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Everything came back slowly. The case. The conversation with Nile. Heading to the station. Getting held at gunpoint. Climbing into the car. Being knocked unconscious.
Making the connection in the case between all the victims.
They were surrogates. They were representing someone. He was representing someone. Unless.
He was the target.
Carefully, Reid cracked open an eye. He wasn’t in a warehouse, or in a cabin, both options that would have potentially caused him to have a panic attack. No, he was in what looked to be a family home. He was tied to a wooden chair, directly in the center of what looked to be a sunken living room.
He was alone.
He raised his head and looked around, noting the wood paneling for wainscoting. The marks on the wall from things being thrown. The coarse blue carpet.
Reid was home.
As the details were registering in his brain, he was already tugging at the ropes that bound him to the chair. But it was no use. Whoever had taken him had managed to tie his hands and arms behind him just tightly enough to make sure he couldn’t slip free. His legs were also tied to the chair legs, but with belts instead of what felt like rope.
He shifted again, trying to loosen at least one of the belts, when he felt something shift in his pocket. His phone. He still had his phone . Reid’s momentary excitement then crashed down when he realized exactly which phone he had.
His secondary phone. For his family. And the BAU didn’t have the number.
Back to square one.
He had just started to twist again when he heard the front door open behind him. He immediately relaxed his body in an attempt to still look unconscious, hoping to buy a little time to access the Unsub.
Footsteps shuffled closer against the carpet. A pause, then moved in front of him.
“I know you’re awake, Spencer.”
Reid could almost feel his heart stop. He didn’t need to access the Unsub. Or even have to connect the dots.
The Unsub was William Reid.
Derek Morgan was pacing.
Frustration was nearly bleeding off of him. He couldn’t believe that this was happening right now. And of all people, why Reid?
When one of the beat cops had found Reid’s phone on the ground in the alleyway near the station, they’d just assumed that someone had dropped it and brought it to the precinct. Only when one of the other officers turned it back on did they realize who it belonged to.
Garcia had stolen Reid’s phone for a few minutes a few months ago and changed the background. He went ahead and kept it, because he had to admit he liked it. It was a photo she’d taken of Morgan and Reid with Henry at the last FBI Family Picnic.
Morgan had been walking by when the officer had turned on the phone, and his heart sank. Reid was missing. Reid had been taken.
He’d grabbed Emily and ran over to the alley that his phone had been found in. The only other thing that he’d found was Reid’s bag. No badge, no gun.
“He has some protection on him, at least,” Emily muttered.
“Or, the Unsub just got another weapon to use against him.” Morgan wasn’t taking any chances. He knew Reid’s luck.
But he also knew Reid’s secret. No matter what this Unsub did to him, he’d be ok. More tired, sure. Bloody, absolutely. But he couldn’t die.
He’d just suffer. And have more nightmares.
They regrouped in the station’s conference room. Hotch and Rossi were glaring at the evidence board, both as frustrated and angry as Morgan. JJ was sitting at the table, frustrated but also plainly worried. Emily joined her, hand on shoulder in silent support.
None of them had told Garcia yet. They knew she would freak out and panic. They didn’t want to hurt her until they had more information.
Hotch addressed the group without turning around. “Alright, let’s run through this to get Reid back. Victims are white males in their late twenties, early thirties. Tall, longer brown hair, thin.”
“No connections between work place, home, family situations. All abducted from different parts of Las Vegas. Dump sites are also varied,” Rossi continues.
Emily stares down at some of the pictures scattered across the table. “Nothing is usually left at the abduction sites. But Reid left his bag and phone.”
Phone. One phone. It clicks in Morgan’s head. Reid had two phones. He’d explained it to him that night at dinner with Booker. One phone was for work. The other was for them .
He’d only left one phone at the abduction site. That meant that he probably still had the second one on him. He’d already searched the young agent’s bag for clues when looking for his gun, so he knew it wasn’t in there.
There was only one problem. Reid hadn’t given him the number for that phone.
But he knew someone who might have it.
The team was throwing theories around the table while he was lost in his head. