conversations between Chris and my mother, not once. But our world had shifted in the past six weeks, with me returning to work full-time and Emily beginning her job at the State Department part-time. No longer were the days when I could work from home while Emily went to her job. My mother and Chris had had countless hours alone together and if I believed Leon, and I did, their relationship had shifted over the course of that time.

Suddenly Chris's nearly constant tears since we picked him up from the hospital made a lot more sense to me, as well as the fact that Chris had stayed in the house with my mother after Leon went to bed a couple of nights ago. It was that single shift in behavior, Chris staying instead of going to his cabin, that likely saved Leon and Rory.

I didn't say anything more about it to Leon. I was torn up inside with sadness that competed with wanting to give Rory and Leon some normalcy and confidence. We played together in the backyard. We ate the food Rossi made us for dinner. Leon, who slept a solid ten hours a night most nights and had gotten maybe five the night before, fell asleep just a little after seven o'clock that evening...

There are six bedrooms on the second story of this house, and we're using none of them. We're on a fold-out couch in the den on the first floor. Chris sleeps on a cot next to us. And Rossi, in constant vigilance that is probably unnecessary, is content to sleep in an arm chair in the corner of the room, his feet propped up on an ottoman and a gun in his hand.

If it wasn't so damn devastating, it would be a lot like camp - me and the kids snuggled together on the fold-out couch, Chris snoozing within arm's reach, and Rossi just a couple of feet away.

With Leon and Chris already asleep, I tried to feed Rory in the living room tonight in hopes that she'd drift off to sleep, too. But she's having none of it.

She stares at me with her damp eyelashes in the soft light from a single lamp. "Mamamamama," she whimpers.

So I reassure her again. "Mama will be back soon."

I stand, aware the Rossi has stationed himself in the hallway, where he can both keep an eye on me and Rory and guard the door to the den. I hold Rory in my arms and feel as her cheek settles down on my chest. "Dada," she sighs, like she's resigned herself to this turmoil much like I have.

I walk around the room and rub her back. I try to sing, but the words stick in my throat. I just want to call Emily, but I know I shouldn't. Our phones are probably safe, but the only connection she should have with us while she's away is with Penelope, if we're to be absolutely sure no one will ever know she's in London.

With tears in my eyes, and not caring that Rossi is in earshot, I talk instead. "On Mama's last birthday, you were only about six weeks old. You were fussy and didn't want to fall asleep that night, so Mama held you and I fed her birthday cake in bed. She smiled at you and me the whole time."

Words become too much for me. I walk and let my tears fall into our daughter's beautiful, curly, wild hair as she snuggles against me and finally lets sleep take her.

Rossi's hand on my shoulder is warm and comforting as I pass him in the hallway. I hear him follow me into the room, and much like the night before, I settle Rory next to Leon in the middle of the bed. I watch Rossi take up residence in the chair in the corner of the room, his gun glinting slightly in the moonlight. Before I crawl into the bed next to Rory, I turn to Chris.

He's sleeping on his side, his body facing the window in the room. I step over and do what I think Emily would do in that moment, bending over his body and kissing his head softly. His voice startles me. "I keep thinking that if I hadn't spent so many years as a drunk, I would have been strong enough to fight him and keep Fran safe, too."

My tears start up again, but I blink them back. "If you hadn't spent so many years drinking, it's more likely you wouldn't have been there at the house at all, and this would have been much worse. You fought hard, Chris. Emily will get her back."

He rolls over to look at me and voices the one question I've been avoiding in my mind this whole time. "But will we get them both back the same?"

I don't have an answer. There's just grief and fear crashing around inside me. I squeeze his shoulder and nod without confidence. I'm holding all the pieces of Emily's current life in this room and she's off completely rogue, having to be someone else right now, and I don't know what the world looks like when we get her back.

"What's a woman like you doing in a dive like this?"

The voice startled me. I recognized it, but it didn't make sense in the context of the establishment I was currently sitting in. Clyde Easter, I confirmed as I looked up from my drink. I worked with him briefly, a joint effort between SIS and the FBI my first year out of the academy. Four years had passed since then, and I didn't know why he was standing before me in a bar in Cleveland.

