B for Beck

by Assbitch67

Beck has had her life planned for her whether she liked it or not... But for some reason it all just keeps going to shit. Maybe it has something to do with her ability to kill a full grown man with a paperclip and snipe a grape inside a shot glass from nearly 6 miles away. But, hey, the cute Doctor at the BAU that doesn't know how to carry his Revolver seems to tolerate her.

10. Behavior

Trigger Warning: Gore... literally, just... it's gonna be a repetitive thing at this point. I can't tell you how many instances of gore and violence are in this one, but just read at your own risk from now on.

---

Behavior

•••

"Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it." - Margaret Halsey, No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a Wasp.

—

These hands, these calloused and chipped hands, had seen many paper files in their days, but today they would be sorting through the files of one of the US Agency's most prolific Asset dating back to WWII.

The Interpol Agent tasked with sorting through what little he was able to dig up on this mysterious Asset better known in the Intelligence Community as simply the Sword, was almost excited to be getting to sift through the life of this incredible Asset the US Government had locked away for so long.

"Who are you?" The Agent mumbled beneath his breath as he began to drag his fingers along the edge of the very first file that his Techies were able to pull from a very deep and dark hole the CIA had buried this girl in. At least, from what Interpol Techs could pull on the Sword, they figured whoever hid her away had to be American Intelligence, but... that was just a guess. She really could've been from anywhere.

...but then they'd gotten that tip to reopen the case with new information and a location on where to look for her.

Now Interpol had a plethora of information on Sword.

The Agent started first with the top of the deck of files.

Arabella Nakajima- 22, Taiwanese Agriculture PhD student at Cambridge University based with a non-profit in Northern Africa.

"Well, we all know that's a cover," the Agent mused as he took a sip of his black tea before setting it back down on his desk. "But what's the story?"

His calloused fingers traced the edge of the manila folder before flipping through the first of dozens of case reports on Miss Nakajima's 'studies' in Northern Africa. And, boy, was she a busy girl.

—

For someone with such sharp edges, it would come as a surprise to find out that Beck actually loved kids.

It wasn't like she was rolling out the red carpet for her own baby maker- truthfully, she wouldn't know what to do if some kid wouldn't stop crying and she had no one else to hand it off to- but she sure did love doting on the kids that were related to her.

"...He looks like Alice," Beck remarked as she stared down into the bright hazel eyes of her baby nephew laid out on his stomach in front of her.

"See!" Her sister-in-law Colleen beamed up at her husband. "That's exactly what I told Jake, but he refuses to believe it."

Jacob, Beck's older brother, raised his hands in defense as the two women glared up at him accusingly. "I'm just saying, Mickey looks more like Dad than he does Alice."

Beck pulled a face as she glanced back down at Baby Mickey. "Oh, bullshit," she scoffed as she lifted the baby up into her arms and held him above her head, tilted down as she could touch her nose with his little nose. "Say 'you're full of shit, daddy- you're full of shit,'" she said in a sing-song voice to the little boy in her hands.

Mickey laughed and screamed with joy and sweet, sweet ignorant bliss, clearly not understanding a word his Aunt Beck was saying.

"Hey, be careful what you say around him," Jacob chastised his little sister. "Remember what happened with Alice when she was a baby?"

Beck grimaced slowly lowering Mickey to rest on her hip. "Oh, yeah... How could I forget that? We had to pick up extra chores around the house for at least a month."

Standing at the corner of the small kitchen island between the siblings, Colleen frowned. "What happened when Alice was a baby?"

Jacob and Beck collectively cringed at the memory. "Well," Jacob began. "When we used to babysit her as teenagers, we would... curse... an insane amount. And one day when we were all sitting down for dinner, Alice said her first word..."

"Which just so happened to be-" Beck paused, glancing down at her nephew before turning back to her siblings. "B-I-T-C-H."

"Oh," Colleen laughed out loud. "How did you two ever live that one down?"

"I don't think we ever did," Beck admit with a chuckle. "In fact, we used to lie to Alice when she was little and tell her that her first word was 'bird.'"

Jacob snorted. "Yeah, and when we finally told her the truth, she laughed so hard she nearly pissed her pants at the table during Thanksgiving a couple years back."

"That was the Thanksgiving I missed, wasn't it?" Colleen prompted. Beck nodded, recalling that her sister had been at work that holiday for the internship that eventually led her to her job at the DA's office there in Los Angeles. "It sucks I missed that."

Beck shrugged. "Eh, that Thanksgiving definitely doesn't top what happened at the Christmas of '96."

Colleen furrowed her eyebrows. "What happened Christmas of '96?"

"Nothing!" Both Ryder siblings shouted in unison, Mickey hiccupping as if on cue. "Trust me, honey," Jacob went on the explain. "You don't wanna know."

Colleen stared up at her husband, but seemed to drop the subject... for the time being.

Beck chuckled, watching her older brother and his wife embrace across the kitchen while she turned back to play with their son on her hip. He was surprisingly big for being just a little over seven months old. Then again, his dad was pretty freakishly big, too. So was Max when he was first born.

Beck sometimes wondered how she was as a baby, but she immediately shook off the intrusive thought.

"So, how's that new job with the FBI treating you?" Colleen prompted as she went to work washing vegetables in the sink at the kitchen island adjacent to her. "Clearly, they're overworking you because this is the first time I've seen you in almost a year."

Beck tilted her head and gave her sister-in-law a knowing smirk. "Don't get jealous the government keeps me away," she scolded her playfully. "I was lucky I even snuck away on this trip."

"Yeah, we all know how much of a workaholic you are on your own," Jacob chuckled as he pulled two beers from the fridge he had been leaning on earlier. "Seriously, though, how did you manage to get some time off?"

"Almost getting eaten by a Satanic serial killer tends to earn you some PTO when you're in my business," Beck winked, turning to glance down at her nephew she was bouncing up and down on her hip. She chuckled when it elicited a small scream of joy from Mickey.

"I can't tell if you're joking or not," Colleen replied, her face void of any humor, but her eyes wide in concern. "Either way, I'm glad you could make it out here. You deserve a vacation sometimes, Beck."

Ring~

Beck winced as she felt the phone in her back pocket vibrate with a new notification. She didn't exactly get a lot of personal texts or calls, so it could only mean one thing...

Beck used her free hand not holding her nephew to pull out her cell to read the message.

Hotchner: How fast can you meet us in Chula Vista, California from where you are now?

Beck winced.

"Work?" Both Jacob and Colleen prompted her in exasperated, but knowing tones.

She grimaced, "Either of you wouldn't happen to know how far Chula Vista is from here, would you?"

Colleen was a little displeased to have to say goodbye to her sister-in-law so soon after she first arrived, but Beck knew she was aware of how these government jobs were. After all, nearly everyone in the family had one. Beck's was just a little more... demanding than most.

Beck was reluctant to give up her baby nephew so soon after just getting to meet and hold him. She was right though, the kid did look like Alice. Big hazel eyes, curly brown hair, and a little button nose that almost looked too small to be on his wide-set, chubby face. This was the first time Beck had seen him in-person and she already knew that kid had her wrapped around his little chubby fingers.

"Come on, buddy, say bye to your Auntie Beck," Colleen cooed as she bounced her son on her hip. Similar to Beck, it didn't seem like Mickey wanted to leave her either, his little hands reaching out as if wanting an escape from his mom's grip.

Beck gave him a sad smile and gave on of his little hands a small squeeze. "Bye, chuột."

Colleen chuckled, turning her own sad smile towards her sister. Colleen was an only child on her parents' side with only two cousins that were about 6 years younger than her that lived on the other side of the country. So, naturally, when she'd started dating Beck's brother around their Senior year of high school back in Texas, Beck and the rest of the Ryder Clan immediately took her in as one of their own, and they'd been together ever since. Beck really did consider Colleen like a sister to her, and that was long before she'd finally taken the Ryder name.

"You be safe out there, alright?" Colleen chided her sister, leaning forward to spare her a small half-hug since the squirming infant in her arms was still trying to get free to crawl back into his Aunt's arms. "Remember, if you're ever in California-"

"Not to hesitate to give you a call," Beck finished for her as she pulled away from her embrace. "I'll keep it in mind, but you know how much I hate LA."

Colleen rolled her eyes just as Mickey let out a small wail. "Oh no," she frowned. "Someone's gonna get even grumpier when he sees his new favorite Aunt leaving him behind. I'm gonna go put him down for his nap before he has an all-out fit." Beck and Jacob chuckled as they watched Colleen depart with little Mickey still whimpering in her arms.

Beck smiled at their departing figures before turning to see her brother with a similar expression on his face. "...he does look like Alice," she stated simply, causing her brother to double-over in laughter.

"Yeah... yeah, he really does," he relented after wiping the tears from the corner of his eyes. "Alright," he began as his laughter subsided. "Real talk- how's this job been treating you?" Beck opened her mouth, but was swiftly cut off before she could even get a word out. "-And don't bullshit me. You know I got enough of that back when you were with the CIA."

Beck frowned. "I'm not bullshitting you, Jake, I'm seriously fine at this job," she insisted.

"Just 'fine'?" Jacob raised an eyebrow in perplexion.

Beck shrugged. "It's not like I'm excited to get to see half-eaten bodies, dead kids, and mutilated women on a daily basis," she explained. "But... I am getting to help bring the freaks who did those things in. It feels... gratifying knowing who I'm working for and what I'm working for. No longer just some crooked bureaucratic puppet."

Jacob nodded, but Beck could tell he was trying his hardest not to mention what happened with Hawks. Jacob knew just as much as their Dad just how integrated Bruno Hawks had become within the Ryder household. It wasn't just Beck who felt the effect of his betrayal, but it was Beck who got hit the hardest.

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask," Jacob cleared his throat. "How is your new boss? I got a couple of old FBI friends I still talk to from Officer School days that took that route after their tours... they tell me that the BAU Unit Chief is a pretty big hardass."

"You spying on me now?" Beck gave her older brother a pointed look.

"What? No- I'm not Dad," he chuckled nervously. "I just... wanna make sure you're not just throwing yourself into another job so similar to the last because you're... I don't know... trying to prove something to-"

"I took this job because I wanted to," Beck cut him off. "I don't need to prove anything to anyone."

It was enough that Beck had been holding her breath for all four years she was with the CTU, scared that a single screw up would somehow send what miniscule respect she'd had to begin with into the ground. The CTU had been all about her proving herself to not only the CIA, the agents within the Unit, and the higher-ups who looked down on her, but also Hawks... And she looked back at how well that turned out for her.

So, no, she didn't join the BAU on anyone's account... but she did still hold her breath sometimes.

"I just want you to be safe, Becks," Jacob stated, his eyes leveling with his short little sister's. "That's all."

"I am," she insisted. "I promise." She held up her hand as if going in for a shake.

He chuckled knowingly before sliding his hand vertically next to hers. "Ch-ch-" he made the gun cocking noise as both their index and middle fingers pushed back as if loading a gun.

"-boom," Beck made the explosion noise as both their hand guns went upwards towards the sky.

Jacob smiled down at his kid sister. "You be safe out there- please don't get yourself killed," he pleaded. "Colleen would be pretty broken up about her favorite sister not making it to her Godson's Christening."

Beck threw her head back in an over-exaggerated groan. "Right," she sighed. "That's a thing- I have to go to that... When is that?"

Jacob smirked, "May."

Beck grimaced. "Shit..."

"Yup- guess you're gonna just have to catch another Satanic cannibal if you're gonna cash in some more PTO," Jacob shrugged.

"Sounds like a plan," the brunette beamed as she swung the keys to her Suzuki around her index finger.

Jacob watched with mild concern as his sister practically skipped over to Hades, the bike roaring to life beneath her as she pulled on her helmet. "Stay safe!" He called out to her, earning him a small thumbs up that seemed less enthusiastic and more like a chore. As a Dad, he suddenly understood why their Dad hated that bike of hers so much as he watched his sister recklessly pull out of their large drive through and speed off down the road into oncoming traffic. Within seconds, she had already sped off into the horizon.

He wasn't sure how much of it was her new job or how much of it was just her... but there was something seriously off with his sister.

—

SIX YEARS EARLIER

"Shit!"

Arabella Nakajima cursed as she continued to push through the thick brush of the forest. Her feet felt so sore in her heavy metal-footed boots, she was sure if she ever got to take them off again, they'd surely be bloody and blistered.

Her and her crew had been running for what felt like miles up and down through the hills of forestry just along the Eastern shoreline of Lake Kivu closer to the border of Rwanda. It was beautiful during the day when it wasn't too sunny. Sure, it was humid as shit due to the large formation of clouds settling in above them, but it was better than getting beat down on by the Sun in Africa.

But they weren't there to soak up anything.

Another round of gunshots fired off just to Arabella's left, a plume of smoke and dirt blew up into the air with every bullet that missed her.

"Fuck!"

James Smithson called out from where he jogged alongside Arabella. "They're getting closer!" He shouted over the sounds of the gunshots that were only a few clicks out from behind them.

"We can't outrun them forever!" Virginia Sauceda called out from Smithson's other side.

The 'them' she was referring to being the known terrorist cell more native to Northern Ukraine that had traveled down the expanse of Africa to get their hands on a geochemist bioengineer who'd been using the exact lake they were running along the shore line of to develop a type of device that was meant to stop another local extinction from the explosive lake. But, unfortunately, what was meant to be a helpful tool in the scientific community, was then repurposed as a weapon- as per usual. Which was why Nakajima, Smithson, Sauceda, and their colleagues working surveillance- Liv Hoskins and Ken Sullivan- had been tasked with retrieving this weapon.

But due to the fact that this was outside of their jurisdiction, yet posed a threat to International safety, these people, like this mission, didn't exist.

There was another shot fired off that hit a tree directly in front of Arabella.

"Dammit," the young girl growled, halting in her tracks, yanking her hidden gun from her holster and aiming it towards the moving figures a few yards back. She barely had time to even put her finger near the trigger when her arm was jerked down by Smithson.

"No!" He'd shouted, pushing her arm down before yanking her back into a sprint. "We can't shoot back, if we leave behind shell casings- someone will trace it back to us!"

Arabella rolled her eyes, holstering her gun and continuing on with bullets still raining down on her and the group. He was right, of course, but she just hated not being able to use what she had to stop the bastards on their tail. She could take the shot and not miss, but they didn't exactly have the time or the man power to shoot them then carefully pluck all the shell casings they left behind from off the forest floor and the bullets from the terrorists' skulls.

"I don't supposed anyone else would have any brilliant plans on how to get out of this, would they?!" Sauceda called out, her footing stumbling slightly as she narrowly missed tripping over a tree branch.

"You're only a few kilometers out from Pick-Up," Sullivan explained in a calm and cool voice from over the comms.

"We're aware of that," Smithson called back. "But do you have any ideas on how to lose the groupies we have stuck to us?"

There was another array of shots, a bullet barely scraping a branch just above Arabella's ear. She yelped, Smithson yanking her arm harder to keep her in-between him and Sauceda. Arabella nearly groaned when she noticed the look of aggravation on Sauceda's face at Smithson's action. Arabella hated when Smithson pulled that shit.

"Have you tried the village just a few clicks Northeast of your location?" Hoskins prompted. "If you're fast enough, you could lose them in the crowds-"

"We won't be fast enough!" Sauceda shouted. "They're closing in and we're running out of options here-"

"I have an idea!" Arabella shouted over another series of shots. "Smithson- you got a lighter?"

Smithson made a face before reluctantly tossing over the silver Zippo to the short girl sprinting to keep up with him and Sauceda. He was a little confused, but after going on at least a dozen or so field ops with Nakajima, he learned not to question some of the shit she did.

Sauceda, on the other hand, had not quite picked up on that same habit. "What the hell are you gonna do with a lighter that's gonna get us out of this?!"

Arabella ignored her, turning back to face Smithson again as they slid down a small downward slope. Her feet hit the ground with a thud and she just kept going. "I'm also gonna need the Device!"

"What?!" Everyone collectively screamed over another series of gunshots hitting the rocks they narrowly ducked under along the side of the lake.

"Okay, this kid has clearly lost her mind," Sullivan muttered through their earpieces. "Someone take the lighter away from her-"

"Put a cork in it, Sullivan," Arabella shot back. She halted in her tracks momentarily as she noticed they were approaching a break in the forest just along a small closed off shoreline of the lake surrounded by a large portion of the mountain that surrounded a little shallow portion of the water. This was perfect.

She stopped and turned to Smithson. "Give me the Device." It wasn't a question.

"Don't give her the Device!" Sauceda barked as she too slid to a stop. "Our orders were to-"

"Our orders were to hand it in to HQ for them to dispose of it," Arabella shot back, shooting the woman to her left a withering glare. "We can either die here and have it pried from our cold, dead hands, or you can give me the Device and I can dispose of it here and now while also getting us out of here!" She exclaimed, her eyes turning back to Smithson, almost silently pleading with him.

There were more shouts and gunfire coming from the other side of the small cove. The terrorists were closing in and they were running out of time.

Smithson looked as though he were having a debate with himself on whether or not he could trust the girl standing before him. He didn't trust anyone, but if he was gonna die here and now, he might as well die with what little faith he had left being with this crazy kid.

He reached into his satchel and handed it to her.

Arabella nodded, ducking when there was more gunshots. She had to move quickly. With the highly explosive Device in her hands, she carefully went to work. She unsheathed her small blade and used the sharp edge to pop open the side of the canister that contained the Device.

"What the Hell are you doing?!" Sauceda demanded. She took a step towards her as though she were going to try and rip it from the girl's grasp, but Smithson held her back. "She's gonna get us all killed!"

"I'm not gonna get us killed!" Arabella insisted as she slowly pried out the multi-colored wires within the compartment she'd just opened.

"Vony desʹ tut!" A male voice shouted from the distance. They're somewhere here. The terrorists were closing in and Arabella had to act quick. Not that Sauceda or any of her other teammates were being very helpful while she tore the very deadly Device apart right beside a very deadly lake.

"Nakajima," Smithson growled, his voice growing more concerned by the second. "You mind talking us through what you're doing with the bomb?"

"Reverse engineering it," she replied simply as her tiny fingers slowly began to unplug and replug in the inputs and outputs within the tiny motherboard inside the small compartment of the Device.

"I'm sorry- did I just hear that correctly," Sullivan exclaimed. "Did she just say she was reverse engineering a bomb?"

"Like it's hard?" Arabella shot back before shoving all the wires and the compartment back into it's place and re-securing the top of the canister on the Device. She pressed the power button and set the setting to the lowest it could go. If she'd did everything right, this should work in her favor. If it didn't... they were dead anyways. "The Chemist literally left his notes out for the world to see, it wasn't that hard to undo whatever the terrorists did to the device to repurpose it into a bomb. I just un-repurposed it to go back to what it was originally designed to do."

"Which was?" Smithson prompted, his patience wearing thin as they heard the sounds of the terrorists growing closer.

"To contain another limnic eruption from the Lake," she explained, whipping out the Zippo Smithson had tossed to her earlier. Carefully, using one of the laces on her boots, she wrapped the Zippo around the armed Device and triple knotted it in place.

"Why are you tying a lighter to the Device if it's not meant to be a bomb?"

Arabella shrugged as she stood up from her crouched position, raising her contraption in her hand. "Because I made it into another bomb," she explained nonchalantly. "You might wanna stand on the other side of that mound." She gestured to the mound of dirt on the opposite side of the shoreline.

