A/N: Sorry for the prolonged wait! Please be aware this chapter contains sexual assault to a degree.
Genre: Suspense
Author: hotchityhotchhotch
Emily closed her laptop as if her web browsing involved something far dirtier than a job search. She swallowed only to find that her mouth was completely dry; then she let Hotch into her apartment.
"Hey," he said with a smile and a quick kiss. "Hope Thai is okay."
"Sounds great," Emily said, getting down some plates from her dark cherry kitchen cabinets.
"Everything all right?" Hotch asked, sneaking up behind her and speaking almost right into her ear.
"Yeah, everything's fine. Will you get some glasses?"
After a month of sneaking around, Hotch figured Emily just felt a bit skittish. In all honesty, so did he. Even though no one would catch them together at her place, it was smart to be vigilant. But if he had things his way, this weekend would give them a couple of days away from all of that.
"You look like you're up to something," Emily observed keenly, spotting Hotch's distant yet pleased look.
"I am. I need you to pack a suitcase."
Emily stopped un-bagging their dinner. "What for?"
"The beach."
A smile curled Emily's lips up. "When? Right now?"
"Got us a redeye. Leaves in…three hours," he said, checking his watch.
Emily gave up on food altogether. "Hotch, you're insane. You already paid for tickets? Where are we going?"
Hotch laughed. "Can you ever ask just one question at a time? And yes, I already bought our tickets, but the destination is a surprise."
"Neither one of us is on vacation right now. You do realize that, right? If we get a case this weekend, we're expected to be on it." But Emily looked excited despite her qualms.
"I'm aware of how the rules work, trust me. Just eat your dinner and go pack a bag."
"What about Jack?"
"Haley and her sister took him to see some extended family. I traded her for some weeknights next week. Now go."
—
"I can't believe you didn't tell me ahead of time so I could maybe put some self-tanner on," Emily said, lifting her shirt a crack. "I probably glow in the dark right now." They got in line to check in for their flight.
Hotch chuckled and wrapped his arms around his girlfriend. A girlfriend was something he definitely hadn't thought was in his future, much less one as promising as Emily. "I love your ghost-like aura."
"Very funny."
Just then, both their phones chirped simultaneously.
"No," Emily moaned, getting to hers first. "Come on, I didn't even get to find out where we were going first. Ugh…"
"Don't worry, I'll get a refund," Hotch said, though rather disappointed too as he pulled out his credentials, ready to abuse them.
"Still…it was going to be our first trip together. You surprised me and everything. It was so sweet."
"I'll surprise you again," Hotch promised. "Right now, we have to get through this line in time to get you back to your place so you can take your own car to work."
"Is it just me, or is sneaking around getting old already?" Emily said before thinking.
Hotch's heart stopped. Even an infinitesimal possibility of losing Emily was too much. "It's…not just you. But we'll work it out."
—
"You don't look happy," Garcia said when Hotch walked into the office a few minutes after Emily.
"Did I ruin a vacation or something?" JJ asked.
Hotch answered neither one of them and took a seat next to Emily. "Let's start the briefing so we can get wherever we're going."
JJ gave Hotch a strange look, then aimed her remote control at the laptop. Onto the TV screen popped an image of a dark-haired couple in bed, their hands tied behind their backs. "Amanda and Pete Semzak, both thirty-four, were found mutilated in their bed yesterday morning by their housekeeper. As you can see, they were naked. The unsub seemed to have waited until they were in the act or maybe had fallen asleep afterward and killed Pete first with three stabs to the chest, at some point castrated him, and then killed Amanda with stab wounds placed in a similar pattern. At least they figured the unsub killed the husband first judging from the spatter analysis and the fact that it would be strategically sounder to bring down the man first when he still had the element of surprise. Preliminary analysis puts their time of death at around ten p.m."
"I looked over this case yesterday," Hotch said. "The police weren't asking for help yet. Another incident?"