I didn't know how to answer his question, so I simply watched him as he sat on the stool next to me, dipping his head intimately close to mine and whispering, "There are nicer bars around here, but you're tired of the meat market they present. The gentlemen at those establishments are either married and trying to hide it or overly-confident, and the game is exhausting for you. You choose a blue collar place, but you come dressed in a designer suit. No one here will hurt you, but no one will approach you either. It's how you like it. You can say that you went out on Friday night when you get back to the office on Monday. You come to places like this because the women find you snobby and the men find you unapproachable and you can drink alone."

I opened my mouth in a rebuff and then sighed. "Nailed it."

Clyde laughed and pulled away from me. "I'm good at things like that. I think you could even be better than me. That's why I'm here. I was hired at Interpol UK to start a new group. Elite profilers. People who are fervently independent and want to dedicate their lives to the job and undercover missions. An equivalent to your Navy Seals, if you will, but without quite as much secrecy. When I was told to pull together a team, I thought of you, and then I thought it was impossible since you needed to be a UK citizen. And then I dug a little bit and found out you had dual citizenship."

I stared at him and sipped my drink. My immediate feeling was to jump at the chance. Wallowing away the rest of my twenties in the Midwest was not exactly what I had in mind when I joined the FBI.

"Why me?" I asked.

"Because I saw you in action a few of years ago. You're far too brilliant to be in Ohio. Sexism is keeping you here, if I had my guess. Your superiors are suppressing your skills to the higher ups. It's very rare when I am scared of anything, and you scared the crap out of me on that case four years ago. I thought, 'Here's a woman who could both read my mind and rip off my balls in a second. What the hell is she doing in Ohio?'"

I smiled. I'd been feeling the same way for awhile now and it was depressing. Still, London. I didn't know if wanted that.

"What would the cases be like?" I asked Clyde.

"I've currently only got a small team, me and a man named Sean. I want you to join us. We've been tasked with going undercover to locate an arms dealer right now. Do you know how to play poker?"

I surveyed the man before me and took another sip of my drink. "You're saying sexism is holding me in a field office in Ohio, but how is it any less sexist of you to use my gender to go undercover?"

Clyde didn't blink. "Oh, it's sexist as hell. But at least it's honest. If you work for me and do a good job, I won't hold you back from transfers or promotions if you want them. I'll make sure you get where you want to be if you work for me and do a good job. I promise you that."

I didn't know why, but I believed him completely. He was confusing and not always appropriate, from what I knew of him, but I never doubted his honesty.

"I'm fairly good at poker," I told him.

"I'll make you better," he said.

Why I'm laying in a bed in Nick Hansen's guestroom thinking about that time with Clyde is not lost on me: It's where it all started. Had Clyde never came back for me, I wouldn't know Nick Hansen, and I probably would never know Derek Morgan. We came up from the FBI academy separated by several years. I was at the Academy while he was still pursuing his JD. There's as slight chance we would have ended up at the Hoover Building together at some point, but it's doubtful.

Everything needed to happen how it did in order for me to be where I am now. And where I am now is far different than where I was forty-eight hours ago. Forty-eight hours ago, I was sleeping next to Derek in bed looking forward to my birthday dinner out, his arm locked around my middle and his breath warm against the back of my neck while our children slept just down the hall. Tonight, I'm in Nick Hansen's flat, on one of the two twin beds in a guest room that had been preserved for his relatives when they came to visit.

Nick had cleaned up while we were out seeing Gil. He'd cleaned up his flat and he'd cleaned himself up. His guest room was now impeccable, but the two twin beds were fitted with sheets decorated with space rockets because his two most frequent visitors were his nephews.

I never planned on this.

I considered staying with Nick while I was in London, but I never considered JJ sharing the room with me. I never considered the close proximity of another person who would witness my weaknesses when I was trying to be resolute, and I never considered the sound of a baby crying on the floor above us. An infant by the sound of it.

JJ's breath was deep and even a few feet away from me in the room, and my breathing was ragged and wandering all over my mental map.