"Why would you turn an already very deadly bomb into yet another bomb to detonate on top of literally one of the most dangerous lakes on the planet?" Hoskins shouted over the comms, her voice rising a couple of octaves as she began to panic. "What are you- insane, Ry-" she coughed. "Nakajima?!"

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm the smartest one here," she shot back as she stared in the direction that the Terrorists were closing in from. "If I throw the contraption in the water and shoot it before it can sink too far, the Zippo will cause a small explosion that will be enough to trigger the Device not to explode, but implode. I set it to the lowest standard, but reacting to the carbon dioxide build-up in the lake, it'll create a really cool phenomenon which will kind of be like an explosion, just without the fire and shrapnel." She turned back to Smithson and Sauceda. "Which is why you really need to get behind the mound."

They didn't ask questions after that, they just ran.

Sauceda and Smithson slid behind the mound, but peeked over slightly to see Arabella running to the side the mound, just atop the water. The small narrow expanse of the lake separating them and the Terrorists rounding the corner just then. They could see the small girl standing out along the shore.

"Anytime now, Nakajima!" Smithson called out.

"Not yet," she muttered beneath her breath. "They need to get closer."

"Osʹ! YE odna z nykh!" The Terrorists called out, pointing to her, aiming their large semi-automatic rifles as they closed in on her. "Oberezhno! Vona trymaye prystriy," one of the men shouted to the rest, pointing to the contraption in her hands. They recognized she was holding what they wanted, they weren't going to shoot her now. Not if they wanted to stay alive.

Slowly, they advanced until there was only a few yards of water between Arabella and the Ukrainian terrorists.

One man held his hand out while the others kept their guns trained on her. Arabella knew what they saw when they looked at her. They saw what everyone else did, looking at some short, young, teenager. She was far from what they expected and she was going to prove it.

"Hand it over," the man told her in a calm tone. "Drop. And we won't hurt you, girl."

Arabella smirked slightly, even sparing the group a chuckle. "Yak ty vymahayesh," she replied. As you demand.

In the blink of an eye, Arabella tossed the contraption into the lake. Once it was up in the air, she unholstered her gun, aimed, and fired. The bullet hitting the Zippo lighter attached to the Device dead-on. With precise timing and perfect aim, the contraption erupted in a large implosion.

The air of the implosion blowing out along the water's edge knocking back all of the terrorists in a single blow and throwing Arabella back in the same breath of air.

She flew back, her gun falling from her hand as her back hit the hill behind her with a violent thud. She fell unconscious to the dirt. The last thing she remembered was two figures shouting over her as they dragged her up from her place on the dirty forest floor.

"Nice work, psycho," she vaguely heard someone mutter beside her. It was a male voice.

Rebecca Ryder chuckled as she was hoisted up by her arms. "I thought I was just insane," she retorted slyly.

—

PRESENT DAY

Spencer dragged his feet on the way towards the dump site. He wasn't exactly eager to see the body of one of the missing girls they'd been tasked with finding only hours before. It wasn't really encouraging to find out one of the people you were sent to find and save was already did before the wheels of the plane hit the ground.

Still, Reid kept up with the rest of the team as they made their way through the yellow tape that surrounded the area off the beaten path close to some patch of woods not too far from the main part of the town.

There were police cars and fire trucks and large Forensic vans parked around the perimeter. It might've been the dead of night, but there were enough lights to make it visible... which maybe made it even worse.

"Have you ID'd the body?" Hotch asked immediately upon greeting the head detective in the case of the two missing girls.

"It's a girl," the Detective answered as he led them through the cars all surrounding the area.

"One of the missing girls?" Hotch prompted.

The Detective frowned. "All I can tell you right now is it's a girl," he replied truthfully, a twinge of pain in his voice.

Spencer's frown deepened. Now he definitely didn't look forward to having to examine this body.

"Did you draw up a list of those involved in the search?" Morgan asked, getting into the same suspicious mindset he always had when it came to Unsubs inserting themselves into the case. It was pretty sick of some people to murder someone then try and pretend to be innocent, even being so disgusting by helping police find the body or evidence. Spencer could read a million books and write a million more on why people did the things that they do, but he still would never understand it sometimes.

The Detective frowned as they grew closer to the scene. "You're gonna find the parents of the girls on that list," he explained, handing Morgan a piece of paper another officer had handed him earlier on their walk up.

"Please tell me they didn't discover the body," Emily pleaded. Spencer hoped that was the case.

"No," the Detective answered. Spencer sighed in relief, but he wasn't off the hook just yet. "As soon as our dogs caught her scent, we kept them away from the scene."

"She's been missing 18 hours?" Spencer prompted.

"That's correct," the Detective answered. "We found the body five hours ago. In fact, one of your other agents has already started analyzing the body for us while we've been waiting for you to arrive."

The entire team collectively paused for a moment, sparing glances from one to the other before they stepped forward towards the ditch that was lit up with a series of lights and flashes from photographers and flashlights alike. Sure enough, standing at the bottom of the ditch beside the splayed out, bloody, and dirty body was Rebecca Ryder.

She glanced up at the group standing at the top of the ditch just above her, her bangs blowing slightly in the breeze as she waved her glove-clad hand up at them. "Took you long enough," she called up to them.

"Glad to see you could make it," Hotch called down to her.

Beck shrugged. "I was nearby, beat you here. Heard there was a body that was found and got right to work," she explained, gesturing to the dead girl at her feet. "Detective Payton, your guys came by earlier asking for you- something about twitchy parents."

The Detective winced at the mention of said parents.

"Have the parents been here all this time?" JJ prompted the Detective, a look of disbelief on her face.

"Yeah," Detective Payton answered exasperatedly. "And I'm running out of excuses."

"I'm gonna go talk to them," the blonde stated, turning on her heel, almost relieved to be getting away from the crime scene.

Spencer didn't blame her either. He couldn't imagine the panic and anxiety of waiting for someone to tell you, as a parent, whether or not the dead, unidentifiable body dumped in a ditch is your kid or not.

Morgan seemed to share the sentiment as he took one look at the body and said, "JJ, I'll come with you." before trailing after her.

"Thanks," Detective Payton sighed in relief. "I gotta be honest, guys. I'm glad you're all here because I have never seen anything like that." He pointed down to the body Beck was hovering over taking glances at the botched face and the skin of her body that was soaked in blood.

"Ryder," Hotch called down to the brunette agent. "What have you found so far?"

"Well," Beck began, a frown playing at her lips. "Her face and her hands have been absolutely destroyed. The Unsub- or Unsubs- used various methods to do that. From the burst blood vessels and the amount of damage to the bones, I'd say a blunt object was used. I found small chips of wood in the flesh, so I'd say a baseball bat. And if that wasn't enough, they also took a knife and sliced every piece of flesh from off her fingers, palms, and face." Spencer shuddered, but it didn't even seem to phase Beck. "Dental records are a no-go, the bat made sure of that. Facial recognition, finger prints... nothing to ID this girl except for DNA samples I already had sent to the PD Forensics lab, but..."

"It'll take time," Hotch concluded with a frown.

"Time we don't have," Beck added. "This girl was... her cause of death was strangulation with a belt, but there are extensive marks of torture long before they obliterated her hands and face and killed her. The obliteration came post-mortem, but all these marks and scars and cuts-" she gestured to the many wounds all along the girl's legs, arms, stomach, neck, and chest area. "-Those were all caused before her death. This girl was tortured with various things ranging from glass cuts-" she gestured to open wounds on her arms. "-cigarette burns-" she gestured to small red scarred dots all along her legs and some on her chest. "-and whip marks from the same belt that was used to ultimately end her life-" she raised the shirt on the girl to reveal a series of red marks and blossoming bruises all along her stomach.

Emily looked away from the body, as did Detective Payton.

Spencer swallowed hard at her description.

"If whoever did this to her only had her for less than thirteen hours, then we're hard-pressed on time to find the other girl still missing," Beck deduced as she glanced back up at the group at the top of the ditch. "But- the upside to all of..." she vaguely gestured to the body. "...is that it narrows down the suspect pool."

"How's that?" the Detective prompted.

"By destroying her ID, they're hoping to delay you making a connection between the victim and the Unsub," Rossi explained to the Detective standing beside him.

"It gives him time to get away," Hotch concluded.

"It also means she knew whoever it was that did this to her," Beck stated as she ripped off the gloves on her hands and made her way to the incline of the ditch. She held her hand up. "A little help?"

Emily was right in front of her, but Spencer was the one who reached out to take her extended hand. He wasn't the strongest member of the BAU, but he was tall enough to help pull the shorter agent from the ditch and help her out.

"Thanks," she spared him a small piece of gratitude before brushing off the dirt from her dark jeans.

"Do you think the other girl's still alive?" Detective Payton asked out loud to no one in particular.

Beck shrugged. "Judging on how quickly the Unsubs killed and disposed of this girl, I'd say we're looking at a eight to twelve hour window we have before they finish whatever it is they have planned for the second girl," she answered a little too bluntly. "After that, it'd be less about finding where they're keeping her and more about recovering what they leave behind of her."

"Beck," Spencer couldn't help but chastising the woman beside him. She turned to him, pulling a bit of a face as if she wasn't aware of how much of a... well, he hated to say it, but- how much of a cold-hearted bitch she was being by saying all of that. She was still a victim, a victim that could've very well been alive and until she was found, they were going to be working on finding her- alive.

"Until we find her body, we should assume the other girl is alive," Rossi reiterated to the Detective, disregarding every word Beck had just said.

"One thing's for sure- this is only the dump site," Hotch stated, his eyes turning from where he'd been glaring at Beck moments before back down to the body down below in the ditch. "We need to figure out where she was killed."

"And who she was," Beck chimed in. Spencer watched as she turned towards the Detective. "You think anyone from the movie theatre they were at could describe what either of the girls were wearing?"

Detective Payton shrugged. "Doubt it," he replied. "From one witness recount, it seemed like these girls were barely noticeable. Came in, left halfway through for a smoke, were never seen again until one of the girls' fathers- Jack Vaughn- came by to pick them up only to find out they'd gone missing."

"Great," Beck muttered bitterly beneath her breath, glancing down in disdain at the body still in the ditch. "No chance the parents are gonna wanna come down to see if they recognize the clothes this girl is wearing either, huh?"

Prentiss scoffed, her eyes wide as she turned to Beck looking affronted that she'd even suggest it. "Yeah, probably not," she replied.

Beck merely shrugged, "Just a shot in the dark."

Detective Payton frowned after having an officer whisper something in his ear. "Alright.. we gotta clear the body now, get it back to the Medical Examiner's for further examination. Anything we might've missed."

Beck and the rest of the group glanced over their shoulders back towards the crowd of people still gathered back by the sea of cars and cruisers. "Might wanna clear the parents out of here first," Prentiss remarked. Beck was turned away, but Spencer could see the way the other brunette agent was giving her a point look from the corner of her eye.

—

The Agent chuckled softly to himself upon finishing up the Nakajima files. Arabella Nakajima was quite the busy girl in Northern Africa.

He slowly raked his calloused fingers across his desk until they fell upon the next file on the pile. He pulled it close and read the name at the top.

Elizabeth (Beth) Nolan- 23 year old British ambassador's daughter and rich socialite. Born and raised in London with family ties to upper-class China.

The Agent frowned. He wondered how they managed to build her that cover. Surely the rich socialites in the UK were bound to know something about this Beth Nolan, but even his sources on the Island were no use to him there. She was like a ghost and none of the many lies that were spread seemed to be founded.

One thing the Agent would give Beth Nolan was that she was efficient at covering her tracks and making a big fat lie seem as believable as a fact.

Time to dig into what she got up to in Europe.

—

When the team made it back to the Police Department back in town, it was a bit of a crowded mess. After finding the body, it didn't seem like anyone on the payroll at Chula Vista PD was getting any sleep. Everyone back at the crime scene just seemed to migrate back to the Precinct and that left Spencer feeling a little claustrophobic.

To put himself at ease, he decided to sneak away to the small conference room that had been set up for the team near the back of the precinct. Although it was loud and bustling outside the office, Spencer found solace in just being able to hear himself enough to think.

"You look like you could use a drink."

He turned from where he'd been glancing out the glass wall separating him and the rest of the chaos outside the room to find Beck had entered the room, perhaps with the same idea he had for an escape of sorts.

"I, uh, I don't really drink," he explained with a small smile.

Beck smirked, "So you don't want this coffee I stole from the precinct break room?" Spencer narrowed his eyes to see her holding up a small paper cup of coffee in one hand and a bottle of Snapple paired with a bag of gummy bears in the other. For her, of course, no doubt.

He didn't argue when she set the coffee down on the table, kicking her feet up as she plopped into a chair adjacent to the one he pulled out for himself.

He watched her pop the lid off her Snapple as he took a small sip of his coffee. She was a fast learner when it come to memorizing his coffee order, he'd give her that.

"Hm," he heard her hum as she read the bottom of the cap. "The middle finger has the fastest growing nail."

Spencer frowned. "Wait, I thought that was the thumb-"

"No, actually, the thumb is the slowest growing nail," she stated with a sly smirk. "Snapple: 4, Dr. Reid: 2." She took a sip of her drink slowly, relishing in her small victory.

Spencer let out a snort as she continued, "Bested by a juice company. I thought you were supposed to be the smartest person in the room, Dr. Reid?"

"I thought we were going by first names?" He frowned slightly.

Beck dropped her eyes down to her lap. "Sorry- habit," she gave in vague explanation. And just like that, it was like a switch had been flipped. Her joking mood was suddenly sucked up like a sponge as though she were locking it back up. That was the last thing Spencer had meant to do when pointing out the fact that she'd been referring to him as 'Dr.' these past few weeks.

It had started after what happened in Florida and the thing with Garcia right after...

Now that he realized it, she had been closed off these past few cases following her leave and everything that had happened. She'd always been a little reserved, but now it had turned into something else. It was almost as though she were actively blocking everyone out.

Spencer just couldn't figure out why.

"Hey," he began, leaning forward in his seat, the coffee in front of him all but forgotten. "Is everything alright?"

Sometimes, he wasn't sure why he bothered asking. He knew he was always going to get the same answer as everyone else.

"I'm fine," she replied stoically.

But... Spencer held out hope that one day she'd feel open enough to actually tell him the truth.

Today just wasn't that day.

"Hey," the pair turned to see Morgan enter the room. "Garcia was able to piece together the message Katie left for her parents. Hotch wants us back in the main office."

Beck was out of her seat before he could even finish explaining that they were needed, "Coming." She almost seemed eager to get out of the conversation Spencer was trying to have with her. The Doctor tried not to look too hurt as he climbed from his seat as well, following after her and Morgan, leading back into the main office full of chaos once more.

"What've you got, Garcia?" Hotch prompted the video feed image of the blonde Technical Analyst they'd left back in DC.

"Nothing good," Garcia answered truthfully as the rest of the team gathered around the small computer screen. She seemed to press a few buttons on her key board and two small windows opened on their screen: one was a transcript, the other was an audio file. She hit play.

"Please, stop! Get off me!" One digitalized voice screamed.

"Don't show them you're scared!" The second voice cried out. "Don't fight!"

Spencer frowned as he listened in to the audio she played for them. In between the shouting and scuffling, Spencer thought he could hear the sounds of male laughter. Possibly the Unsub strangling the girl crying out.

"Please-" there was choking noise that cut her off. "Please- Daddy! Daddy, help me! Please, God- stop it-"

Choking gurgling, more laughing, screams and another scuffle.

Spencer was about to turn away from the horrible sounds of the girl they'd just found butchered in the ditch when, thankfully, Garcia hit pause on the audio file, sparing them from whatever was left of the message.

"It lasts exactly 53 seconds and then it goes dead," she stated. Spencer glanced back at the scene. He may not have been as seasoned as the rest of the people around him, but with how little he was used to such gore and loss, Garcia was even less experienced. He could tell having to piece together the recording of this girl's death affected Penelope. "I think she was strangled."

"You're not wrong about that," Beck crossed her arms over her stomach, her eyes downcast to the floor in a similar fashion that Hotch had his eyes down as though they were both deep in thought.

"What do you want to do?" Morgan prompted their Unit Chief.

"Do?" Rossi chimed in from Hotch's other side. "There's nothing else to do- the parents can ID the voice."

The group collectively blanched. "Are you serious?!" Prentiss gaped at the older agent.

"No!" Garcia could also be heard protesting from her place on the screen. "No, sir, they can never hear this."

"We don't have a choice," Beck explained from where she stood just beside the computer screen, glancing down at the audio file still muted. "If we don't ID whoever we just found, we can't begin to go over victimology on whoever they still have. We leave that other girl with her captors for any longer and they'll do the same thing they did to the first girl to the second. We don't have the luxury of sparing feelings when the possibility of one of their daughters not making it back alive is on the table."

Prentiss turned to face Beck, "You're talking about having these parents listen to one of their daughters being killed!"

"And the other one is soon to follow suit if we don't figure out who that is," Beck shot back, her hand gesturing to the recording still up. "Having the parents ID the voice isn't ideal, but it's the fastest way to get what we need to save the other girl we're looking for."

There was a heavy silence that set upon the group.

Hotch looked plagued by the words of all of his team, his frown deepening as he turned away from the group, his eyes briefly meeting Rossi's as he passed. "She's right," the Unit Chief finally relented. "If we don't do this, it may be too late for whoever is still out there." Spencer noted the way Beck looked as though she hadn't expected Hotch to agree with her. It was becoming a recurring thing; she would say something, he would shoot her down, or she would say something, he'd agree, and she'd look taken aback the way she was now. "DNA would take too long, but we're not going to force these parents to subject to having to listen to the final moments of one of their daughters life. We give them the choice."

Spencer glanced back at the team. Beck looked satisfied with his answer, for once. And while everyone's eyes were on Hotch, Spencer caught sight of the incredulous look Emily was still shooting to the back of Beck's head, similar the look she had been giving her earlier at the dumpsite. Hm, that was odd. Prentiss wasn't a very resentful person, so Spencer wondered what it was about Beck that rubbed her so wrong.

Either way, it didn't matter when the lot of them were all line up around the parents of the two abducted girls. All differences were set aside as everyone held their breath while Hotch explained the parameters of what they were or weren't about to do.

"Our Technical Analyst was able to piece together the message Katie left for you on your phone," Hotch began, pointedly looking to Mr. and Mrs. Owen who anxiously stood off to the side. "The message isn't... pleasant, but what we're asking won't be any easier. We need to ID the voice of the girl in the message left by Katie so we know who we're looking for. There are other options of ID'ing the girl we've already found, but my feeling is by the time we got the results back it would be too late to save whoever they still have... It's up to you."

On the far side of the room, acting in a demeanor that was far more relaxed than the other two parents were Lindsey Vaughn's father and family friend, Jack and... Actually, Spencer wasn't sure he caught the taller man's name. Either way, he did catch the odd behavior between the two men. Not necessarily the behavior of a man and family friend who had just been told the girl dead in the ditch might've been related to them or not.

"This message," Mr. Vaughn began. "What did it record?"

"It's the... last moments of one of your daughters' lives," Hotch didn't sugarcoat it.

"Oh my god," Mrs. Owen's voice broke as she softly sobbed into her hand.

"If you choose to wait, you can make a public appeal to the media," JJ offered, hoping to bring some kind of comfort or easier option for the parents. She at least understood that it was difficult, what they were asking of them.