JJ nodded solemnly. Another similar looking couple showed up on the screen. "Carolyn and Adam Woodward, just last night. Same age, signature, only a mile across town. Carolyn's sister came to pick her up for brunch this morning and found them. Same estimate on time of death. PD wants us down their pronto. They can't afford to lose the tourism bucks to a serial killer."
"Let's finish the briefing on the jet," Hotch said, taking down some notes. He made sure that he and Emily were the last ones to leave the roundtable room. They let everyone else get quite the head start.
"What?" she asked when she noticed the glint in his eye. "No way," she said in dramatic realization. "Myrtle Beach, really? That's where you were going to take me?"
Hotch nodded. "I had a spa trip planned for you and nine holes of golf planned for me, even. I won't give away anything else, though. We'll still go on a real trip eventually. But maybe once the case is over, we can at least sneak in a moonlit walk on the beach."
"Yeah, nothing gets me in the mood for romance more than couples being mutilated while they have sex," Emily teased.
"I was thinking we might have to have a drink beforehand."
—
"Any luck with the Semzaks' parents?" Hotch asked Gideon as they all reconvened at the police department the next evening after several hours of interviews.
"No known enemies. Nice quiet newlyweds heavily involved in their church. Nothing interesting besides the fact that they'd gotten some work done in their basement recently. I've got Garcia looking through employee backgrounds."
"I have her doing the same for the Woodwards. They had some basement work done, too," Emily reported. "They were also newlyweds, but nothing about church. We can probably rule out that connection."
"That's a good starting point," Hotch said. "But I'm sure a lot of people get work done in their basements around here with all the hurricanes and tropical storms coming through. So that's not good enough. We need something more to go on while Garcia digs. We might have another dead couple on our hands by tonight."
"First responders were different, so nothing there," Reid reported. "I checked out the scenes and they're done dusting for prints. They haven't found anything that's already in the system."
"Any evidence of rape?" Hotch asked Morgan, who had visited the morgue.
"Hard to tell so soon, given what they were doing at the time or right before. They obviously found semen in both women and they also had skin under their fingernails with no signs of nail marks on their husbands, but they easily could've been fending off the unsub when he came at them with the knife, not necessarily resisting rape. We won't have any DNA evidence until the first rape kit comes back tomorrow."
Hotch had a sudden thought. "Reid, you were at the crime scenes—were the windows open?"
"Uhh…yeah, in both bedrooms. But the CSIs could've opened them."
"Good CSIs wouldn't. What about the curtains?" Hotch asked.
Reid closed his eyes. "They were mostly closed, but sheer. If the light was on and someone was close enough—"
"Both one-story houses, right?" Emily said ominously, flipping through the pictures in her case file. Reid nodded. "Think we've got an out-of-control peeping Tom on our hands?" she proposed.
"Anything's possible," Hotch asked. "Garcia's busy with employee screenings. Morgan, go to Detective Ferris and tell him we need a list of convicted sexoffenders within a five-mile radius, specifically voyeurs. "Once we have the list, we'll all split it and start getting alibis."
Happy to have some leads on the case so soon, Emily took her portion of the list and began a few blocks from the police department. The first sex offender she questioned dug through his garbage for a movie stub from the night of the first murders and reported having spent three hours in front of his computer the night after. He'd even shown Emily his computer history, the contents of which told her that he wasn't quite on the path to recovery from his perverted tendencies. She thanked him for his time and went to the shabby home of the next man to be questioned.
Jeremy Gray, thirty-five and overly tan given his blonde hair, looked surprised to see Emily at his door but let her inside without making her beg. Emily knew she outmatched him in wits, but his two-hundred-fifty pounds of pure muscle made her eager to move on to the next man on her list. The man they were looking for had been able to keep his fully grown male victims down long enough to tie their hands and stab them in a precise pattern without using drugs or knocking them out. If anyone fit that bill, her current subject did. "Can you tell me where you were Wednesday and Thursday nights between five and ten o'clock?" she asked when they took a seat at Gray's kitchen table.