Gill was everything we needed and more than I was prepared to handle. Gil was the owner of all of Clyde's personal medals and commendations from his past that I'd wondered about. Gil was with Clyde in the Royal Marines and later SIS. He was the behind-the-scenes man who orchestrated everything from supplies to electronic surveillance while Clyde took in all the public accolades. And when Clyde found out he was dying, Gill was the recipient of every aware Clyde ever received while Gil was in his ear. Clyde left Gil with a note, "These were always more yours than mine."

You're twenty minutes from Theydon Garnon. Why didn't Clyde call you immediately two years ago? I'd asked the grown hippie who'd shown us around his house and let me see all of Clyde's awards.

I was in Russia at the time, Gil had responded.

I nodded. There was no point in arguing that statement. Clyde's whole purpose in those last weeks of his life was to get me and Derek together, and if Gil had been close enough to stop the fire, Clyde would have called him.

Gil was generous, with both thoughts and information and supplies. "Whatever you need," he'd told me and JJ.

I didn't know exactly what we needed at that point, but I had a list of thoughts - night-vision binoculars, weapons, vests, access to a helicopter and plane, sedatives and amobarbital or any "truth serum" he could get his hands on.

It was that item on the list that caused him to look closely at me.

"I need to know if there's anyone else out there besides the people who have Fran," I told him.

He was quick just like Clyde, voicing what I'd already thought about. "Odds are that there is is. You say the woman with the red hair is in her twenties? Where does she come up with something like this? From Adrian? The idea, maybe, but there's got to be someone else she has access to that's feeding all of this. You want to find the woman, you find out why Adrian kept her in secret. You want to find the person orchestrating this, then you're going to have to dig deeper. Adrian won't tell you even if you could secretly visit him. But it's just not possible. Not in all my years. An amateur, no matter how much vengeance she has in her heart, is not capable of this. There's someone else."

I took in those words and agreed with them on some level, but I didn't obsess over them. Fran was my only mission at the moment. Fran and a new picture that had been sent early that morning, on US time, which had arrived to us in the afternoon on UK time while we were first getting to know Gil.

Gil assured us he'd get our supplies together. He said he knew everything about me, and about how much Clyde cared about me, and it was more than just duty, it was like helping out family.

"What if you're caught helping us?" I'd asked him.

Without blinking or looking away from my eyes, he'd said, "I'd willingly die before I gave you away."

Regardless of his eccentric appearance, I believed him. JJ believed him. And with those words ringing in our ears, we'd made our way back to Nick's flat and started delving into his research.

Adrian was a sociopath uncomplicated by a dicey childhood, which was the first red flag to me. No one goes from innocent child to full-bread sociopath in the blink of an eye. There are always clues, but Adrian's history yielded none. He was a good student, he was well-liked, he was popular and admired and sheltered by his wealthy parents. There were no mysteries in his hometown in Romania when he was growing up. Adrian Stancu was the perfect child, even though we all knew it wasn't true.

As evening turned to night, JJ and I were both feeling our lack of sleep in the past forty-eight hours. We agreed with Nick to six hours, and we'd resume at five-thirty in the morning. We readied for bed. I crawled in between the sheets of a twin bed covered in spaceships and stars just moments before JJ did.

"Em?" she asked.

"Hmm," I murmured in my exhausted state.

"Nothing," she said.

I couldn't find sleep, even long after JJ's breath settled in the deep, even rhythm of slumber. And then the baby started up, a baby who I could hear through the vents in Nick's building.

I'd thought my breastmilk would just fade into oblivion while I was gone. Quite frankly, I was counting on it, to just let that go and focus on finding Fran and ending this situation permanently. But with the muffled cries of a baby in the building, I felt a tingle in my breasts that I hadn't really felt in a long time.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," my harsh side murmured in irritation as I dragged myself out of bed. I made my way to the bathroom and lifted my pajama top - an old t-shirt of Derek's that I'd pilfered from Rossi's house before my flight. It was over the sink in Nick's bathroom that I hand-expressed the milk that was causing the heaviness in my breasts.