Spencer glanced over a little further past JJ and noticed Beck had her eyes glued to... well, nothing in particular. She was just staring into space. These parents were about to listen to one of their kids dying and she was just completely zoned out. What was going on with her?

"Either way, we're still looking for one of your daughters," Rossi said, pulling Spencer's attention back up front.

"Live appeal- I don't think that's a good idea, Jack," Spencer frowned at the words being whispered into Mr. Vaughn's ear by the nameless family friend... That was an odd thing to say when the chances of finding his daughter either dead or live rested on the options laid out before him.

"Why not?" Spencer turned to see Beck had tuned back into the conversation, her eyes boring into the brunet family friend of Mr. Vaughn's as if she'd just been given a new target to tear into, and boy, did she look ready to rip into him to see if her new suspicions were correct.

"Because," the family friend began. "We know they're set up to see the reaction of the parent, check for signs of guilt."

Mrs. Owen frowned, "Is that true?"

"In some cases," Hotch answered honestly. No point in lying, though, this wasn't one of those cases... At least, Spencer hoped it wasn't.

"But you're not guilty," Beck pressed, her arms folding over her chest as she tilted her head slightly. "You shouldn't have anything to worry about if it benefited finding Lindsey or Katie."

The man swallowed hard under the intensity of her glare. This was usually around the point in time that Hotch would reign her in, but surprisingly, he seemed about as suspicious as she was.

"I'll listen to the recording," Mr. Vaughn stated abruptly.

All eyes then fell on Mr. and Mrs. Owen. It was their decision on whether or not they wanted to do it. "I'm sorry, Bruce. I can't do this," Mrs. Owen whimpered as she pulled away from her husband's side. "I'm sorry..." she muttered one last time before showing herself out of the room.

Mr. Owen frowned, watching his wife go before setting his jaw and turning back to Hotch, mentally preparing himself for what he was about to hear.

Hotch nodded, walking towards the computer and leading the group over. "Go ahead, Garcia."

Spencer held his breath.

"Please... please, no- please. Please- stop it! Stop it!"

"Don't fight them. Don't!"

"Please, God, stop!"

"Don't show them you're scared."

"Get off of me! ...please, help me! Please, God! Stop it!"

Spencer flinched away from the computer where the rest of the group was standing. He turned away and his eyes fell on the woman standing behind him. Beck's eyes remaining glued to the faces of the parents behind him. She didn't even look phased by what she was hearing.

"Daddy, help me, please! Please-!"

There was a choking, gurgling sound and then it stopped abruptly.

"P-play it again," Mr. Owen's voice broke. Spencer turned back around then once the message was through.

Hotch frowned, "Mr. Owen..."

"That's not Katie," he shook his head forcefully, sniffling as he tried to contain his tears. "I know her voice. That's not her, that's not Katie." Something told Spencer that it was with the emotions portrayed by both parents in the room. Mr. Owen was in tears, though he seemed to be in denial, while Mr. Vaughn just looked relieved.

The girl they'd found dead in the ditch had been Katie Owen.

"Bruce..." everyone turned to find Mrs. Owen had returned.

"Mrs. Owen, I'm so sorry," Prentiss turned to her, her voice as quite as a whisper as she shook her head slightly. "Please-" her eyes were already brimming with tears, JJ nearly appearing on her side as she held her up by her arm.

"No," Mr. Owen took a step towards his wife. "No, Lori, it's okay. It's not her," he insisted.

Spencer had to look away from the broken expression on both the Owens' faces. This had to be the worst part of his job, having to see things like this, experience things like this along side these parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends and family. The loss, the grief.

But it also reminded him of why he did this job. So that one day he would be so good at it that there wouldn't need to be one dead girl or boy or man or woman for them to finally catch an Unsub before he strikes. There wouldn't be any loss or grief, there would just be protecting people. People like the Owens.

"Bruce..." Mr. Vaughn frowned, taking a tentative step towards his friend, Mrs. Own nearly collapsing into the arms of the unnamed friend, sobs wracking her body.

"Jack," Mr. Owen shot back in defiance. "Jack, it's not Katie... right? You know-"

"Bruce," Mr. Vaughn pressed gently, coming over to wrap an arm comfortingly around the man.

Mr. Owen was still shaking his head persistently. Everyone in the precinct to be watching as this man unraveled, still heavily in denial about what he'd just heard... what he'd hear in his sleep from now on in his nightmares, what he'd hear when he closed his eyes, what he'd hear whenever he tried to recall the last memory he ever had of his daughter who was alive just a few hours ago.

"Jack," Mr. Owen pressed on. "Jack, it's not Katie."

"...It's Katie," Mr. Vaughn confirmed in a soft whisper.

"No... no, it's not." Spencer could almost see the exact moment that Mr. Owen finally realized that what he'd just heard was the death of his daughter. "Jack, please-" Mr. Vaughn seemed to notice the look of pure devastation on his friend's face as well as he wrapped his arms around Mr. Owen in comfort as he shook with sobs, crying with pleads similar to that of his daughter's last words into the crook of Mr. Vaughn's neck.

Spencer had to sniffle a little bit before he could clear his mind enough to focus on what was next: finding Lindsey Vaughn before her fate matched with Katie's.

"I want Lindsey's picture everywhere," Spencer heard Hotch tell Detective Payton after Mr. Vaughn ushered Mr. Owen away.

"What they did to Katie took a long time," Rossi explained to the shaken Detective. "It was very violent and we know Katie screamed-" Spencer saw Prentiss flinch slightly, but when he glanced over at Beck, she seemed to be hanging on his every word- just waiting for a command somewhere in there. "-yet, no calls from complaining neighbors... Why?"

Detective Payton shook his head. "There weren't any."

And just like that, the gears in Spencer's head began to spin again, brushing aside the horrid interaction he'd just had to bear witness to moments before to throw himself right back into work. It was almost as though he were desperate to never have to repeat that incident with Lindsey Vaughn. He didn't want to have to see another broken parent sob over a kid he couldn't save.

So he went to work.

"The abduction site is nine miles North of the dump site on the edge of town," the Doctor began, speeding off to the conference room he had been hiding out in earlier, the team and the Detective on his trail as he led them over to the map on the board. He drew a line between Point A and Point B with his red dry erase marker. "Both are indicators of a comfort zone, so I'm assuming the kill site is somewhere between these two points," he explained, gesturing between the two points he'd just drawn on the board.

"That's a wide area," Detective Payton mused, rolling up his sleeves to get to work.

"What's in that area?" Spencer turned slightly to see Beck peeking over Prentiss's shoulder to get a look at the map.

Detective Payton shrugged. "Woods, small suburbs, projects, trailer homes," he explained nonchalantly

"Do a grid search- narrow it down to wooded areas, industrial sites, abandoned houses," Hotch ordered. "He needed privacy and he needed a controlled environment."

"Or they," Beck muttered. It was almost beneath her breath, but the people closest to her picked it up. Hotch and Spencer included.

"What's critical right now is a heavy police presence," Rossi explained to the the Detective.

"Rossi," Hotch began, pulling the older agent's attention back to the Unit Chief. "In the morning, I want you, Ryder, and Reid to go in and search Jack Vaughn's house." Spencer glanced past Hotch to find the eager look on Beck's face. Ever since she'd set her sights on the family friend of Mr. Vaughn's, Spencer knew she'd just been dying to dig into what it was he was hiding, if he was hiding anything. Truthfully, Spencer couldn't even blame her. He wanted answers as well.

"Prentiss," Hotch continued with his orders. "You, Morgan, and I will go to where the girls were last seen." He let out a heavy sigh before turning back to face the group. "Everyone- head back to the hotel. Get some sleep if you can, we have a lot of work to do tomorrow."

The team began to slowly file back out of the room, but neither Beck or Spencer moved.

He felt her approach the board beside him tentatively, when he glanced over at her, she had her eyes glued on the map and the lines he'd drawn on it.

"No one's going to be getting much sleep tonight, are they?" Spencer prompted the woman still peering down at the map with unease.

He heard her sigh. "Nope," she admitted truthfully. "But, hey, at least the crappy coffee here is free... if you steal it, that is." And with that, he watched her turn on he heel and head back out of he conference room the way everyone else had left.

She was drinking coffee, Spencer mused... She didn't drink coffee, not unless something was wrong. Was something wrong with Beck?

—

Elizabeth Nolan was quite the party animal when she wanted to be.

As one of the most prominent members of the social scene in upper-class London, it wasn't uncommon to find her nursing a glass of over-priced Vodka surrounded by a crowd dancing to electro dance music in a space lit up by strobe lights.

But what was uncommon was when Beth Nolan took up an acquaintance.

She wasn't known to be overly-friendly with anyone, wasn't known to glance a lingering glance to someone in particular. It was actually a very rare habit for someone surrounded by the party scene, but no one ever took note of it until one day, Beth broke the habit and found herself secluded with a fellow she'd met at the bar and had been talking with all night.

Beth was a gorgeous girl. It was a surprise to many how she'd gone so long without being picked up by a modeling agency with her beautiful sun kissed skin that presented as tan, but not too tan to the point where she looked burnt, her eyes a gorgeous hazel-grey mix under the luminescent lights of the club, the jet-black hair that was so long she had to pin it up in places just to keep from sitting on it whenever it was straightened, and the crowning jewel of her physical features: her fit and toned body. It was surprising that she wasn't on the cover of UK's Vogue every other issue, but what wasn't surprising was the fact that finding suitors would be like a walk in the park for her if she weren't so adamant on avoiding them... up until this point.

Beth sat with her ankles crossed and hands in her lap on a luscious royal green couch in one of the few private rooms above the chaos of the club with floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the crowded bodies on the dance floor pressing up against one another beneath the flashing lights that Beth secretly loathed. She was grateful to have a reprieve from the club chaos, but her work was far from over as she leaned a little closer to the man seated on the couch beside her.

"Romanee-Conti wine..." the man practically purred in his French accent as he began to hold up the large glass bottle up from the bucket of ice it had been placed in upon their arrival to the room. "One of the world's most expensive wines. You know why?"

Frankly, she couldn't have cared less, but still, Beth smiled innocently, shaking her head. Play the part, she told herself. "Why?" She asked.

"Because this here bottle was passed down from generations," he explained. "In 1945, the Romanee-Conti Vineyard made 600 bottles of wine, only 600, before completely uprooting those vines and replacing them." Beth watched idly as he poured the dark liquid into two separate glasses, his words pouring from his mouth as smooth as the wine was pouring from the bottle. "Some bottles sold for over half a million dollars, my family was able to buy five of those bottles. My great-grandfather had a bottle, his son after him, my father after him, and now... us."

He beamed at the woman seated beside him as he set the bottle down and handed her a glass as he took his own in his hand. She took it as he raised his in a small toast. "To us."

She smiled, holding the glass up slightly. "To uprooting the past," she amended before bringing the glass to her lips, watching through her eyelashes as the man took a long sip of his drink. Unlike the man across from her, however, Beth didn't let the liquid reach past her lips down her throat. She just waited.

It only took a second or two before the man's blinks became rapid and his Adam's apple began bobbing up and down as he tried to place the odd taste he was getting from the wine right now. It would be now that the drugs were setting in and he'd begin to lose sight in his right eye and the high-powered roofies would begin to throw off his equilibrium.

Beth slowly pulled the wine back away from her lips, untouched with only a lipstick stain on the rim to prove she was even there at all. She seemed calm and steady, watching the man's eyes unfocus as he began to slack and become unable to pick up any of his surroundings or even what was happening to him.

Beth sighed. Oh, how she loved drugs sometimes.

She spared a glance at the expensive watch on the man's wrist and noted the time. A quarter to 1- perfect. She was right on time.

Carefully, Beth stood from the couch and threw the man's arm over her shoulder to help hoist him up. From outside the window, the music from the rave down below still shook the floors and walls. Everyone down there was far too busy trying to feel something from the unnecessarily loud bass from the speakers to even notice Beth Nolan helping carry a half-conscious billionaire playboy from out of the private room into a secret door off to the side. It was too perfect.

As soon as Beth made it to the back door, she immediately found herself in the busy kitchen to the restaurant on the other side of the club. Thankfully, the door only opened up to the back part so nobody noticed the short young woman in a sparkly cocktail dress and six-inch heels lugging around an unconscious millionaire in a suit through the many racks of pots and pans.

Once Beth was clear of the kitchen, she pushed herself through the side door towards the exit. She had made it to the alley way on the side of the building, carefully walking down the stairs to the street, when she stopped mid-way towards the car parked just a few yards away.

"Ah-ah!" She halted at the sound of someone shouting behind her. Slowly, she turned to glance over her shoulder to see who it was. Her eyes widened slightly when she took in the sight of half a dozen men carrying large rifles in their hands dressed in expensive suits similar to the man she was barely managing to keep up while in this ridiculously high heels.

"Not so fast there, darling," the man- the one who'd first called out to her- purred in a posh British accent. "Whatcha got there?" He gestured the butt of his gun towards the unconscious man on her shoulder.

"Shit," Beth muttered beneath her breath.

In her ear, her ear piece beeped. "What? What is it?" The voice of Bruno Hawks called out from where he and a series of the other members of the CTU watched and waited from the Pit back on US Soil.

"Nothing," she whispered through clenched teeth. "It's just time to switch to plan B."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "What? Rebecca, what Plan B?"

Beth sighed, mentally preparing to put on her best 'damsel in distress performance.' "Oh my goodness!" She cried out dramatically, turning as best she could while limping towards the men. "Thank God, you're here! I don't- I don't know what happened. We were- and he- you have to help him-!"

She was cut off when she'd made it just in front of the first man before he abruptly slammed his gun into the side of her face, effectively knocking her unconscious.

Man, Plan A had been too perfect, but that had been because she'd actually listened to the team and went in with the long haul for that mission. But Plan B was completely improvised and all Beth Nolan... And a little bat shit insane, but hopefully it would work out. At least Beth hoped it would.

She came to about thirty minutes later seated in some kind of dark room that had ceilings, walls, and tile floors that reminded her of some kind of abandoned elementary school. She had her hands held tightly behind her back in a wooden chair and when she twisted her wrists to feel what her captors had used, she had to refrain from beaming when she realized what they were: handcuffs.

"Oh, good- you're awake finally." Beth turned to the sound of the formerly unconscious millionaire to find him very much conscious and walking towards her with three of the armed men flanking his sides. "And not at all damaged," he mused as he came closer, reaching out to take her chin in his hand and turn to see where she'd been hit. "I was afraid that Alfred might've messed up your perfect face when he knocked you unconscious. It's nice to see your defining trait is still intact."

Beth, who would've normally fought against his touch, leaned into it, even going as far as glancing up at him through her mascara-coated eyelashes. "I take it that you've come to realize this is all some big mistake then?"

"Oh God, no," he laughed, pulling his hand away harshly, her chin bobbing in response. "I know who you are, Elizabeth. What you are." Beth nearly laughed at how ironic his words were. If only he actually had a clue. "You're a government spy. British Intelligence sent you, did they? To try and steal back what they so hilariously let slip through their grimy little fingers?"

Beth pretended to shift in her seat uncomfortably as if to mimic a deer caught in headlights. "What gave me away?"

The man tilted his head, pity flashing across his features. "You, darling," he replied. "You were just too good too be true." Damn, she thought to herself, should've tried to deepen the cover a little more.

Beth clenched her jaw, her eyes glancing between the man in front of her and the three men behind him worriedly, feigning anxiousness. The man took notice.

"Alfred," he addressed the man that had knocked her out. "Give us a moment, will you?"

Alfred, as he'd called him, didn't look ecstatic about the idea. But Beth knew that a man who had no problem with knocking such a small girl like her down with a large rifle also didn't want to appear to be worried over the young woman either. He nodded before he and his small posse exited, leaving just Beth and her target.

"You want to be alone with me?" Beth wondered aloud. "Why?"

"Because I want the truth," he answered, walking forward until he was standing right above her. He reached out, his large hand cupping her face, his thumb lightly tracing her bottom lip. "Was any of it real?"

Beth had to bite back the laugh she was holding on to for dear life. Oh, how she had this man hoodwinked so well- too well.

"Tomas," she said in a breathy whisper against his thumb. "Don't." Act defiant, it was what she was always taught. Don't give it up too quickly, make him think he has to fight for it. Seduction 101, kids.

"Tell me," he pressed, his hand moving from her cheek to the base of her neck. His fingers treading through her hair, knocking loose a few bobby pins, before yanking her head back forcing her to look up at him. "Tell me," he pleaded, the raw emotion in his eyes not exactly matching up to his harsh and unfeeling actions.

"Why?" She practically sobbed. Beth could feel the hot tears prickling in her eyes, her vision becoming blurry as it became hard to see through them. Damn, she was good. "Why does it matter? You're going to kill me either way now."

"If you tell me the truth, if you truly did care for me in the time we spent together," Tomas paused, his hold on the back of her hair tightening with every word. "I won't need to kill you. We can fix this."

"And if you're wrong?" She pressed. "If I betray you?"

"You can't," he told her simply, his hold on her hair falling. He leaned down to her, his face in front of hers as both of his hands cupped her face. "Even if you break my heart, you run back to Interpol with whatever it is our time together gave you... you still won't take what I have."

Beth sniffled, the tears falling down her cheeks. "How can you know?"

He laughed at her like adults laughed at children. His thumbs coming up to wipe away a few of her tears. "Because, my love," he whispered to her, leaning forward to press their foreheads together. "You can't extract nuclear codes from someone's eye."

Bingo.

Using the bobby pin the man had knocked from her hair, Beth unlocked the handcuffs around her wrist with a sift click.

The sobbing mess of Beth Nolan was quickly replaced by the unimpressed glare of Beck Ryder. "You underestimate me, Mr. Carmichael," she replied in her American accent. Tomas's eyes widened as he pulled away from the woman just before she brought her heeled foot up to land a harsh kick to his chest, knocking him back a few feet.

He slid across the tile floors and she watched him try to push himself up as she stood from her chair and unhooked her other wrist from the handcuffs, bet kept them in her hand. Her heels made little noise as she sauntered towards the man now up onto his feet and caught the punch he'd thrown at her and pushed his arm up at an odd angle. Tomas Carmichael's face scrunching in pain at the quick movement.

He opened his mouth to cry out, but Beck hit his jugular with her hand, more specifically, the area between her thumb and her index finger, eliciting a choke instead of a scream.

Once he was speechless, the Agent spun him around and twisted his other arm behind his back. Using the handcuffs he'd used on her, she bounded his hands behind his back and kicked out his knee from beneath him while he still struggled to breathe from her blow to his neck.

Without allowing him a moment to process what was happening, the woman began to drag him towards one of the wide windows. She peered out over the edge and realize that it was a long fall. She spotted parts of the building she'd be able to carefully latch onto and flip down from, but... she'd only be able to do that on her own, not with another bound body. And it wasn't like she could just walk out the front door towards six heavily armed men with another person with her as well.

She was trapped.

"Shit," she hissed beneath her breath.

"Becca, is that you?" Hawks called out. "What's going on? I can't get eyes on you. Did you get what you needed from Carmichael?"

"Yes, I found out where the codes are hidden," she answered exasperatedly.

"Good," he replied. "Get them back here as soon as you can-"

"Well, that's actually, sorta, the problem," she exclaimed. "They're hidden inside of his eye and I can't get him out of this building. I only have one exit and we both can't make it out."