"Uhh, let's see…Wednesday night…that's my AA meeting."
"Would you authorize the facilitator of your group to verify you were there? I'm sure you signed in, right?"
"Oh, you know what, I mighta forgot. I can call, though. Name's Sherry Dunbar. I'm not like…wanted for anything, though, am I?"
Emily shook her head. "No evidence that we have points us specifically to you besides the nature of the crime. We have dozens of others on our list. If you could get me the phone number of your AA facilitator and I can verify your alibi over the phone, that would be fine. What about Thursday night?"
"Lemme go find the number…uhh, Thursday night I go out with my buddies, hit up the tittie bar, to be honest, sorry—"
Recovering alcoholics and strip clubs don't exactly mesh well, Emily thought to herself. She was just about to text a teammate discreetly for backup when Gray showed up with a slip of paper.
"Thank you," she said, dialing the number. She grinned uncomfortably as Gray watched her intently. "Ms. Dunbar, this is Special Agent Emily Prentiss with the FBI. We're investigating two double-homicides and I need the verify—"
When Emily saw the switchblade, she would have gone silent anyway, but Gray added a hand over her mouth for good measure. She set the phone down on the table. He pressed the blade to her throat and reached across her waist for her gun. Now all she had over him was her brains and the knowledge that a knee to the groin could be crippling. She wasn't going to try anything too risky with a knife to her throat, though. She wanted to cry when Gray proved smart enough to shut her phone off to keep it from being tracked.
She'd thought it a bit chauvinistic of Morgan to suggest that she not go out on these house calls alone, but as she was led into the back of the house and into a bedroom plastered with identical photographs of a brunette—like herself, Amanda, and Carolyn—she wished someone would have listened to Morgan's advice.
She tried to fight back when she saw Gray pulling a length of rope out of his nightstand drawer.
—
Hotch was in the middle of questioning his own potential suspect when his phone rang. He ignored it for the first time and followed his two-call rule. When it rang again a few minutes later, he excused himself and answered Morgan. "What is it?"
"It's Prentiss. Somethin's wrong, Hotch."
Hotch's heart dropped into his shoes. "What? Where is she?"
"We don't know. Some woman named Sherry Dunbar called in saying she got a call from Emily but that she got cut off mid-sentence. She said the phone call didn't end right away. It was more like someone was forced to stop talking."
"You start at the top of her portion of the list. I'll start at the closest house from the police station. She had to have been following a pattern. We'll find her. You take Gideon with you," Hotch said. His current interview subject seemed to understand he was off the hook as Hotch jogged out the door.
"What about you?" Morgan asked. Hotch heard a car door shutting over the phone—Morgan was already on his way.
"I'll call in and have them send police to every location on her list. Morgan, be careful."
—
"You look more like Katie than the other girls, even," Gray said wistfully, combing Emily's hair behind her ear. Now instead of a knife to her throat, he had a gun to her temple. Her wrists were tied behind her. "Just the right size, too."
"Why?" Emily asked, gulping when the man's hand rested against her breast. "What did Katie do to you to make you so upset?"
"I suppose since I'm gonna kill you after I have my way with you, I could let you in a little," Gray said, leaning in and breathing on Emily's neck before he kissed it. "She and I were engaged. I bought her the nicest ring, got behind on my rent for it. She cried. She said yes a thousand times. I decided since we were gonna get married, it was time for us to be completely open with each other."
Emily tried to resist lying down at Gray's urging, but he pushed more forcefully until she had no choice. Rape's not as bad as dying, she told herself. Besides, the team will find me or I'll think of something before it gets to that.
"When she found out about my record, she left. Married some half-Asian jackoff with a buncha money."
"Why kill other couples, though? Why not Katie and her husband?" Emily asked, keeping her tone curious.
"Oh, I'll kill them, too. They're having a little honeymoon at home this week. I go over to watch and listen, but I'll save them for the end of their vacation. Let them enjoy themselves a little. In the meantime, I can perfect my art."