My tears and my breast milk mingled together and slid down the drain.

I'm not sure how long I was in the bathroom before both my milk and tears subsided. All I knew was that I needed sleep. The night Fran was taken, I hadn't slept at all. And last night I'd only had a few hours on the plane. My eyes were red and weary, and my body was exhausted, but I couldn't imagine laying down in bed at that moment.

So I went to Nick's living room and flicked on a small table lamp. There were file folders all over the coffee table and I picked one up. I also picked up Nick's pack of cigarettes and snatched one from the cardboard case. I lit it with a lighter that was on the table and inhaled deeply before coughing slightly.

I pondered the mystery of Adrian Stancu's past.

No sociopath goes from zero to sixty. I had the feeling that the mystery of the red-headed woman lied in Adrian's past - a past that we couldn't find.

I flipped through documents, learning more about Adrian's childhood. He lived in Romania and went to a private school where he had an impeccable academic and behavioral record. His family vacationed every summer, spending time in both the shores around Greece and Provence.

I'm deep in thought when JJ wanders down the hall. Dressed in flannel pajama pants and a gray t-shirt, she looks much younger than she is. "Why aren't you sleeping?" she asks.

She doesn't ask why I was smoking.

"We're missing something," I say.

I pull Nick's laptop towards me and open the internet browser. I start doing searches for missing children's cases in both Provence and Greece that were unsolved. I click on links and search results and go back and clicked on different links.

"Did you smoke before the BAU?" JJ asks.

I shake my head. "Not really. Only on cases. I'm one of those fortunate people who don't get addicted to nicotine. I like the rush it gives me, but I don't need it or crave it."

I see JJ nod out of the corner of my eye. "Why did you join Interpol in the first place?" she asks.

"Clyde needed a good poker player," I respond as I stab at the links on my web search.

JJ huffs out an audible breath. "At your wedding you said that you'd lived all over the world and had only ever felt like you were home once in your life, and that was at your house with Derek. That's why I'm here. I don't want you to give up on your home, no matter what happens."

My eyes are torn between what I've found on the computer screen and what JJ is saying. Her eyes are luminous in the soft glow of the room, heartfelt and staring at me. I don't want to give up on that either, but we have to get through this before we can go back.

I turn the laptop screen to face her. "Tatiana Gavlan, eleven years old, went missing from Provence in 1980. Her family was renting a house for the summer in the same neighborhood Adrian's family always stayed. He would have been thirteen at the the time. He was never questioned in her disappearance, but his father was, though they never found anything. It was the last summer his family spent any time in Provence."

I watch JJ take in Tatiana's face - the startling blue eyes and the red curly hair. I watch as JJ reaches for her burn phone. It's two o'clock in the morning in London, but it's not obscenely late in DC yet, and we aren't working on any modernized synchronicity with time anyway.

"Garcia," I hear JJ say into the phone. "Look for home purchases or rentals from the time Adrian's four-hundred thousand dollars disappeared until two years. We're looking for anything in Europe where the first name on the deed or agreement is Tatiana. Or the last name is Gavlan."

Maybe it's a needle in a haystack, but I don't think so. The resemblance between Tatiana and the woman I saw on surveillance cameras in that courthouse in London is uncanny. They aren't the same people for sure, but if I close my eyes, I can almost delve into Adrian's head. He was thirteen and his games went too far with a little girl in the neighborhood on summer. He killed her accidentally - and hid the body. And his life and his cult was spent in search of a suitable replacement. I think back to the number of red-haired children I saw who were his victims - an overwhelming percentage.

And Adrian found one. He found one and he kept her, and now she's out for revenge. And I'm out to take her down.

I take a drag from the cigarette in my hands and open my eyes to look at JJ, who is staring at me like she doesn't quite know what to make of me. After nearly an hour of silence, the baby a floor above us starts up with her crying again. My nipples tingle, but I push the feeling aside. I stab out my cigarette.

"We should get a little sleep," I say to the woman I consider my best friend.

She nods. She touches my shoulder, but stays quiet when I pull away from her.