There was a pause on the other line, the only other sound the Agent could hear was Tomas's coughing.

"...Becca," Hawks eventually replied. "Do what needs to be done."

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

There didn't need to be any further explanation. She knew her third option the minute Tomas had told her where he'd hidden the nuclear codes. But... it was a last resort and...

She didn't want to kill anyone that would've willingly given up what they had. Tomas could've been spared. Locked up for some stupid risk he'd made by stealing the nuclear codes he probably would've used as leverage from the government for a couple million dollars, but he wasn't a killer. Beck didn't want to kill him.

But, it didn't look like she would be given a choice.

She turned Tomas over and pressed his back against the wall. She bent down to his height and saw how red and blood-shot his eyes were. He had two of them, but Beck couldn't risk taking the wrong one.

"I'm sorry," she whispered to him before pressing her knee to his chest to keep him in place. Her chest constricted when she saw his eyes widen in realization of what she was about to do. The action only made it worse.

Without a second thought, Beck pressed her nails into the sockets of his eye and pushed. She could feel the shape of the small, squishy eyeball beneath her fingers, but it was getting harder and harder to see it through the blood and flesh she was pushing through to get to it.

She could hear Tomas silently screaming through his coughs and chokes and feel him twisting and turning beneath her, trying to get away from this pain as her fingers came to fully envelop the small ball-shaped body part. Once she had a hold of the eye, she pulled it out as hard as she can, blood splattering from his eye socket from where the optic nerve had been violently severed.

With one eye down, she gently placed it in her free hand before repeating the first process with his second eye.

She didn't have time to process her actions, scared that if she realized what she was doing was inhumane, and wrong, and gory, and violent in so many ways, she'd stop. She couldn't think about what she was doing because she couldn't stop. She had her orders, she had her mission, she had her goal.

Beck would put aside her humanity to get it done.

"Er," she groaned through clenched teeth as she pressed her fingers in harder into his second eye socket, yanking it out in a similar fashion to the first. She probably looked terrifying, covered in his blood, but it was nothing compared to how terrifying Tomas Carmichael now looked with two missing eyes from his empty, bleeding sockets as he choked out bloody sobs from the back of his throat.

Beck jerked away from the shell of a man she'd just ripped the eyes out of. Her body felt numb and it was like her stomach had fallen to the floor. She didn't know whether to scream or barf, but she didn't have the luxury to do either in the moment.

She held onto the two bloody eyes securely in the palm of her hand before rushing to the window and making her escape in the wind of the dark, London night, leaving not only an eye-less corpse in her wake, but also a small shard of her soul.

—

The Vaughn Household was what anyone would expect from the average cookie-cutter, suburban home. But not everyone was Spencer Reid.

He noticed the small blemishes that the average person wouldn't. More specifically, the blemishes in the life of Lindsey Vaughn.

The first thing he picked up on inside of the teenage girl's room is the fact that it looked nothing like it belonged to just that, a teenage girl. The walls were barren of any real color, posters, photos. Her desk was barren, not even a colorful pen in the small container. Most of her furniture and drawers were partially empty and the bed was well-made, but... void of any colorful pattern.

This room belonged to Lindsey, sure, but there was no real personality. Because she wasn't attached to this room, and she wasn't attached to her life here. Spencer wanted to know why that was.

"What happened to Lindsey's mother?" Rossi prompted Jack Vaughn, who stood idly from the doorway watching the Agents' every move.

"Does it matter?" Jack's family friend shot back, a little too defensive for anyone in the room to let it go unnoticed, especially the resilient Agent Ryder who turned at the man's response to the simple question. Spencer knew when Beck was out to get someone and just like he'd noted from the station last night, she was out to get Jack's friend.

Rossi frowned, "It does to Lindsey."

"It's called Victimology," Spencer cut in as he walked across the room to examine the other drawers near the bed. "It helps us understand more about Lindsey."

"How?" Jack prompted, a little less stand-offish than he was the night before.

It was a weird dynamic, Spencer had noticed between Jack and his friend. While Jack was open to hear the team out about their ideas and methods to find his daughter, his friend made it seem like he was some kind of suspect in the case that needed to be protected. It was... odd.

"How she carries herself. How she interacts socially with others," Morgan interjected in an explanation as he too moved to a different side of the room.

Jack shrugged. "She's just like any other 15-year-old," he responded.

"No, she isn't," Beck replied nonchalantly from where she stood by Lindsey's desk examining every inch of it. Spencer turned to her, his eyebrows raised in concern at how openly blatant she was in her answer, similar to the way she was with Detective Payton at the dumpsite last night.

"I'm sorry?" Jack prompted the agent.

Quick to cover for her, Spencer interjected. "Everything in our house is an externalization of ourselves. Our- our personalities carry over into how we decorate, the placement of our furniture, the colors we choose to surround ourselves with in every day life-"

"What he's trying to say is-" Beck jumped back into the conversation. "This room is nothing like what someone would expect from any other 15-year-old girl. In fact, it mirrors a room more fit for an older, more mature woman. Void of any color, barren walls, little to no decor whatsoever."

Jack narrowed his eyes at the woman before him. "What are you trying to say?"

"Oh, I'm not saying anything," she retorted in a dangerously smug tone. "I'm just pointing out the fact that your daughter may not be who you make her out to be, since clearly she's so detached from herself, she can't even be bothered to form an attachment to something as personalized and confining as her room."

With a slap, Beck dropped a series of report cards she'd been looking at stuffed inside of one of the drawers to Lindsey's barren desk. She maintained eye contact with Jack even after the tense moment was broken by the sound of Spencer's phone ringing. And Spencer, as eager as he was to remain in the room to try and diffuse the situation with Beck, had to take the call the second he saw the contact name.

"Garcia," he answered before making his way out of the room, past Jack and his 'friend.'

"Reid, I ran a check on the folks involved in the search. All good- nice neighborhood, no sexual offenders. But, here's the big news," Garcia exclaimed while Spencer casually made his way through the home, keeping an eye out for any electronics Lindsey might've used that could've connected her to whoever took her. "I found a blog Katie ran on Faceplace-dot-TV. She talks a lot about Lindsey, and- boy- she did not like Lindsey's dad."

Neither does Beck, Spencer was half-tempted to add.

"Lindsey and Jack moved to Chula Vista six years ago," Spencer listened to Garcia continued as he peered around what looked to be some kind of home office. Sitting at a desk nearby was a large desk-top computer. Bingo. "Up until nine, according to Katie, Lindsey lived in Maine. Jack owned a fishing boat with his three brothers, Mom stayed at home. But then, tragedy struck. Fish stock went down, Dad was forced to sell his boat, the family fell apart, Mom died in a car accident."

Spencer narrowed his eyes as he began to log into the search engine's history only to find a pop-up he wasn't exactly familiar with. "It sounds familiar," he noted.

"It should! It's the exact life story of a girl named Lindsey in a book called the Emerald Sea of Dreams. I've read it, like, five times," Garcia explained in her usual quick-pace that only a handful of people could decipher at a time, Spencer being one of those few since he had the tendency to do the same.

But right now, he was multi-tasking: listening to Garcia explain the oddity that was Lindsey's name and life story and also trying to snoop through whatever online footprint Lindsey or Jack might've left because something certainly wasn't right.

While Spencer peered over his shoulder to make sure neither Jack nor his snoopy friend were coming up behind him, he listened to Garcia continue, "If Lindsey stole her name and her story from a book, why didn't her Father say anything about it?"

Spencer frowned, turning back to the computer screen in front of him that displayed another odd screen when he went to check the history. "His computer's set to automatically clear the web browser history and wipe the temp file on a daily basis."

If Beck were here, she'd be all over how fishy this was right now.

"Give me his IP address," Garcia stated simply.

He listed it off to her, making sure to keep his voice down and constantly check behind him for any signs of Jack or his friend.

There was beat of silence on the other end of the line before Garcia finally responded. "Nothing," she said, defeated. "He must be using a Gray Box proxy server. It makes tracking his internet history impossible."

Spencer opened his mouth to ask why a former fishermen would need something so high-tech when he heard someone approach from behind.

"Um, can I help you?" Spencer spun around in the desk seat to find both Jack and his friend approaching.

Panicked, Spencer struggled to hit the End Call button as he stammered for an explanation. "Uh- hey- uh... I was just, uh-"

"Checking to see if Lindsey was in contact with anyone," Spencer, Jack, and his friend all turned to find Beck standing off to the side of the office, close to the second entrance Spencer had missed up until this point. "Predators have a tendency to lure young girls out through the internet. Dr. Reid here was just scoping out Lindsey's online footprint."

Jack turned back to Spencer, "Is that right?"

"Yes," he lied, his eyes going back and forth between Jack and Beck on either side of him. "Statistically, actually, 43 percent of predators have-"

"Lindsey doesn't like computers," Jack interjected with a lame excuse.

Beck narrowed her eyes at him while Spencer just relaxed his posture in relief. "Oh," he stated simply, nodding his head up and down as he grimaced. "Cool," he added awkwardly before starting out, Beck not far behind him as they made their way past Jack and his... friend.

Once they were out of earshot, Spencer heard Beck chuckle beside him. "'Cool'? Really? That's the best you could come up with?" She shook her head.

"I'm not exactly a professional liar," he shot back exasperatedly. "I panicked. I didn't even hear them coming up behind me."

"It's a good thing I am a professional liar then," Beck replied as they stopped just short of the hallway over, both peering out in the direction they'd just came. "Jack Vaughn sure as Hell isn't, though. 'Lindsey doesn't like computers'- oh, please. That was almost worse than 'cool'."

Spencer nodded in agreement. "I found something on his computer, though," he explained. "Found out he has his computer set to be wiped every day and has some high-tech blocking any one from accessing it either, Garcia already tried."

"High-tech, huh?" She prompted, her head turning towards something unseen. "Yeah, while you were snooping through their internet history and being a terrible liar, I got a look at this guy's security system. Top of the line, over-the-top for a suburban house, crazy expensive and unnecessarily high-tech security system... Who is this guy?"

Spencer frowned. That's what he wanted to know, too.

"Doesn't look much like a home," Rossi stated once the group of agents had gathered Jack and his family friend to the living room with them. "State-of-the-art security system, but the furniture looks rented."

"Walls are bare of any real art," Morgan added. "The shelves are void of any family photos."

"Spyware wipes your computer file history daily," Spencer interjected from where he stood behind the trio.

"And you're awfully defensive for just a Dad looking for his missing daughter," Beck added, her arms crossed over her chest.

Jack's friend, who Spencer had just learned recently was named Pat, frowned at the accusations. "What are you getting at, Agents?"

"I don't know," Beck retorted as she dropped her arms to her side and took a step forward. "Why don't you tell me? You seem to be pretty involved for someone who's just a family friend. Who is he, Jack?" She turned from Pat to Mr. Vaughn leaning on the wall beside him. When he hesitated to answer, Beck persisted. "What? You gonna just hide behind your buddy here forever?"

"I think you're making some pretty bold claims, Agent," Pat spat at her, but Beck wasn't deterred. Of course not, she never was.

"You wanna hear a bold claim?" She shot back. "Something is going on in your household, Jack, and whether it has something to do with why Katie is dead and your daughter is missing, I'm going to get to the bottom of it, even if it means going through you. And by that, I mean asking you why it is that your daughter told Katie to stop fighting against her captors as she was choked to death, why she told her not to show them she was scared?" She prompted the man.

She took another measured step forward. "You wanna hear a bold claim, Mr. Vaughn?" she asked. "Average 15-year-old girls don't react that way in those situations unless they're coached or unless they have some experience with not fighting back and not showing her abusers fear..."

Her words hung in the air like idle gas waiting to be lit.

Spencer watched from afar as the anger in Jack's eyes lit up and set it ablaze.

"You fucking bitch-!" He roared, charging for the woman, only to be held back by his friend. "No! Let me go!"

Beck didn't move at first, unaffected. But then, as Pat struggled to keep Jack at bay, his jacket lifted to reveal a pistol tucked away in his belt behind his back in a similar fashion to the way Beck holstered her own weapon.

"Gun!" Morgan called out.

Within seconds, Beck, Morgan, Rossi and Spencer all had their weapons out, loaded, and aimed for the man in front of them.

"Put your hands where I can see them! Both of you!" Morgan shouted, Jack immediately standing upright and Pat doing as instructed. "Do not move!"

"Stop!" Pat called out as he raised his hands up. "Okay. Okay. Just calm down." He slowly turned around to face the group of Agents, his hands still raised in defense.

"Make one wrong move," Beck grit out through her teeth as she stared at the man down the barrel of her gun. Spencer glanced anxiously between her and Pat and noticed how her finger continuously flickered towards the trigger as though she were almost anxious to pull it.

Pat shook his head. "I'm gonna reach into my pocket... and I'm gonna take out a badge. Just calm down!" He persisted as he dug into his jacket pocket and produced a small credential pack. "Okay..." he began, holding it up and unfolding it to show the group what it was.

Spencer narrowed his eyes to read the name above the shiny metal star emblem. Pat Mannan.

"United States Marshal," Mannan explained, flicking his credentials shut as the group slowly lowered their weapons. "Jack and Lindsey are under my authority."

"Which is what?" Rossi prompted.

"Witness Protection," both Beck and Morgan answered in unison as they holstered their weapons once more.

Beck cast one last fleeting glare at Jack, the lingering rage he still had towards her reciprocated in the glare he gave to her in response. Spencer watched as she turned back to Rossi, Morgan and Spencer. "I'm not telling Hotchner."

Luckily for Beck, she hadn't been the one to have to call Hotch. Instead, that responsibility fell on to Rossi, who was a little less than enthusiastic to relay the news that he was going to get there a little later than expected due to something at the precinct.

In the hours they spent waiting for Hotch, Prentiss, and JJ to arrive, Spencer tried his best to ease tensions by keeping Beck occupied and away from Pat and Jack in the living room. Of course, he'd leave it to her to find a way to commit some form of petty theft as she brewed herself a full pot of coffee in the Vaughns' kitchen.

"That's your 5th cup today," Spencer noted as he sat isolated at the end of the marble kitchen island, opposite to where she stood near the actual kitchen counter in front of the slowly brewing pot.

Beck peered at him from over her shoulder in acknowledgement before turning right back to the pot, focusing on the small drips of brown liquid as if they were so fascinating. "I didn't get a lot of sleep the past couple of nights," she offered in vague explanation.

"Your stitches bothering you again?"

There had been a period of time following what had happened in Florida and then the following weeks after what had happened with Jason Clark Battle in the middle of the BAU office where Beck was consistently late to work due to terrible headaches she would get from her stitches in the back of her head coming undone a series of times. Spencer wondered if maybe that was what had been bothering her these past few weeks.

Beck shook her head, her hand instinctually coming up to run her fingers along the nape of her neck where some of her stitches ended. They were healed up for the most part now, but he imagined they were still a little irritating. "No," she answered. "My neighbor, Mrs. Stone, she got a new dog that just yaps away all night. It's to the point where I'm seriously considering dropping a bit of rat poisoning in that little shit's food bowl next time I pass by."

Spencer didn't buy a lick of what she was saying, and he kinda doubted she believed her lies too. But it begged the question then: why tell the lies?

"Hey," Spencer began as he watched her pour some of the coffee into a mug carefully. "Are you sure everything is alright-?"

"I'm fine," she answered swiftly, brushing him off. Sometimes he wondered why he tried with her.

Just then, the sounds of a car pulling into the drive thru and voices outside had both of their attention. Beck, who looked to be eager to not only see what was going on, but also eager to get out of the conversation, set down her half poured cup of coffee and started out of the kitchen towards the living room to see what the fuss was about. Spencer wasn't far behind her.

There were still voices coming from outside when Hotch entered through the front door. Jack sat straighter in his chair, sparing the Unit Chief a brief glance as he walked through the living room. Pat putting away his phone as Rossi, Morgan, Beck and Spencer all stood to attention at their Unit Chief's entrance.

"What's going on?" He demanded immediately.

Spencer nearly chuckled at the way Beck immediately ducked out of the way, keeping true to her word that she wasn't going to be the one to break the news to their Unit Chief.

Morgan spared her a glance before stepping up to bat. "Jack's in Witness Protection."

"Ten years," Rossi chimed in from beside him. "Must be real important."

Pat shifted his weight on his feet while Jack remained unmoving as Hotch turned his frustration towards the two. "Why didn't you tell us immediately?"

"Good question," Beck piped up, crossing her arms over her chest as she tilted her head slightly.

Pat briefly met her glare, but turned back to Hotch instantly. "Because he's a State's Witness whose identity needs to be protected at all costs," he answered.

Jack's eyes remained glued to the floor and Spencer couldn't help but notice how very out of sync the two men are. What was once a suspicious dynamic between 'friends' now revealed to be a Witness and his Office started making a lot of sense.

"You know, Jack," Pat started. "This may not have anything to do with-"

"With what? His past?" Rossi interjected.

Beck scoffed from beside Spencer. "What are the odds that these Unsubs just happened to take the daughter of your State's Witness?" she prompted. No one answered, but Spencer would bet that it wasn't likely.

"Jack," Hotch persisted. Mr. Vaughn turning to meet his eyes. "Every person in this room, with the exception of him-" he looked pointedly at Pat. "-is here for your daughter."

There was a tense moment that set amongst the group as everyone held their breath, waiting for Jack to make the decision on whether or not he was willing to give up what he knew to help save Lindsey.

Spencer nervously picked at the thread on the elbow of his sweater, eyeing Jack nervously and briefly glancing back to Beck to find her signature glare now directed towards Mr. Vaughn as though she were trying to intimidate him into speaking. Spencer imagined if she had it her way, she would get Jack to tell them what he knew whether he wanted to give it up or not.

That thought alone should've made Spencer that much more scared of her, but he never felt in danger when he was with Beck. All he felt was the desperate urge to rip away every brick of the walls she hid herself behind to try and reveal just a pinch more of what she was revealing bit by bit. It was exhausting, but also exhilarating.

"If this does have anything to do with me," Jack finally broke the tense silence in the room. "They'll be coming out of Boston. Irish-America. Two or more men."

"You got any names?" Beck prompted.

Jack's jaw clenched as Pat stepped in. "He's not at liberty to discuss details-"

"Tough shit," Beck snapped at the US Marshal, surprising even Hotch with her abrupt tone towards a government official. "What's more important right now? Your case or Lindsey Vaugh's safety?" When Pat didn't answer and Jack's eyes fell back to the floor, Spencer knew Beck had her answer.

Spencer was surprised when Hotch didn't comment on Beck's snappiness. Instead, he opted to ignore it as though he agreed. "Let's get them back to the station," the Unit Chief directed the Agents. "And keep them there until this is over," he added as a precaution.

Spencer lingered behind the group as Morgan stood in front of Jack, ready to lead him out by the arm. Spencer was still waiting for Beck to leave as Rossi walked past them, but it looked as though she were keeping herself planted. Her eyes focused on Pat, but for a moment, she shot a quick look over her shoulder at Spencer as if signaling for him to go. He took the hint without argument and started after Rossi, Beck not far behind him with her eyes still trained on Pat until they made it to the door.

She was acting protective. Spencer didn't need to study behavior to understand what it meant when she put herself between him and Pat. She didn't trust the US Marshal... Then again, he remembered when she'd told him she didn't really trust anyone. Well, aside from him, that was.