"Three stabs to the chst," Emily said shakily as her captor lay on top of her.
"To the heart."
—
Hotch jumped into his Suburban and flipped to the third page on the list—Emily's page. He started at the location on the same street as the police department. The same man Emily had first questioned looked annoyed at being harassed again when he'd given rather solid alibis for both nights, but he had already allowed the police inside and let Hotch in, too.
"Prentiss!" Hotch barked. "Are you here?"
"Dude, look at me," the man said, pointing to his thin frame. He only stood five-foot-seven. "You think I can lock an FBI agent up somewhere? I mean, not that I wouldn't wanna. Chick had a great rack. But really."
Hotch searched the house carefully once, then stormed out and sped to the next, two police cruisers following behind him. When he saw Emily's SUV parked out front, he had the police circle the perimeter. He started to open the front door with two fingers and found that it wasn't locked.
"What about probable cause?" the nearest officer muttered.
"That's her vehicle right there," Hotch snapped impatiently before he let himself inside.
—
"Three stabs to the heart," Gray repeated. "One for each word. For how many times she stabbed me in the heart. This isn't working. That's what she said to me. That's what she said to me! I saved up for a year to buy her that damn ring and she can't find it in herself to accept who I am, what I'd done?" Gray growled.
"That's horrible," Emily said. "Listen, I'll…play along. I can be Katie for you. We can even make love if you want. But not with a gun to my head and with my hands tied up. I can't get in the mood and I can't act as if I love you if I'm fearing for my life," she reasoned.
Gray said nothing in return, just took to nibbling on her neck again. Eventually, his free hand began to sneak up her shirt. The closer he got to what he wanted, the more relaxed his gun hand became, until it fell to the pillow. Just as he was about to touch his lips to Emily's, she kneed him in the crotch in one swift motion, then pushed his body off of her with her legs while he was still in shock. His head hit the corner of the nightstand and he groaned upon reaching the floor.
"You sick bastard," Emily fumed, launching off the bed and stomping on Gray's stomach.
"Emily!" Hotch called, rushing into the room at the loud sound. "Are you okay?" he asked as they rolled the groggy criminal onto his stomach to handcuff him. His erection was hard to miss and confirmed to Hotch that Emily hadn't simply been held captive.
"I'm fine," Emily said, panting as Hotch untied her restraints. "His fiancée dumped him and he couldn't get over it. He was saving her and her new husband for last. Excuse me." She left the room in a hurry, not stopping her steady pace until she found herself outside. She took in a few deep breaths and calmed herself, trying to think of anything but what had just happened.
And what had almost happened.
Hotch was content to let the police take care of the rest once he gave them as much information as he had. His primary concern was for Emily, whom he followed after in silence, letting her catch her breath and collect herself before he spoke to her. In the meantime, he made sure an officer contacted the rest of the team.
He wanted nothing more than to hold her, but wasn't sure whether they wanted to risk an officer blabbing. Even more importantly, he wasn't sure Emily would welcome any man's touch right now, even his. "I'm so sorry," he said, walking to his vehicle and hoping she would follow. She did. "Morgan was right. You shouldn't have gone alone."
"I held my own," Emily said blankly.
"True. But still, this never would've happened if you'd had someone with you. The others he took down, they were average sized, but maybe if—"
"Hotch, stop," Emily said, hugging her waist. "It's impractical to pair every agent up and get half the work done when you know two people's lives are on the line. We did what we had to do. I just…need to stop talking about it now."
"Sorry, of course," Hotch said cautiously. "Let's get you back to the station, get you—"
Emily shook her head. "I don't want to go back to the station."
Hotch withheld a sigh. "What do you need, then? Just tell me, I'll get it for you. Anything."
"Just you," Emily said, her lips rolling between her teeth. Her eyes shone as she looked pitifully up at him. "I don't want questions, I don't want the team looking at me, but I don't want to be alone. I just need you. You're the only one I trust in that way right now."