"To an extent," her words rang as clear as a bell in his head. "I guess I trust you enough not to backstab me in any kind of way."

Maybe that was why he didn't feel the need to be as suspicious or afraid of her as the rest of the team sometimes felt about Beck. Because he was the first she'd admitted to trusting.

"Oh great," Spencer was pulled out of his train of thought by the woman in question as she caught up with him on the sidewalk outside. When Spencer turned to face Beck with a questioning look, she jerked her head forward in the direction of the house opposite of them. "More problems for us, incoming."

Spencer followed her gaze and immediately saw what- and who- she was talking about.

"Mr. Owen, please don't make this harder than it is," Detective Payton exclaimed, his hand on Bruce Owen's shoulder as he tried to push past the Detective, JJ, and Prentiss in an attempt to get towards Jack as Morgan lead him down the sidewalk to get to the parked SUV.

"Jack!" Mr. Owen called out as the group pushed through towards them.

"Rossi," Morgan called from over his shoulder.

Immediately, as Rossi took Morgan's place leading Jack to the SUV in the driveway, Beck peeled away from Spencer's side to join Morgan in creating a barrier between Jack and the Owens.

"Let go of me! What's going on? I want to know what he did to my Katie!" Mr. Owen called out as he pushed past the people trying to reign him in. Spencer was reluctant to leave the group as he quickly made his way around the front of the car to get to the driver's side to get them out of this situation before it escalated.

"First, you need to cam down, sir-" Morgan attempted to reason with Mr. Owen.

"Don't tell me to calm down!" Spencer glanced over through the windows of the SUV to see Mr. Owen shoving Morgan back, his wife gasping at her husband's actions as she stood a distance away behind him. "Why are you arresting him?!"

"We're bringing him in for questioning. He is not a suspect in your daughter's murder," Beck told him firmly, her posture stiff and her hands at the ready. Spencer hoped she didn't plan on doing anything drastic, but in case she did, he kept the driver's side door open for easy exit. "You need to back away and go back inside," she stated, her voice low as she held a hand up, Morgan's hand still pressed firmly against Mr. Owen's chest to keep him at bay.

"About what?!" Mrs. Owen cried out as Mr. Owen snapped.

"Jack!" he screamed, attempting to push past Morgan and Beck to get to the man seated in the backseat of the SUV.

Rossi shut the back door and climbed into the passenger's side. He turned to Spencer, "Step on it before this gets any uglier." Spencer hesitated, glancing between Jack in the backseat, Rossi climbing in beside him, and through the window where Beck was struggling to keep Mr. Own under control. "Reid," Rossi pressed.

"If you had anything to do with this, I swear!" Mr. Owen shouted. "I will kill you!"

It all happened in the blink of an eye. As Mr. Owen shouted his threat, Beck grabbed his extended hand and pulled it to the small of his back, Mr. Owen not even having time to process her actions as he cried out just before Beck pinched the area on his upper-inner arm. Spencer gaped as he watched Mr. Owen fall unconscious to the ground.

"Oh my God!" Mrs. Owen cried out as Prentiss held her back.

"Ryder!" Morgan shouted simultaneously as he bent down to keep Mr. Owen from hitting his head.

"Reid," Spencer turned back to Rossi. "Now would be a good time to go."

Spencer nodded, this time his hesitance gone seeing as Beck had it under control. He shut the door to his left and buckled up before putting the SUV in reverse and speeding away, leaving Beck, Hotch, Morgan and the rest of his team to clean up the mess Beck had just made for them.

They were halfway down the block, Spencer could see the group of people still out in the drive way slowly growing further away, when a voice spoke up from the backseat.

"Quite a stunt your girl pulled back there," Jack Vaughn mused. Spencer kept his eyes on the road, not letting Jack's perplexed tone get to his head. "You've got some interesting methods, Agents."

Rossi bit the hook Jack was leaving out for them, his eyes meeting Jack's as he looked up into the rearview mirror at him. "You're one to talk," he retorted.

Jack let out a scoff, turning his eyes to the window and away from Rossi. "Takes one to know one," his voice so low, Spencer was barely able to make out his words. But now that he'd heard them, he wanted to hear more.

"One of what?" He pressed, his eyes alternating between the road and the rearview mirror.

Jack turned momentarily, meeting his gaze. He didn't say anything, but somehow a million answers flooded to Spencer's mind about what he could've meant when comparing himself to Beck. A part of Spencer wanted to disagree with him before he even said a word, but another knew he wasn't wrong.

"Reid," Rossi pulled his attention back to the road, Spencer having to hit the brakes abruptly as they approached a red light and his attempt to try and not to let Jack's words get into his head tragically failing.

Beck isn't a killer, he told himself. She's nothing like Jack.

—

The Agent gently closed the file for Elizabeth Nolan, his mind still reeling from what he had just read. It was... detailed, extensive. The person who'd written up this reports didn't neglect any details. The Agent couldn't tell whether he was concerned by how detailed the files were or how brutal the actual missions were themselves.

Don't get him wrong, the Agent was pretty seasoned himself. But perhaps being a seasoned Interpol Agent was a little bit different than being a seasoned CIA Operative.

Coming to that conclusion, the Agent was a little hesitant to carry on. But, he had work to do. If he wanted to get a reading on who he was looking into, he had to get through them all. It looked as though they were only getting worse with time, though. Whoever this Sword was... she sure was something, that was for sure.

Carefully, the Agent picked up the second to last file on the pile and placed it in front of him. His fingers gently traced the name branded on the top. Reba Nunez.

Reba Nunez- a low-class worker, hotel maid, gardener, driver, and nanny for middle to upper-class families. A girl from a religious family, only ever seen in a head scarf that covered every inch of her skin aside from her eyes and hands. Pronounced dead in a fatal car accident almost two years ago with the family that was in her care: Aaliyah Nadir and her two children.

Nadir, the Agent mused. He remembered the name of the husband: Hassan, a known war lord in Riyadh who was recently arrested just a little over a year ago by the Counterterrorism Unit of the CIA with the help of the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI... Oh, yes, the Agent had heard all about the scandal of that case that not only ended in Hassan Nadir's capture, but also the arrest of the CTU's own Bruno Hawks.

Ah, finally, the Agent chuckled to himself. He was getting to the vital parts of the Sword's story.

—

Following a brief soiree at the station with former Mobster Jack Vaughn, the team was called away to some kind of abandoned neighborhood just South of the city's limits and a few cliques away from Katie's dumpsite.

Spencer wasn't sure what they were about to walk into, but from the way the local police had blocked off the area, he assumed it wasn't anything he would be looking forward to. Beck, however, looked nearly ecstatic to be getting some action.

Clad in her Kevlar vest and gun holstered closer to her hip than her back where it usually was, Spencer watched the shorter Agent practically jump out of the still moving SUV as they stopped just in front of the series of houses.

"Beck!"

Before anyone had even managed to shut their car doors, Spencer watched Beck bound over the curb and stairs to get up to the walkway of the house. Spencer moved to follow after her, but was grounded slightly when Hotch turned to him.

"What is it to the dump site? Five miles?"

"Six-point-two miles South," he blurt out the answer in a rush, his eyes still trained over the top of the SUV where he watched Beck duck beneath yellow police tape to get into the house.

He was almost growing frustrated the closer she got to the house and the further she got from him. Spencer was almost ready to push past Hotch and Detective Payton to get through the series of people between him and the house, but eventually, they all managed to catch up.

"Why didn't they dump Katie's body on the other side of town?" Morgan posed the question as they trekked down the path, following about ten steps behind Beck.

"And risk heading out on the open road while everyone was out looking for the girls?" Prentiss retorted in response. Spencer mentally kicked himself, he hadn't even thought to think of the implications of the close proximity... He'd been too busy keeping an eye on Beck.

As they ducked beneath the yellow police tape, Rossi mused, "Something forced them to move on."

But what? Spencer couldn't help but ask himself as he pulled on a set of blue latex gloves before he and the rest of the team eventually entered the house.

Spencer scanned the area, taking note of the excessive amount of beer bottles thrown, stacked, and tossed around, a series of blood stains on the dingy carpet, and colorful graffiti markings littering the walls as trash littered all around the floor. He saw everything, but he didn't see Beck.

His eyes narrowed as he did a full 360, trying to figure out where she had time to go in what little time she was out of his eyesight.

"Katie's cell phone," Spencer heard Prentiss say as the rest of the team started scavenging through what the Unsub's left of their little hideout. As they focused on the damage done to the living room, Spencer still found himself lingering away, his eyes scanning everywhere else trying to look for the missing member of said team.

"Two different sets of footprints," Morgan noted. "So two Unsubs."

"Beck was right," Spencer muttered beneath his breath.

"Jack also said there'd be two of them," Detective Payton stated.

Where is she? Spencer anxiously tapped his bottom lip as he was still unable to locate Beck.

"There's cigarette butts everywhere," Prentiss muttered in disdain. "For professionals this is a real mess."

"Multiple beer and liquor bottles," Hotch added as Prentiss bent down to pick something up from the floor, this time, Spencer leaning forward to see what she'd found.

"This," she lifted a brown leather belt up to examine it carefully. "-could be the belt they used to strangle Katie." Beck had been right again about the belt marks on Katie's neck.

Spencer frowned. Surely, she wouldn't be missing out on profiling the last location our Unsubs stayed and finding the murder weapon, so where did she go? Had she been taken again?

Spencer's mind immediately went to the worst case scenario that happened in Florida. Surely, she couldn't have been taken down again. Not after how hard she worked herself following the Feylinn case and then even harder after what had happened in the BAU office with Jason Clark Battle. He'd noted her wet hair every morning from her showers prior to her early jogs and he'd even caught her a few times leaving the FBI gym late at night after he was off the clock as well.

Thinking about it now, there was yet another thing he'd noted was off about her: the excessive working out she did. He'd heard of exercising and physical exertion as a form of coping mechanisms, but he'd figured it would blow over after a few cases. But, apparently, what was bugging her was still sticking around.

Spencer hadn't realized he'd been zoned out until Hotch's observation pulled him back to the present- and very active crime scene. "Katie and Lindsey may have left the movie theater of their own free will, but they sure didn't count on coming here-"

"Guys," the team all turned to glance around the corner towards the open back door where- low and behold- Beck stood. Spencer felt himself physically deflate in relief. "You need to come see this."

Out of the corner of his eye, Spencer saw Hotch exchange a weary glance with Rossi before the team trailed after the Agent in the back doorway. But as they began their walk out, Spencer nearly halted in his tracks when he glanced down at the floor and realized his tracks weren't the only ones on the floor. Imprinted in blood was a series of boot marks and at the end near the door... a trail of blood.

That couldn't have been Katie's.

"Does this blood trail go all the way out the back?" Morgan asked out loud as Beck lead them towards an open area behind a series of other houses.

"Yep. Followed it as soon as I walked in," Beck explained to Spencer's chagrin. Of course, the first thing she does when walking into an active crime scene is immediately follow the trail of blood without back-up. It's almost as if she were looking for trouble.

Because she was, a little voice that sounded a lot like Jack Vaughn whispered in the back of his mind.

"It's an arterial bleed, most likely the result of a stab wound," Beck noted as she continued to carefully step along the thick trail of blood.

"What makes you say that?" Prentiss called out skeptically from behind Spencer.

"Because if it was a gun shot wound, whoever this was wouldn't have made it this far. Especially not with an entrance and exit wound through a major artery. They would've bled out in seconds," she explained, Spencer taking note of how sure she sounded almost as though she'd had experience with this type of manner of death. Thinking of it now, she probably did.

"Takes one to know one," Jack's words echoed in his ears again. Spencer shook them off just as quickly as his words came back to him.

"Could it have been Lindsey?" Detective Payton prompted.

Beck halted in her steps, not only at the Detective's question, but also due to the fact that the trail suddenly stopped just at her feet. She glanced up, turning to Detective Payton with a torn look. "Not sure," she answered, but something about her tone made Spencer wonder if she was being honest.

"It stops here," Prentiss frowned, her eyes glued to the ground, searching for any clues.

Beck shook her head. "The blood trail stops here, but not the clue trail," she said, pointing in the direction just over Hotch's shoulder. The team turned to follow what she was gesturing to, Spencer's eyes immediately zeroing in on the house nearby with a broken door still propped open on it's broken hinges.

Spencer wondered if this was how far Beck had gotten before she turned back around to show them what she'd found, but from the manner in which she so casually approached the abandoned house without brandishing her gun or the way she moved up the stairs carefully and without caution, he figured she probably came all the way here without calling for back-up.

The team, with their weapons drawn and their senses on high alert, followed the Agent up to the second floor towards a room that she slowly pushed herself through the door and into.

Spencer was just behind her when she moved out of the way to reveal what she had really come all the way out here to show them.

Lying on the ground a few feet away, sprawled out in the middle of the empty room, was a dead boy. Not a dead man- a dead boy. He couldn't have been over eighteen with how frail his facial features were and how toned and fit his muscular body was. His eyes were wide open, but glazed over with a lifeless fog. There were small bloody marks nicked across his face, but those small wounds weren't the cause of his death, the three gaping stab wounds in his abdomen were.

As the rest of the team that had entered the room studied the body on the ground, Spencer shifted out of the way so Hotch could bend down to carefully pick up the open phone lying on the ground beside the corpse.

"He was stabbed three times," Hotch pointed out, his eyes trailing the extent of the blood that not only pooled into the carpet beneath him, but also all along his pant legs to his shoes. There was that arterial bleeding Beck had took note of earlier.

Out of the corner of his eye, Spencer saw Detective Payton share a look with Beck. "You were right." She almost looked like she wanted to roll her eyes at his validation, but refrained from doing so.

"He might've been killed with a knife," Rossi began to walk forward to stand on the other side of the body. "But it wasn't a knife that gave him those marks on his face."

"Scratch marks," Hotch confirmed. "On his face and both arms."

Prentiss strained her neck to get a closer look from behind Spencer. "What's that on his hand?"

Spencer narrowed his eyes, following Prentiss's gaze and leaning forward to carefully examine the bloody pattern along the side of the boy's hand. "It... It looks like a bite mark."

"Hotch," Morgan frowned. "These are all defensive wounds. This isn't some victim, this is one of our Unsubs."

Beside him, Detective Payton frowned. "But why would they do this to one of their own?"

Still kneeled over the body, Rossi let out a heavy sigh, "At some point for him, things got out of hand and he wanted out."

"And whoever he was with wasn't about to let that happen," Hotch finished.

"He tries to make a run for it and gets stabbed in the process," Prentiss chimed in. "Doesn't explain how he was able to get away."

"It was dark," Rossi supplied. "They couldn't find him after he ran out the back."

"They think he's gone to the police-" Hotch began, Beck swiftly cutting in.

"Which, clearly, he was," she said, gesturing to the open phone he'd plucked off the ground beside the corpse moments ago.

Spencer notices the side-long glance Hotch shoots to the girl before continuing where he'd left off. "They have to act fast, so they take Katie and dump her across town."

"Why keep Lindsey then?" Morgan chimed in. "Clearly, this has nothing to do with the mob, so what significance does she have to them?"

"None," Beck answered before anyone else could get a word in. Spencer noted the fact that her eyes hadn't left the lifeless ones of the boy's beside her. "They took her for the same reason they killed this kid."

Carefully, she raised a hand and closed his open eyelids with her fingertips. "To maintain what little control they have left."

"Takes one to know one."

This time, when the words echoed in the back of Spencer's mind, he didn't want to ignore them. He wanted answers.

—

Reba Nunez was a damn good spy, and an even better liar.

She played her role well: an overpaid nanny and glorified personal driver for wives of some of the most powerful men in the Middle East. She'd gotten the job by simply being quiet, keeping her head down, and pretending not to understand a lick of English at all times.

"No... No, absolutely not," her passenger in the backseat shook her head adamantly as she spoke into the phone pressed to her ear. "I don't care how much it costs, we need to buy out the Himada Oil Reserve before anyone else does. This business doesn't come without sacrifice... Uh, driver- sayiq, khudh alyasar huna!" The woman called out to Reba, distancing her phone from her ear.

Reba met the woman's gaze through the rearview mirror, sparing her a miniscule nod that she understood before doing as she was told and taking the next left. As the car turned, the conversation in the backseat continued.

"Of course... Yes, I absolutely understand what the Nadir merge means to the company, but if we don't secure our funds earlier on, we'll miss out on greater opportunities," the woman- Nadiyah Abdul, CEO of one of the fastest growing oil companies in the Middle-East, continued into the speaker of her phone, her eyes still glancing out the window as they drove through the bustling city of Aleppo, Syria.

In the front seat, still tuning into the conversation still dragging on, Reba couldn't help but let her eyes drift down to the passenger sitting just beside Nadiyah who looked as though he wouldn't mind if Reba crashed the car just before they got to their destination by the sullen look on his face.

Antwan, Nadiyah's son, looked as though he wanted to be anywhere but in that car right now. Reba understood the feeling. In all her time babysitting the young pre-teen boy and having to juggle not only him, but also his mother, she also found herself wishing a sniper would take it upon himself to finish her off once and for all. But, today specifically held weight for young Antwan. It was his first day of primary school and Nadiyah wouldn't hear another excuse on why he couldn't go.

"Ahaha! I- hold on," Nadiyah paused her phone call, that had started to trail more into the housewife gossip than actual intel, and turned to her son. "Antwan. Hal nasha'at bila 'akhlaqi? 'Aslih rabtat eunuqik- fix your tie!" She snapped, jutting her perfectly polished finger into her sons neck where his school uniform tie had come slightly undone since the time they'd left the large mansion the Abduls called their home.

Reba watched through the rearview as Antwan flinched at his mother's harsh poke into his jugular and quickly fastened the tie before her fake acrylic nail pierced his skin again.

Remembering that it wasn't her job to actually care for the boy, she merely frowned beneath the beige cloth of her niqab and turned back to her driving.

It didn't take long for them to reach their destination as Reba turned the car towards the curb just outside the large building Reba had come to recognize as Nadiyah Abdul's company headquarters.

"Aye Anya! You know I can't talk about that over the phone," Nadiyah let out a bellowing laugh that sounded more like a cackle as Reba opened the door for her and her son.

It was like Reba was invisible to the woman as she continued to chatter on the phone, not paying any mind to the young woman helping her son from out of the backseat and onto the curb with an extended hand.

Antwan, having stumbled a bit getting out, turned to his mother expectantly, as if waiting for her to acknowledge him before she had to leave for work. It was the entire premise of him getting out of the car in the first place, but it seemed he was just as invisible as Reba was to his own mother.

"Goodbye, my love," she called over her shoulder as she sauntered toward her building's entrance, her hands cradling her phone carefully so not to disturb whatever conversation she was still so invested in. She blew one last kiss to her son before disappearing behind the glass double doors of her company.

Sighing, Reba turned to the little boy still standing on the curb beside her.

He frowned slightly, trying not to let it show just how much her blatant ignorance bothered him. But Reba could tell from the clenched jaw and the ramrod posture that Antwan was holding back much more emotions than he could handle.

It isn't your job to care about him this way, Reba reminded herself mentally as she juggled with hugging the kid or weighing in on his mother's behavior. It isn't your job and it isn't your place.

That was her mantra these past few weeks building this cover with the Abduls. A reminder that she was to remain the way she was now to them: invisible.

But empathy was always her greatest downfall at times. Staring at just how broken this poor kid was, Reba couldn't help but at least attempt to make the kid feel better.

"Ya, hal hadhih 'ahdhiat jadidatun?" Are these new shoes? She prompted the boy as she made her way around him, lightly tapping the tip of her foot with his. "Tabdu latifatan." They look cute.

Antwan followed her gaze, peering down at his footwear. "'Iinahum yafealuna?" They do?

Reba's heart broke a little bit at how surprised he sounded. Then again, it wasn't as though his parents gave him many compliments. Similar to Nadiyah's behavior in the car, all Antwan ever knew was criticism, nitpicking, stern orders, and harsh punishment. Sometimes when Reba looked back at Antwan in the rear view mirror, it was hard not to also see herself in him.

"Mhmm," she nodded, crinkling her eyes to show him that she was genuine. He glanced back up at her and returned her hidden smile with a beaming one of his own. "Nan alan ealaa. Yumkinuk altabahi bihim fi almadrasati." You can brag about them at school, she assured him, jerking her head in the direction of the car as she opened the door for him.

His mood had done a complete 180, his smile remaining on his face even at the mention of school as he climbed into the backseat of the car. He was buckled in before Reba climbed in behind the wheel.

As they drove, Reba kept the mood light by playing Antwan's favorite station. She knew Antwan didn't actually have any favorites, he wasn't allowed to. His life consisted of only focusing on academics, manners, and social hierarchy, and according to the Abduls, little things like sports, candies, and raunchy American music on the only hip-hop station in Syria didn't fit into any of those allotted subjects and were therefore deemed inappropriate and unnecessary. But, every once in a while, Reba would indulge the poor kid with little things here and there. A bag of gummy worms, an extra serving of food, a couple minutes of running around in the vast backyard while still in his school uniform, and, of course, listening to a few songs on the radio as they drove to school in silence.

"I drink a Boost for breakfast, an Ensure for dessert. Somebody ordered pancakes, I just sip the sizzurp. That right there could drive a sane man berserk. Not to worry, Mr. H-to-the-Izzo's back to wizzerk."

As Kanye's raunchy rap began to fill the silence left by the lack of speaking between the driver and her passenger, Reba chuckled beneath her breath as she peered in the back seat. Antwan's once frowning face had transformed into a small smile as he peered out the window, watching the scenery as he bobbed his head to the beat.

Eventually, him bobbing his head turned into him singing along to the chorus.

"Through the fire, to the limit, to the wall. For a chance to be with you, I'd gladly risk it all~!" Reba openly laughed this time, her eyes darting between the road and Antwan giving it all in the backseat. "Through the fire, through whatever, come what may! For a chance at loving you, I'd take it all the way! Right down to the wire, even through the-"

BOOM!

It all happened in a flash.

The ground shook, a bright flash of white suddenly erupted from Reba's peripheral vision as a large force suddenly blasted into either the car or something just beside where she was driving- she couldn't tell. All Reba knew was that it was an explosion and suddenly her aimlessly trying to turn the wheel of the car was doing nothing as the vehicle spiraled out of control and crashed directly into a large metal pole off to the side of the road.

"Oomph-!" Reba gasped as her face hit the steering wheel hard, only to have her head pulled back roughly by her seatbelt. "Ah," she grimaced, her hand coming up to pinch her nose hard where she knew blood was beginning to trickle down. Her fingers felt the bridge of her poor nose and she could've sighed out of relief had the car not just been reared off the road- it wasn't broken.

There was smoke pluming from the hood of the car as well as everywhere else, dust and sand kicked up from the explosion poured through the broken windows of the car and all Reba could think of was getting Antwan to safety.

"Mm," she pushed through the pain coming from her throbbing shoulder to turn in her seat to glance in the backseat. "Ant- Antwan?" She coughed, trying to wave her hands through the particles of dust and smoke to see where the kid was. "Antwan? Antwan!"

"'ana huna! 'ana huna!" A small voice called back followed by a series of smothered coughs. "I can't see- la aistatie an araa! AGH-!" A scream ripped through the chaos as a series of loud popping noises had both Reba and Antwan ducking down. Gunshots.

Antwan was openly sobbing now as Reba spun back in her seat, her shaking hands reaching down through the crushed door to rip off her seatbelt. Once she was free, she positioned herself to be able to kick the dented door out. She jumped out of the car, ducking down to stay clear of the small pelts of gunfire raining down from somewhere unseen. Reba tried to narrow her eyes, attempting to get even a glimpse of who was shooting and where, but with all the dust from the explosion, it was nearly impossible.

So she focused on the task at hand: getting her target to safety.

"Reba!" Antwan cried out from the backseat. "Saeidni! Saeidni!" Help me! He begged.

Reba ripped open the backdoor and climbed in, waving her hands again to get through the smog to assess the situation. She glanced down at Antwan's seatbelt and realized in the chaos of the explosion, his seatbelt had become caught in the dented door similar to the way Reba's had been.

She pushed herself onto her hands and knees in the backseat to reach across to yank at it, hoping to at least earn herself a budge, but to no avail.

"Ah-!" Antwan screeched as another loud round of gunshots rained above them, a series of shouts and another explosion following it. Reba threw herself over Antwan, pulling him down as she tried to see through the broken back window to see what was happening. Once she was sure no one was aiming for them, she went back to work. She yanked and yanked, and still nothing.

Fuck.

There was no other option, and frankly, if Reba really needed to, she could easily just fake her death here and now and get away with saving Antwan without him going back to his family and telling them his nanny had a military-grade knife hidden away behind her back. But... if she was lucky enough to make it out of this, she could always just quit with the excuse that she was traumatized by this experience... whatever it was.

Screw it.

Reba threw caution to the wind and as another round of gunfire echoed through the car, Reba unsheathed her knife and sliced through the seatbelt holding the boy down. The second he was free, Reba holstered her weapon once more and pulled Antwan out by his arms.

The second Antwan's feet hit the pavement, Reba was yanking him by his arm and rushing him away from the open area where they had just been caught up in some kind of stand-off. There were still shots being fired from all around and while Reba couldn't see them, she could sure as hell hear them- that was until a series of shots were fired at a car parked a few yards in the direction the pair were running. Reba halted in her tracks as she watched the car catch aflame from all the bullets piercing the hood. She picked Antwan up by the waist and pushed them both behind a building wall to duck for cover just before the vehicle exploded in a ball of flames.

Okay, that was intentional. No doubt about it.

Reba huffed, using her free hand that wasn't cradling a sobbing Antwan to her chest, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the satellite phone she'd stashed for emergencies like this. Her shaking fingers dialed the only number on the thing and pressed it to her ear, she didn't have to wait long before someone picked up.

"Ryder, what's happening down there? Talk to me." Reba was met with Bruno Hawks' voice through the receiver.

"Hawks- gah!" Reba gasped, ducking down with Antwan as another explosion shook the world around them. "Hawks! There's an ambush. Explosives. Automatic weapons. I can't see them and I don't know how many there are or where they're coming from or who they are-"

"Alright, alright, alright-" Hawks broke through her frantic ranting. "Focus up, Becca. You've got a job to do."

Job. Job. Job, right!

Her job wasn't to care about Antwan in this way, her job was to remain in her place and gather intel.

Her job wasn't to care about him. Her job wasn't to care about him. Her job wasn't to care about-

"To Hell with the job!" Reba snapped back at Hawks. "My cover is blown, my targets are no where near me, and I have their son with me in this warzone. Now get usthe Hell out of here!" She shouted into the speaker, her eyes darting down to meet Antwan's as they both flinched at another round of distant sounding shooting and shouting. She knew a million thoughts were probably going through his head right now as he not only processed whatever was going on around him, but also what he'd just heard in English from his nanny-but-apparently-not-nanny.

There was a beat of silence on the other line just before another explosion sounded off nearby. Antwan screamed and Reba grew anxious.

"Hawks!"

Silence.

"...Your extraction team will be there in ten minutes."

Ten minutes? Ten minutes?!

"I don't have ten minutes, Bruno!" Reba shouted, pushing Antwan farther back into the corner of the wall beside the building as more explosions sounded off above them. "Get us out- now!"

"Ten minutes is the best I can give you, so I suggest either laying low and trying to keep the both you and the kid safe as best you can, or..." he trailed off.

Reba flinched at the sound of another round of gunshots, but tried to focus in on what her Director was saying. "'Or' what?"

There was a sigh. "Or you can ditch the kid and fight your own way out of this." Reba scoffed, feeling a pit in her stomach grow at how disgusted she was at the thought of just leaving Antwan here alone to fend for himself. As though Hawks could sense her disbelief, he went on to add, "You have to remember, Becca, his isn't apart of your mission. He isn't your kid, and he isn't your responsibility. Now you get your ass back here, whatever you have to do. That's an order."

And as quick as the call had began, it was quick to end as well.

Deflated, Reba's hand fell from her ear, the phone still barely clutched in her limp hand. Outraged by what she'd just been told to do, the woman chucked the piece of metal out into the debris-riddled street just as another explosion sounded off.

Then it hit her: an idea. A brilliant one, at that.

"Reba!" Antwan choked on his sobs as he kept hidden in the corner where she was holding him. "Do something," he pleaded, in English now that he knew she understood what he and his parents had been saying all this time.

Time to enact Backup Plan Z, it would seem.

Reba turned to Antwan and pushed him to the farthest corner she could. "Stay here," she instructed him. "Do not move, do you understand me? Not for anything." Antwan's eyes widened, terrified of the implications of being left alone in this warzone. "Antwan," Reba gripped his chin in her fingers tightly to jerk his head up so he could meet her eyes. "Abq qawiana." Be strong.

And with that, she darted off into the smoke and gunfire. Before her feet even hit the asphalt of the street below, a series of gunfire rang about all around her. She ducked behind some kind of newspaper box as she reached for the dismantled weapon she carried on her at all times in pieces. Once her pistol was completely put back together, she shoved the magazine into place and focused on where she knew the gunfire and shouting was coming from.

To test a theory, Reba ripped off her beige niqab- now tattered and dirty- and flung it up out into the open where it was promptly riddled with bullets and shot out of midair. Her face was now exposed, but it was a minor loss because now she knew the direction from which the shooters were firing from.

Reba turned herself to the side, still blocking herself with the newspaper box, and leaned around to try and get a better view. The sun was on her side, it would seem. As she glanced through the smog and carthage left behind by her attackers, she could make out seven shadows against the smoke reflected by the sun behind them approaching from down the street she'd been driving down with Antwan.

Reba spun back around and took a deep breath.

Seven targets. All weaponized with automatic rifles. Goal-oriented to take her and Antwan out. Eliminate the threat, protect the Civilian.

Reba cocked her gun, ready to take aim.

Without wasting another moment, she jumped from her crouched position and rushed to the opposite side of the street. Her goal was now to draw them away from Antwan and get them all out of the playing field before they drew any closer to his position. For this to work, she had to put all that stealth work she'd used in the jungle to work within this smoky wasteland.

Reba hid herself well behind anything she could. Her short stature ensured that it would be hard not to hide her entire body behind small objects no one would think to check behind. Underestimation would always be the downfall of her enemies.

As the seven men shouted at one another, still slowly creeping to their targets, Reba was now doing the same to them. She hid well as they passed her hiding spot, only to then run up behind them. The hunters had now become the hunted because while she kicked a rock to draw attention in one direction, she silently strangled an outlier in the opposite direction.

His body fell, but she kept going.

She fired a shot up at a window building in front of them, watching as they all fired off their guns like blind idiots. Her distraction was working well and she used the gunfire as a cover for her own two shots she'd aimed at two other outliers on the other side.

Three down, four to go.

As Reba ducked behind a flaming car, she realized from the frightened shouts from the remaining four that they were beginning to realize they were missing three of their own.

Good, Reba thought to herself as she locked her eyes on one of the four who was frantically whipping his weapon around as if he could protect himself with it. She wanted them to be scared.

The woman turned, aiming to confuse as she shot at the window from a building up above just behind them. The crashing of glass had all four men turning to shoot whoever they thought was in there. Once again, using the distraction, Reba shot the frantic man at the end in the head and ducked away as the remaining three scrambled for cover upon realizing that either there was a sniper or someone shooting them from the ground.

As Reba ran to the left side of the street, one of the remaining three gun men did the same. She met him part of the way and the minute he was out of the sight of the other two, Reba pounced. He didn't even see that he'd run into the jaws of the wolf as she kicked the side of the gun and knocked him back into the wall. Before he could even process who she was, what was happening, and how to retaliate, she grabbed his wrist, yanked him to his feet, and placed the barrel of her gun directly beneath his chin.

He seemed to realize that he was hopelessly defeated because he began to beg for his life, "Min fadlika! Min fadliki! Samihni!" But Reba didn't care.

He whimpered just before she pulled the trigger and watched his lifeless body drop to the ground before her eyes, a splatter of blood remaining up high on the wall behind him. Reba didn't wait for it to trickle down as she dashed across the street, using the debris as a cover to walk one way as the two remaining shooters moved towards the sound of her gunshot.

Reba, having come up behind them, fired off a shot in the one on the left's ankle, the street erupting in all out chaos.

The man she'd shot fell to the floor, screaming in pain as he clutched his injured leg, as the other spun around, frantically firing off shots at whatever moved behind him. Reba, taking cover behind a large pillar beneath the building waited for him to eventually stop before showing herself. She jumped out, firing off three shots: one at the automatic rifle the shooter was holding and two at the injured man at his feet.

She heard one last scream before ducking back behind a car.

Six down, one to go.

"Agh!" The remaining shooter screamed in fury as he began to shoot relentlessly in her direction. Once he seemed to run out of bullets, Reba heard him begin to reach for something metallic on his belt... and this was where Plan Z was pushed into motion.

There was a soft click and Reba jumped out from her hiding spot. The grenade had only just been thrown when Reba looked up and shot it out of the sky in quick precision. The explosion shook the ground around them and both Reba and the attacker stumbled back into hiding positions.

As the frustration of the man continued to grow, Reba could hear him ripping off two grenades from his belt this time.

"Argh!" He screamed as he clicked one and threw and clicked off the other. She shot the last one in the air, but when the first one hit directly at her feet, instinct kicked in and so did she.

Before she realized what she was doing, Reba punted the grenade from the ground and across the street. What she hadn't accounted for, however, was where it landed.

Two explosions rang out, but Reba was frozen. Having seen the first grenade she'd shot in midair explode and take out the man who'd thrown it, she didn't need to go confirm the kill. But she watched with wide eyes as fire burned and drywall cracked following the explosion she'd mistakenly kicked in the direction in which she'd been hiding before, right beside the crashed car still playing Kanye West, and directly beneath the building where she'd stashed Antwan and told him not to move.

Reba's heart fell to the floor, her blood running cold, as she approached and realized there was a limp body lying at the foot of the rubble.

"No," the word left her hoarse throat in a broken whisper. "No, no, no, no-" she jumped over broken pieces of brick, through burning trash cans, and past the crashed car before bending over Antwan's limp body.

He was lying on his stomach, his hands and legs sprawled out as though he'd been tossed about violently. The closer she kneeled to him, the more small burns she could see were still sizzling on his exposed patches of skin now peeking out from the charred remains of his school uniform.

Carefully, she reached down to check his pulse on his neck, only to pull her hand away after not being able to feel his soft skin.

Panicking, Reba pulled Antwan's body over to reveal a horrid site.

She jumped away, reacting as though see his burns was burning herself. Her hand came up to clamp over her mouth as a dry sob escaped her throat. She stared into the wide open eyes of the poor boy she'd come to accidentally care for, not because she wanted to try and look for any life behind his hazel irises, but because it was all she had the stomach to look at of his body.

All across half of his face and down his neck was a large, open, gaping and bloody burn. All of the flesh from his chest, up his neck, and directly down the middle of his face had been burnt off. Blood was gushing from the remaining untouched flesh of the left side of his face and Reba flinched at the sight of it trickling down the charred off muscle of his jaw and into his open and exposed teeth.

Reba wanted to scream, cry... help, but... she couldn't move.

"Ryder!" A distant voice called out. "Ryder!"

Everything sounded as though it was underwater, the voice calling out to her sounded much farther away than it actually was and she jumped at the abrupt contact of someone shaking her shoulder. She tore her eyes away from Antwan's burnt corpse to find John Summers standing just beside her.

"What the Hell are you doing? We've gotta move- now!"

Her extraction team, right...

Summers tried to yank on her arm once more, but she hesitate, her eyes still glancing back at Antwan. She knew there was nothing she could do to save him, but she couldn't just leave him. She couldn't. She couldn't. She wouldn't-

"Rebecca!" Summers screamed, his grip on her arm now making her cry out in pain at how tightly he was trying to pull her. "Leave him! He's not our target, let's go!"

He's not my target.

A voice in the back of her head reminded her as she stared back into Antwan's lifeless eyes.

He's not my target. My job isn't to care, it's to know my place and stay quiet.

Reluctantly, Rebecca Ryder finally allowed John Summers to pull her away from the scene. The sounds of crackling fire and sirens now filling her ears as they left the dead boy and any type of feelings she had for him.

My job isn't to care. My job isn't to care. My job isn't to care.

Beck had to repeat the sentiment to herself over and over as the sounds of Kanye West followed them away.

"Right down to the wire, even through the fire~!"

—

"Douglas Silverman, 18-years-old," Spencer stated as he rushed over the the corkboard at the front of the briefing room and tacked the school photo of the young man they'd found dead hours earlier to it, placing his smiling face just beside his lifeless one.

Spencer frowned as he stepped away from the board, noting how out of place the young, polite looking young man in the photo looked up against the other photos of his dead body.

"We need to interview kids in his class, parents, teachers, find out who his friends were," Hotch explained to the rest of the team and a handful of Detective Payton's men and women in uniform that had all gathered around the the profile briefing.

Beside him, Rossi speaking up, "It's at least 2 or more boys. One older, early to mid-20's."

As Morgan began to chime in with other aspects of the profile, Spencer's eyes landed on Beck from across the room where she sat at a nearby desk. She sat as still as a statue, the only part of her body that was moving was her finger as it lightly tapped the edge of the desk in a brief pattern- Spencer couldn't quite tell what she was typing out.

"He'll think of himself as a real badass, somebody who broke the rules, defied the system."

Despite having just been given vital and groundbreaking information on one of the three Unsubs, it didn't look to Spencer that Beck really cared all that much. In fact, she didn't even look to be paying attention to what Morgan was saying only a few feet away from her.

"And have flunked or gotten out of high school, possible the same one" Prentiss continued, Beck still not reacting in any type of way as her eyes remained glued to nothing in particular. "He'll also have a record- petty theft, larceny."

"But Douglas Silverman's been missing for 2 days," Detective Payton spoke up. "How come no one's called?"

Spencer couldn't help but wonder what Beck was so focused on that had nothing to do with this case? What had her so wound up? Why wouldn't she speak to anyone or give any clues as to what was bothering her?

"It's a 3-day weekend," JJ answered Detective Payton. "His parents are out of town, or he calls, says he's okay."

The walls that had been built up so high from the minute Spencer had met her were finally rearing their ugly heads in the form of Beck's natural ability to remain unseen and unheard. It seemed to be both a blessing and a curse for someone in their field, but for Spencer, it was just a frustrating oversight he wished would go away already.