Hotch nodded and gave her a look that sought permission as his hand moved toward her shoulder. She nodded and let him grip it comfortingly. "I have an idea," he said. "How about the beach? It's getting dark out. It'll be nice and quiet there."
—
Together they looked out onto the darkening ocean when Hotch parked the SUV. Neither said a thing; they only kicked off their shoes and socks and rolled up their pant legs. Hotch considerately made sure Emily didn't watch him in the act of disrobing in any other way, waiting until her back was turned before he slipped off his jacket and popped the top button on his shirt.
"Let me just text the team really quick so no one worries," he said.
"What are you telling them?"
Hotch finished his message first, then held his hand out for Emily if she wanted it. She did and she took it, following him out onto the sand. The crowds were thinning as a cool breeze picked up. "That you're okay and you just don't want the attention or the stares right now, so we went somewhere to get a bite to eat. They'll understand that. They'll find out what happened and they won't think it suspicious at all. Not that I care about them knowing about us."
"What do you mean?"
"It's time for me to go. I'm ready for something different," Hotch confessed after a few beats. "I've thought about it a lot and I'm sure. I want more time with Jack and I don't want you and I to keep sneaking around. We deserve better. We deserve a real relationship. Not that what we've had hasn't been amazing—"
"I was looking at other jobs, too," Emily admitted, taking a moment to appreciate the warm sand beneath her feet. "All the lying is driving me up the wall, to be honest. And if I want to settle down sometime soon, start a family…" She gulped.
"I don't want you to give up your career for me," Hotch said. "You said you never would, anyway."
"I would for you."
Hotch shook his head. "Unless today makes you feel differently, I don't think you leaving this job is a good idea. You love it. And I've had my run. It's time for me to be with Jack. I missed so many firsts already and I can't stand the thought of missing more. And every time I go five days without seeing him, that's five days lost. It's time for me to be his dad, not just the guy who sees him a couple days a week."
Emily nodded her understanding. "If that's what you want to do, then I'll support that a hundred percent. I'll stay with the team until I feel it's time to leave because of…other life choices. Sound good?"
"Sounds perfect." Hotch's heart warmed for the first time since he'd seen Emily's face before they'd split up for their last task. He led them gradually to the waves, letting the water rush over their feet. It was hard not to bring up the day's events when he so desperately wanted to know what had happened. Knowing wouldn't make him happy by any stretch of the imagination, but he still found it difficult to shut off the curious part of his brain. He felt rather disconnected from her as a result of being left in the dark.
"This is nice," Emily said after a while of no sound apart from the rushing water.
Hotch didn't know if there would ever be a better time. He didn't know if there would ever be a time where Emily needed to hear it more. He didn't know if there would ever be a time when it would be taken more seriously, when she would know that he meant every word. "I love you," he said without fear. "I love you, Emily. I still do. I'm not sure if I ever completely stopped."
Emily stopped in her tracks. "Me neither," she said, making sure Hotch could see her eyes in the moonlight before she spoke again. "I love you, too." Sooner than she had expected, she found herself smiling genuinely. "This feels so right, even despite all the sneaking around. Why else would we have ended up in the same place again, you know? It surely wasn't so we could just apologize to each other. We could've done that over the phone."
Hotch wished he could kiss her, hold her, do anything to show her he agreed wholeheartedly without just stating it simply. Thankfully, he found something to say that he thought might be just as effective as any physical act. "Do you believe in soul mates?" he asked her.
Emily thought this through as they walked some more. "If someone would've asked me that a few months ago, I would've laughed."
"But now?"
Emily shrugged. "Considering what might've happened to me today and the fact that I still wanted nothing more than to be alone with you…considering the fact that we've defied death together on multiple occasions and the fact that after thirteen years, you remembered my favorite kind of pizza, I'd have to say yes."
A/N: Please leave a review! Thanks for your patience :)