"And now that the weekend's over, I can tell you with what's happened, it's gonna end violently," Hotch frowned beside Spencer, he himself not even noticing the Agent's behavior due to how focused he was on the case. Spencer wished he had his ignorance, but at the same time, he was glad to be cursed with being overly analytical of what everyone around him did, more specifically, what Beck did. Because despite not being able to drop it, he was able to try and get answers on his own.

"Prentiss and I will go to speak with Douglas's parents. Morgan, JJ, go talk to Mr. and Mrs. Owens, see if they know Doug or anyone he might've hung out with. Rossi, take Detective Payton with you to speak with any teachers or students he interacted with at school. Reid, stay here, work on the geographical profile to try and pinpoint where the other two Unsubs might've moved to with Lindsey. Ryder-" Spencer watched as her head snapped to attention as though she'd been paying attention the entire time. "-Talk to Jack, see if he knows anything about Doug or any other boys Lindsey might've interacted with that he knew of."

She nodded, moving to push herself from her seat as everyone else in the room started off for their individual tasks. She was almost out of the woods when Hotch called her back.

"Ryder," Spencer held his breath as he turned to the corkboard with his back to the pair, a part of him hoped Hotch had noticed Beck's out of the ordinary behavior and was finally deciding to get answers for himself, but... "Be vigilant."

Spencer deflated with disappointment. If anyone could've gotten something out of Beck, it would've been Hotch.

"Spencer." The Doctor spun around at the sound of his name being called, his eyes locking with his Unit Chief's who stood a few feet away, still lingering. "Keep an eye out and an ear open for her," Hotch instructed, jerking his head in Beck's direction as she poked her head into the room where Jack and Pat waited idly. Spencer nodded in understanding and turned back to his work at the board before Hotch peeled away with Prentiss.

Spencer shouldn't have been as surprised as he was that Hotch had asked him to keep an eye on the woman leading Jack and Pat to the main area where he was. It was no secret Beck was in the habit of pushing people to their limits, both emotionally and sometimes physically. But Spencer also knew that there had to have been some kind of trust between Hotch and Beck if he was allowing her to speak to the former Mobster unaccompanied by someone who was more authoritative that could reel her in better than he could if things did get out of hand.

He also figured that perhaps after Hotch had had to kill Jason Clark Battle in the middle of the BAU office in the defense of the woman that some the trust issues between the two had been resolved, but... apparently they hadn't.

"You gonna tell us why you brought us out here, Agent?" Pat spat the word at Beck as though it were poison.

The beat of silence following Pat's taunt could've either been her glaring at him or rolling her eyes, Spencer was leaning more towards glaring. Having one of the deadliest glares was a classic trait of hers she loved to use.

"I wanted to ask you a couple questions-" Beck had begun, speaking directly to Jack just before Pat interjected once more.

He groaned, "I thought we established that this has nothing to do with Jack or what happened in Boston."

"This isn't about that, and while I do think it's rather interesting that you're so loud mouthed now after being so quiet before about Jack and his origins-" Spencer turned slightly at the sound of Beck's voice slowly growing louder. "-if you continue to disrupt this investigation any further, I will not hesitate to lock your ass up in a cell in the back while I call up your Director and have a lovely chat about gross incompetence and obstruction of justice. Am I understood?"

A flash of something similar to fear flashed in Pat's eyes, but it looked as though Beck's threats were effective as he watched Pat back down, drawing her attention back to Jack. Spencer took that as his signal that she clearly had things under control and went back to attempting to do his work without focusing on her conversation and failing miserably.

"You're really something, ya know that?" He overheard Jack mutter. "I'm surprised you're not the one locked up after the stunt you pulled with Bruce."

"Oh," Spencer heard Beck's fake pouty voice. "Don't pretend like you care about anyone other than yourself. Please, save me from having to pretend to be empathetic towards you."

"My daughter is missing," Jack growled in a dangerously low voice. Spencer debated about stepping in now.

"And how many parents are without their daughters and sons because of you, Jack? Huh?" Beck shot back. "Let's get one thing straight," Spencer stole another glance over his shoulder upon hearing Beck's tone of voice get dangerously low in a similar fashion that Jack's had been. "I couldn't care less about what you're going through right now. Far as I'm concerned you're a means to an end. The only reason you're not yet ended right now is because you're here to help us find Lindsey."

Spencer's face whipped back to the board when he saw her move to reach for the photo of Doug that he'd tacked up earlier, bringing it back to Jack and slapping it down on the table in front of him.

"And you're gonna start by telling me who he is," she stated.

Jack leaned forward, his eyebrows furrowing as he studied the photo of Doug she'd just laid out for him. After a moment, he came back up, shaking his head. "I've never seen this kid before in my life," he exclaimed. "I coveted every person that came into Lindsey's life. I had to. I can't afford to forget a face. His I've never seen."

"Maybe this boy, and the other two boys that were with him, weren't boys Lindsey wanted you to meet," Beck suggested, glancing between the photo of Douglas and back to Jack. "You know how teenage girls can be. Clutching their pearls whenever a cute boy gives them attention, wouldn't want them to be scared off by her mobster dad."

Jack frowned, shaking his head more feverantly this time. "No," he replied. "Lindsey and I don't have any secrets."

"Yeah, 'cause that's real healthy," Beck scoffed sarcastically. "She know about what you did, Jack? About the... Corporation and what role you played in it?"

He swallowed hard before nodding. "She knows what I am, what I was."

"What you still are," she corrected him in a bored tone. "She know why you turned State's Witness? Does Lindsey know why you're alive and her Mom isn't?"

Jack flinched, but tried to push through with a clenched jaw. "Yes," he bit out.

Beck sat back slightly, Spencer recognized the look on her face as one of consideration. "So if she knows about all that you've done and everything you've taught her, why wouldn't she know better than to get mixed up with men just like you?"

"She wouldn't."

Then, a realization dawned about the both of them, it had seemed. "But Katie would..."

At the mention of Lindsey's now deceased best-friend, Jack frowned. His eyes traveled up, past where Beck sat in front of him towards the window where he could see a stressed out Mr. Owen standing beside an idly seated Mrs. Owen. "Lindsey protected Katie like a- like a sister," he stated.

"Meaning that if some sketchy kids came to offer Katie a ride..." Beck raised an eyebrow, prompting the man in front of her.

Jack shook his head, "Lindsey would have gone along to make sure she was okay."

Beck nodded, understanding his words and the situation his daughter was in. For a moment, it looked to Spencer as though Beck was going back on what she'd said before about sparing Jack any empathy because when she looked up at him, all Spencer saw in her eyes was just that. She felt sorry for him, she understood his pain.

"Jack," she called his attention back to her. "Lindsey is alive because of what you taught her. You should take comfort in the fact that she may still be alive because of the skills she learned from you."

"Will it be enough?" Jack asked, dejectedly.

Beck shifted in her place on the table. "I can't answer that for you."

It was then that the oddly emotional scene was broken apart by Mr. Owens approach. Jack stood straighter, as did Pat and Spencer, while Beck merely turned to glance over her shoulder at the man she'd subdued the night before. He eyed her wearily and Spencer could've sworn she saw Beck smirk at the way he shifted uncomfortably under her gaze as though she enjoyed the effect she had on him.

"I'd like to speak... to Jack if I may," he began awkwardly, his posture stiff either from the immense emotional duress he was under or just because he was still a little weary of Beck. "To apologize."

Beck and Spencer both frowned, Spencer eyeing Pat to see his reaction, the man eventually nodding. "Sure," he answered.

Mr. Owens made no move to leave with Jack, not until he turned to face Beck as if waiting for her say-so.

She stood with her arms crossed and her eyes narrowed at the man before her. "...Ten minutes," she muttered eventually, pushing herself from off the table she had been leaning on and starting out after Pat. Spencer made the split decision to follow their lead when he realized this might be the only time he'd get to talk with Beck alone since earlier in the case.

Pat, thankfully, made himself scarce as he excused himself for a smoke outside. Spencer was able to catch Beck staring out the window, her eyes focused on nothing in particular and her guard down. She hadn't even acknowledged him until he was just beside her.

"Are you alright?"

Beck flinched, almost jumping at the sound of his voice. He winced apologetically at her unexpected reaction.

"Yeah," she quickly brushed off her reaction. "Why wouldn't I be? I'm not the one who lost his daughter just a few hours ago and seems to be functioning a little too well for my comfort..." Spencer followed her eyes as she tried to watch Mr. Owens and Jack through the shaded glass that looked out to the office where they were still talking.

Spencer nodded, turning back to face her. "You're pretty suspicious of Mr. Owens. Jack, too..." he frowned slightly as he pulled his eyebrows together in concentration before breaking out into a familiar chuckle. "And Pat... You're kind of suspicious of everyone, now that I think about it."

Beck scoffed. A bitter and humorless scoff that held an underlying meaning he couldn't quite place, but something told him it probably had something to do with why she'd been so... off since he first saw her the other day.

"So... what is it?" Spencer pressed.

"What is what?"

"What's been bothering you these past few weeks?"

Beck shook her head, "Nothing-"

"It's not-" A bubble of frustration building in Spencer's chest finally burst up to the surface, though, thankfully he was able to catch himself before completely unleashing that frustration out on Beck... for the most part.

He cleared his throat, ready to get it all out before she had time to come up with some vague argument to dismiss it.

"It's not nothing," he insisted. "You've been on edge. You stare off into space. You're back to being late to work. You've been drinking coffee nonstop, which means you've been getting hardly any sleep-"

"Reid."

"You keep saying everything is alright when it clearly isn't-"

"Reid-"

"And that-" he pointed out. "You keep calling me Reid."

She shrugged nonchalantly. "Everyone calls you Reid."

"You didn't," he countered.

"Yeah, for a week," she retorted.

"That's not the point!" He snapped, releasing what frustration he'd been attempting to keep under control and finally just unleashing everything he could to get it out into the open and tense air between them. "You keep brushing everything off as if no one is going to notice or care, but I do. I care."

"You shouldn't," she spat back, venom dripping from her voice as she stood in front of him, her eyes locked with his and her face only inches away from his.

Then why do I? Spencer wanted to ask, but the words died on his tongue when something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention from the other room.

He glanced over Beck's shoulder and noticed the orange pill bottle sitting on the desk outside where Beck had been sitting minutes before. And not just any pill bottle: Jack's pill bottle. Why had he left it there? And most importantly: where was he?

Spencer brushed past the woman in front of him who was slowly realizing what was going on as she followed after him into the main space. Their eyes scanned the room, they spotted Mr. Owens lingering, glancing around the room looking like a lost puppy, but Jack was still no where in sight.

"Oh, no..." Spencer muttered as his blood ran cold and his hairs stood up at the back of his neck. Something was wrong, something was very, very wrong.

"He's taken my car!"

There was a crash on the other end of the office, Beck and Spencer both turned at the sound to find Pat stumbling in, a scowl on his bloodied face.

"Bastard took my car," Pat muttered as he grabbed a nearby walkie-talkie from the desk a few yards away.

"Shit," Beck cursed, her eyes immediately locating Mr. Owen who only stared at her, his chin held up in defiance as if he knew what he did, but he didn't care what the repercussions were. Spencer was scared to find out what he had done.

"Call Hotchner and the rest of the Motley Crew," Beck called over her shoulder at him before sauntering over to where Mr. Owens was as the station erupted into all out chaos.

"This is Pat Mannan," Pat called into the radio as Spencer fumbled with the dial on the phone in front of him. "All units, all units- I want an APB out on Jack Vaughn."

"Move," he glanced up to see Beck manhandling Mr. Owens into a nearby interview room. Spencer almost felt as though he should stop her, but when he felt a sort of pang of satisfaction in seeing Mr. Owens' frightened face... he decided against it.

He was spending too much time in Beck's head...

—

The Agent carefully set aside the file on Reba Nunez with a tight chest full of emotions on what he'd just read.

He cleared his throat and mentally prepared himself for the fourth and final file he had left on his desk. He plucked it from the pile and placed it in front of himself.

His calloused fingers ran over the bold letters on the name at the top.

Raya Navarro.

A young journalist based in South America that specialized on socioeconomic trends.

The Agent had to admit, the CIA was certainly thorough with their background work. They'd not only fabricated a relatively realistic online newspaper, but they'd also published quite a few extensive works by Miss Navarro, all on topics ranging from pieces on Wall Street to the socioeconomic disadvantages of immigrants in America.

What she was doing in South America, however, was unclear to the Agent.

He sighed as he ran a finger along the sides of the rest of the files contents. He supposed he was about to find out, wasn't he?

—

"Fuck!"

Raya screamed as she lugged around the bleeding body of her op's sniper.

"Come on, come on!" The young woman, no older than nineteen shouted as she desperately tried to drag the two ton man in full Kevlar across the jungle floor a few miles North West of Letitia, Columbia. "Ah-!"

The girl had to quickly duck down over the bloody body as a series of gunshots were fired off at the trees behind and above her, one barely whizzing past her ear. Oh, this was going terribly wrong.

"Shit," Raya huffed, grabbed the walkie on the sniper's hip. "Where the Hell is Extraction?!" She screamed over the gunshots into the receiver.

"In- In bound," came the crackly response.

Raya pressed herself further to the ground as more bullets hit the tree trunk beside her, pieces of tree and leaves flying around all around her. "Tell them to hurry the fuck up!" Raya shouted before tossing the walkie to the side.

During a brief period without bullets raining down on her, Raya jumped at the opportunity and dragged her sniper back behind a downed tree trunk in a dip in the forest that gave her the cover she would need to either wait this out or have a decent chance at fending for herself.

"Urgh," the sniper groaned as she dropped him at the bottom of the ditch. As Raya pulled away briefly, she noticed the blood was beginning to spill out through his Kevlar vest now.

"Shit," she cursed, dropping to her knees beside him. It was worse than she previously thought. There was another round of bullets that shot off in the distance, but Raya had a new problem now. Not only would she have to keep herself alive, but now she had to try and keep this sniper from dying.

Not wasting another moment, Raya unsheathed her large knife from the back of her calf and sliced off the straps of the Kevlar vest the sniper was wearing. Once that was out of the way, she could see the spot where the large piece of shrapnel had gone through from the explosion.

The explosives...the one thing the CTU hadn't considered when taking this mission.

Raya was currently the last remaining operative on the ground that wasn't injured and still alive because she had been suspicious of the weapons dealers they had tracked to the small city in Colombia. She thought it was odd that there were so many shipments, but not a lot of ammunition. But it became evident where the rest of the shipments were when most of the ops team was blown to kingdom come not but three hours after drop-off.

While Raya had been snooping around the perimeter, her team had already taken position and now... most of them were gone.

All but her and this sniper she had pulled from the rubble in a panic.

She hadn't known any of their names, barely even saw their faces beneath their large helmets and visors. But survivor's guilt would have to wait, she had a job to do right now.

Raya had to bite her cheek to keep from frowning in front of the bleeding sniper who was still drifting in and out of consciousness. The injury was bad... very bad. The shrapnel that had struck him hadn't gone through the Kevlar vest, but had somehow managed to slip in through his skin. Now, he had a large shard of thin metal beneath and through his chest skin... and judging from how deep it looked on the side... it was mere centimeters from his heart, possibly even piercing a bit of it.

Raya would have to get it out. She couldn't keep it in there and she definitely just rip it out haphazardly. To any actual surgeon this would've looked hopeless, but Raya had gone through the simulations, she'd memorized every surgical tactic, every medical text, watched every video, and even sat in on a few tough surgeries during her private studies. But this was real life now, and it wasn't like she had a plethora of medical supplies on her... but she did have a will and where there was a will there was a way.

"Okay, Beck, focus," she whispered to herself, shaking herself back to reality.

Alright, she began, her fingers trailing the wound lightly as she examined the best course of action. The adipose tissue and pectoralis muscle was still intact which wasn't a good sign. The shrapnel made a straight shot through the ribs and from the placement, seems to be lodged about a centimeter through the back of the lungs meaning... Fuck.

The heart. It was lodged into the larger chunk of the heart.

This thing couldn't be taken out, he'd die instantly.

But Raya had faith in herself... She could fix this. She had to be able to fix this.

Okay, she began. First thing's first: assess how deep into the heart it was.

Raya took the blade she still held close to her and carefully began to peel away small pieces of flesh at a time, substituting a scalpel for her Columbia River... Ironic for the position and place she was in right now.

"Mm," the sniper hissed through the pain, jerking forward a bit.

Raya was quick to halt him with a quick shove to the chest, keeping his back pressed to the ground. "You definitely don't wanna do that right now," she told him. "Trust me."

"I don't even-" a cough wracked his body followed by a groan as more blood pooled from the wound. "-know who you are."

"My name isn't important," she replied as she sped up her cutting process to get to the side of the shrapnel to see just where it was lodged within his heart. "What's yours?"

"M-Matthew," he stammered through soft sobs building in his throat. "Matthew Kroger."

"Your friends call you Matt?" Raya asked, trying her best to distract him as she got closer and closer to the shrapnel, eventually peeling away the last piece of flesh as she got to the angled part of the shrapnel. Her hands were covered in his blood and here she was trying to keep a conversation with the guy.

"Matti," he coughed slightly. "My friends... My friends call me Matti."

"Nice," she replied, slightly panicking as she tried to remember where the heart was in terms of the chest area from the outside.

She'd done this before where the lungs and ribs were held out of the way by clamps, she'd only actually seen the position of the heart behind the lungs in simulations and textbooks. Shit, I'm way out of my depth here.

"Where're you from, Matti?" Raya prompted the guy as she measured it out with her knuckles.

The heart is positioned at about 1.5 centimeters to the left of the midsagittal plane.

"Maine," Matti replied through the tears, flinching slightly at the sound of more bullets off the side.

If the piece of metal is about 9 centimeters wide and 4 centimeters tall and located at about 2 centimeters left of the midsagittal plane...

"Matti from Maine," Raya chuckled softly. "I'm from Texas."

Counting in the fact that the heart is approximately 12 centimeters tall and 8.5 centimeters wide, with the shrapnel being 1 centimeter off to the left of the heart...

"Guess that-" another cough. Raya winced. "-that explains the... the accent."

It would be lodged in directly above the myocardium layer of the heart.

"Well, Texas is my home," Raya muttered.

Okay... she could work with this.

"And I'm gonna get you home, too, Matti," she assured the man as she began to wipe away the excess flesh and blood from off her blade, prepping for the next step of her plan. "But... in order for me to do that, I'm gonna need you to stay extremely still. Can you do that for me?"

Matti, with tears in his eyes, nodded. He trusted her... He didn't have a choice but to.

"Okay, this is gonna hurt," she said, not bothering to lie or sugarcoat what she was about to do, whether it be for his own good or for her own sanity.

With careful precision, Raya slowly began to push the hilt of the knife just above the shrapnel and into place beneath the skin. Just before it was completely in place, Raya took her fingers and pinched her nails to grasp the shrapnel between her index finger and thumb. As she was pushing the blade into place, she was simultaneously easing the shrapnel out of Matti's chest and outer layer of heart.

It was an agonizing minute and a half before Raya completely pulled the shrapnel out, leaving the knife in place. But what scarred her as she tossed the shrapnel off to the forest floor was the bloody sight looking back at her.

While the knife was large enough to keep the skin in place and keep him from completely bleeding out, it wasn't large enough to block the view of the inside of Matti's heart as it beat rapidly beneath the metal of the knife.

Seeing a heart in simulations and on operating tables was one thing, but this...

And for a brief moment in time, Raya froze.

BOOM!

Raya flinched as a loud blast knocked the air out of her chest. The blast, simultaneously causing Matti to shake, which in turn, caused a series of coughs to leave his throat. His heart rate picked up as his chest heaved. The worst case scenario was suddenly in motion as Raya watched in awe as blood began to squirt and spew from the beating heart that had stable moments before. With the outer layer and most of the middle layer of muscle having been removed with the shrapnel, all of the blood in Matti's body was suddenly being sprayed all out and onto Raya's hands as she tried to put pressure on it.

"No, no, no, no, no- NO!"

She screamed, cried, and begged as she tried to hold the heart in place and keep the blood from getting everywhere. She wanted to scream and run away just at how it felt holding a beating and bleeding heart in her hands, but she couldn't just leave this man who didn't even know her name to die.

"Please- God- no!" She begged, desperately willing for Matti to live despite knowing he was dead before the blast even went off.

"Ryder!" A distance voice called out. "Ryder!"

A series of gunshots flew out over her head, but Raya still didn't duck as she kept trying and trying to keep Matti's beating heart from bleeding out.

"No!" The young woman screamed when she felt two arms begin to yank her back. "No!"

"We gotta go!" John Summers screamed into her ear as he yanked her away from Matti's dying form. The force of his pulls and the desperation in Raya's grip resulting in the girl being yanked to her feet with Matthew Kroger's beating heart in her hand and out of his chest.

Rebecca Ryder's jaw fell open, her eyes wide with awe and horror of what she'd just done.

She felt the heat of more fire and the heavy vibrations in her own chest that were in sync with the bullets whizzing past her in the Columbian jungle. She made a move to lift her foot, but then everything went black. The last thing she remembered was a guttural scream ringing in her ears that sounded strikingly similar to hers.

—

Mr. Owens was a dead end, Spencer and Beck had come to find. He wasn't talking, it was as though he had gone into some kind of catatonic state. He refused to even look either Agent in the eyes as they demanded to know where he sent Jack Vaughn.

Beck was nearly on the verge of launching herself across the table to choke the answers they needed out of him, but luckily, Spencer cut the interrogation off before she got the chance to.

"He's useless," the brunette spat as they both walked back into the small office where the boards and maps were.

"He just sent a killer to go track down the boys who kidnapped and killed his own daughters," Spencer uttered, in pure shock at how Mr. Owens could do something so... so... He couldn't even find the words. "They're never going to see the light of day again unless we get to them before Jack does."

Meanwhile, Beck was still stuck on Jack. She had her jaw clenched when Spencer glanced back at her. She was practically fuming at the ears. "We should've never let them be alone together. How did we not catch Owens' micro-expressions after showing him the picture of the dead kid?"

"Look at him, Beck," Spencer tried to reason with her, gesturing in the general direction of where they'd left Mr. Owen back in the interrogation room. "He's showing barely any emotion anymore. It wasn't something any of us could've caught onto."

"Well, we still shouldn't have let them be in a room together," she grumbled beneath her breath.

Spencer shook his head. "There's nothing we can do about that now, but there's a chance we can find where the Unsubs are before Jack gets to them."

Beck lifted her head at that. "How?"

"We finish the profile," he answered, gesturing to the maps and board behind him.

Beck crossed her arms, moving closer to the board as Spencer immediately got to work. "So, what do we know?" she pressed.

"We know the names of two out of three of our Unsubs," Spencer began as he plucked the top off of one of the markers at the bottom of the map. He put a dot at Douglas Silverman's house- the same color as the dot placed where his body had been discovered at the abandoned house. Then, he took another marker and placed a dot a few blocks away at the newly revealed Unsub's house- Ryan Phillips.

Beck frowned as she took in the placements of all the dots on the board: Douglas's house, Ryan's house, the movie theater where Lindsey and Katie had been taken, the house where Katie and Douglas had been killed, and the dumpsite for Katie's body.

"They're all within the same ten miles of each other," she noted over Spencer's shoulder.

He nodded. "That means wherever the Unsubs are keeping Lindsey has to be around this area," he circled in a large circle around each dot. "The Southeastern District."

"Hey," both agents turned at Pat Mannan's entrance into the room, his nose still slightly bloodied from where Jack had sucker punched him. "There've been gunshots coming from Jackson Street."

"Jackson Street," Beck frowned beside Spencer. "Reid, that's close to where Ryan Phillips lives. That must be where the third Unsub lives."

"Are you coming?" Pat snapped frustratedly.

Spencer barely spared him a glance as he continue to analyze what was inside this ten mile radius circle in front of him, but he noticed the way Beck had began to move after Pat had left... She was leaving.

"Wait-" Spencer jerked forward, his hand grabbing her wrist to keep her in place. On instinct, just like the first time he'd grabbed her arm back at the CTU, Beck ripped her arm from his grip and spun around defensively. "Sorry," he quickly remedied. "But if you leave now, you could be heading into a dead end."

"Reid, it's the only lead we have," she pressed.

"I think I know where the Unsub is keeping Lindsey," he explained before reaching for his pocket and producing his cell.

"What are you doing?" She prompted him, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

"Calling Hotch," he answered before putting the phone to his ear.

In regular Hotch fashion, he answered after two rings. "Reid- good news, please."

Spencer pulled the phone from his ear and hit the speaker button for Beck to join the call, but from the way she tensed upon hearing Hotch's voice, it didn't seem like she appreciated the gesture very much. "After inputting all the sites, I've come up with a two-dimensional service overlay map that indicates the offenders' operating area."

"Reid, where is he?" Hotch pressed, clearly not hanging off his every word the way Beck was as she stood beside him. Spencer could hear her fingers tapping on the table behind him as she anxiously awaited his answer.

Tap. Tap. Tap-hold. Tap. Pause. Tap. Tap. Tap-hold. Pause. Tap-hold. Tap. Tap-hold. Tap. Pause. Tap-hold. Tap. Tap-hold.

"I know it sounds crazy, but I think he's taken her to the Mayford High School two blocks from here," he stated. Beck physically deflated next to him as she jumped into action, grabbing the SUV keys from the table.

"I'll meet you there," Hotch answered after a beat. "And Reid... be careful."

"I've got Beck with me," he answered, turning to see the woman had paused at the door, waiting for him to join her. "I'll be fine." And with that, he flipped the phone shut and rushed out the door with Beck at his side.

For the first time since what had happened in Florida, he was really starting to feel like she was beginning to show some semblance of trust towards him again. Or at least that's what he hoped this was as he set his anxiousness aside and just kept walking with her.

The car ride- per Beck's need for speed- was very brief, but very memorable.

Not only had Beck run through about a dozen red lights, she'd nearly managed to clip a handful of cars, narrowly avoid two curbs, and drift enough times to make Spencer's knuckles almost permanently white by the time they'd slid to a stop just outside Mayford High.

As they pulled in, however, they noticed that they weren't alone.

Sitting in a spot beside where Beck had halted to a stop was Pat Mannan's car.

"Jack's already here," Beck muttered just before hitting the brakes.

Spencer didn't waste a second. Still feeling a high from the car ride, he jumped out from the passenger's side of the SUV and began sprinting through the school, the sounds of Beck calling after him drifting to the back of his mind as he tried to work out where the Unsubs would be keeping Lindsey in a school.

"Reid!"

He passed a series of lockers and windows, his pistol in hand.

They'd have to be keeping her away from windows which immediately excluded any classroom.

Spencer gripped his pistol tightly as he opened the first door he noticed had been propped open.

They could be in an office, but there would be a risk that if Lindsey got free from the restraints she no doubt had on, she'd be able to make contact with someone.

His sprint slowed to a quick speed-walk, his feet slowly hitting the tile floor of the school hall as he carefully made his way through, making sure to keep his eyes peeled for any movement and ears peeled for any sounds.

It would have to be a room with only one entrance and exit so that if either of the Unsubs left the room, there'd be no chance for Lindsey to escape...

He had it.

They were keeping Lindsey in a bathroom.

"Urgh!"

Spencer jumped, slightly startled by the loud sounds coming from down the hall he'd just entered. The Doctor raised his pistol as he sped up towards the boys bathroom where the sound had come from... They were in there. Jack had beat him to where the Unsub was.

Spencer knew Hotch had told him to be careful, and he knew Beck wasn't far behind, but he couldn't wait for back-up. Not when Jack was on the verge of killing someone that deserved justice, not to be slaughtered.

"Kill him! Kill him, Daddy!"

Spencer heard the unmistakable voice of Lindsey Vaughn from inside and made a split decision then.

He went in.

The minute he was inside, he raised his gun and pointed it at the first person he saw with a weapon:: Jack Vaughn.

It was a hectic sight. Jack standing over the knocked down body of Ryan Phillips with a shotgun pointed in his face and a jostled, but not fatally injured, Lindsey at his side.

"Put the gun down!" Spencer ordered.

"Help me, please!" Ryan Phillips begged as he reached out to him in desperation. "Please help me!"

Spencer paid him no mind as he kept his eyes on Jack. "Jack, put down the gun."

"She begged him to stop and he laughed at her! He laughed at her!" Lindsey shouted. But Spencer was surprised to find her statement was directed to him, but to her father who still kept his gun aimed at the whimpering boy at his feet. Because that's all he was, a stupid, insolate, boy who deserved jail time- not a bullet to the head.

"I didn't laugh at her," Ryan sobbed. "Honestly, I would change this if I could! But I can't... Please, just don't kill me."

Jack remained unmoving.

"Jack," Spencer said softly, trying a different approach in hopes that if Jack wouldn't respond to force, he would respond to reason.

He tried to remember what struck Jack the most aside from keeping Lindsey safe. The one conversation coming to mind that really elicited an emotional reaction from him that Spencer could recall was the one Beck had had where she'd mentioned... his wife.

"You swore to your wife you'd protect Lindsey," he began. "Listen to her, Jack. Listen to what she wants. She's- she's begging you to kill somebody right in front of her. What do you think your wife wanted you to protect her from?"

For a second, Spencer thought he saw Jack's eye twitch in response to his words. The tightness of his jaw and the finger still hovering over the trigger hesitating if just for a moment. And for that moment, Spencer really thought he was getting through to him.

"Jack... your life has been, uh... it's been about violence, and if you do this, Lindsey's will be, too. Do you want that?" Spencer pressed.

On the floor, still in tears, Ryan shook his head as sirens could be heard in the distance. "No, you don't want that," he whimpered softly from the ground.

Slowly, Spencer began to lower his weapon as he noticed Jack slightly lowering his own.

"When does it end Jack?"

"Put down the gun," Ryan sniffled.

Spencer felt chills run down his spine when he heard Lindsey whisper to her father, "Kill him."

"When does it stop?" Spencer tried when Jack's eyes flickered to his daughter's momentarily in response to her words.

Maybe what he was saying was really getting through to this killer, this madman. Maybe if he couldn't save Douglas Silverman or Katie Owens, he could save Ryan Phillips and Lindsey Vaughn's future. Maybe... just maybe-

"Tomorrow."

The words left Jack's mouth like a promise just before he raised his weapon again.

It all happened in a flash.

Spencer remembered shouting out in protest just as he saw Jack pull his finger against the trigger, but just before the sound of the gunshot met his ears, the sound of his name being called abruptly pulled him back... No, those were... Those were hands pulling him back.

Just before the gunshot echoed through the bathroom and before Spencer would have to witness Ryan Phillips' head be burst open at the hands of Jack Vaughn, he was yanked away from the sight, his eyes meeting a pair of familiar brown ones as he flinched at the sound of the shotgun firing.

Spencer couldn't move. He felt frozen. Like someone had taken liquid nitrogen in a needle and stuck it into his veins.

He didn't need to turn around to know Ryan Phillips was dead. He didn't need to turn around to know Jack Vaughn had turned to his daughter who'd witnessed it all to let her out of her bindings. He didn't need to turn around because he had someone keeping him turned away from the horrific scene behind him.

When he tried to turn at the sound of movement as Jack ushered Lindsey from the room, Beck pulled him back to her the way she'd done moments before.

"Don't," she told him insistently. "Trust me."

He did.

"I-" he stammered, unable to find the words for the emotions he was feeling. "I tried-"

"I know," Beck told him with a short nod, her fingers digging into his arms as she tried to keep him in the present. "You can't control his actions. This isn't on you, Spencer."

Spencer... she'd called him by his name.

"You okay, Reid?"

Morgan.

He glanced to the side to see Hotch, Detective Payton, Morgan and Rossi had entered the bathroom and seen the horrific sight. He hadn't even noticed them past Beck until Morgan had addressed him, his eyebrows furrowed in concern.

"I couldn't-" Spencer swallowed hard. I couldn't save him.

"Come on," Beck released his left arm as she led him by his right towards the door. "You don't need to see..." she trailed off as she ushered him out of the bathroom and away from the results of his failure.

—

Upon reading the last of the files the Agent was provided on the Sword, he realized then what he was dealing with was no laughing matter.

His stomach filled with dread as he wondered what his source was doing poking around this force to be reckoned with. He feared for anyone who was even a small threat to the woman he'd just read up on.

The Agent knew then that he had a call to make, and not one that was informational.

He needed to give out a warning.

—

Back at the BAU office, Spencer found himself still seated in silence at his desk. He was still reeling from what had happened hours before. He imagined it would've been worse had he actually witnessed what his mediocre negotiation skills had caused.

On one hand, he thought his punishment for failing Ryan Phillips would be fitting to be having to witness his murder. But on the other hand, he knew he'd never get the memory of his head being blown off out of his mind.

So, Beck had made that decision for him.

As the Doctor sat at his desk, eyeing the Agent across the walkway at her own desk, he couldn't help but wonder if she had seen Ryan Phillips get killed. If she had to carry that burden for him.

He wished she wouldn't have.

But the other part of him, the one far more inclined to trusting the otherwise suspicious woman, was thankful she had.

It was just passing up on ten at night when Beck finally threw in the towel. Spencer heard her log out from her computer. He spared a glance over to her desk to watch her spray a small bit of water onto her Bonsai Paris before collecting her bike helmet from the creaky cabinet at the foot of her desk and starting out. But not before stopping briefly at his desk.

"Hey," she greeted, a small frown playing at her lips.

"Hi," he replied, glancing down at her helmet as if he hadn't been watching her take it out moments before. "Heading out?"

"Yeah," she answered with a small nod. "After the last 36 hours, I'm calling it an early night. You should too. You deserve it, Spencer."

"Thanks. I'll consider it," he said, idly tapping the end of his pen against his desk.

For a moment, Beck stood there as if she wanted to say something more, but ultimately decided against it. Spencer felt a twinge of disappointment pang in his chest at her lack of interaction with him, but he couldn't be too disappointed. She was back to calling him 'Spencer', after all.

So despite the fact that he still had a lingering feeling that Beck was holding back from him and the rest of the team, more so than usual, he had to excuse it. Because like she'd said to him earlier, he couldn't control Jack Vaughn's actions anymore than he could control Beck Ryder's.

And a part of him was okay with that.

—

The Agent dialed up his source. He knew if it was morning at Interpol, it was coming up on night time across the pond where he knew she was located. And knowing her hours, the Agent knew he wouldn't have to listen to idle ringing for much longer.

Sure enough, she answered after only a few rings.

"Clyde?"

"Oh, good, you're awake," he replied cheekily, his fingers idly tracing 'X's over the letters of the Sword's stack of files. "I have some information on the... case study patient we had discussed."

There was a beat of silence on the other line.

"You were able to get into the CIA's system?"

"What? Like it's hard?" Clyde Easter scoffed. "Anyway, this isn't a professional call, per se. I can't exactly discuss details over this line. It isn't safe."

"What is safe, nowadays?" Came the exasperated response he was expecting.

"Well, I can tell you right now, you certainly aren't," he retorted.

He could practically hear the gears turning in his source's head. "What do you mean?"

"This case, the one you asked me to look into," Clyde began with a frown. "I have to know... you're not mixed up with this... Sword, are you?"

Another beat.

"...Why?"

Clyde let out a heavy sigh. "Like I said, I can't divulge details with you like this. But what I can tell you is that whatever this is about... Whatever reason you're looking into this... Rebecca Ryder... I'm telling you that it's best to stop now."

"Clyde," she tried to reason, but the Agent who'd just read through some of the most horrific reports he'd ever laid his eyes on was not having it.

"No," Clyde cut her off insistently. "I'm calling out of courtesy. Consider this a warning: whatever this Rebecca Ryder touches falls apart at the seams... I suggest you rethink pulling on this very dangerous thread, Emily."

—

On the other line, Emily Prentiss's frown deepened. This definitely wasn't what she was expecting from her former Interpol colleague.

Then again, she had wanted a gauge on who she was dealing with, and from the way Clyde was reacting to whatever he'd dug up on her, she had a pretty good idea now.

"Fine," she relented with a huff, her eyes following the brunette across the room as she walked away from Reid's desk and started out of the office, unaware of the woman watching her. "Keep in touch, Clyde."

And with that, she hung up the phone and bought fingers up to her mouth as she began to nervously bite at what was left of her nails.

What had Hotch gotten them into by hiring on Beck Ryder?

—

Well, that went well.

Beck let out an audible sigh as she dropped her go-bag onto her living room floor and kicked off her boots in the middle of the floor. Mrs. Stone would probably complain about the noise later, but Beck couldn't be bothered to give a shit about her bitchy neighbors right now. Not when she had a million other things to worry about.

As Beck made her way out of her living room towards her room, she made sure to bump her hip into the small jukebox in the corner of the hall just past her living room. It lit up and immediately began to play where it had left off a few nights before she'd left to California to visit her brother.

The soft thumping of drums and dulcet sounds of electric guitar whining began to fill the air as Foghorn's 'Slow Ride' played Beck into her room.

She found she worked a lot better under immense terror as well as with a rocking soundtrack playing in the back. And as she pulled the double doors of her walk-in closet open and took a step back, she knew she had a lot of work to do.

As Beck took a step back to examine what she had to work with, she looked out across the closet and saw the many different files attached to faces, each board in her closet filled to the brim with whatever she had pulled from Penelope Garcia's encrypted drive on the team.

She had gained quite a lot of information.

Rossi's former unsolved cases that still probably haunted him at night.

Garcia's interesting criminal record.

Morgan's troubling past back in Chicago.

Prentiss's relationship to a certain ambassador that presided over quite a bit of government.

Hotchner's remarkably long list of casualties while on the field.

JJ's multiple therapy visits following an incident that had piqued Beck's interest from just months after what had happened with the CTU.

Elle Greenaway's internal investigation following an active case just before her informal resignation.

And last but not least... an unreported drug problem documented only through reports from other team members about the odd behavior of one Dr. Spencer Reid.

Beck sighed, taking a seat at the edge of her bed as she looked over just the brink of what she'd gathered. With what she'd found alone, she could decimate the BAU.

So, what's stopping you?

Beck let her head fall into her hands as her fingers gripped at her hair.

"I don't know."

—

A/N: Yes, you do, Beck. :)

N e way, sorry for the late update, but as you can see this was kind of a monster to get out. THEE longest chapter I've ever written, so... enjoy. Lmk what you guys think because your feedback and reviews literally have me by the neck.

- Ally

Incorrect Quote of the Chapter:

Beck: *looking out in the distance pensively*

Spencer: She's so thoughtful... I wonder what she could be thinking about...

Beck: *whispering to herself* Wed-nes-day... Whensday...? Wendesday?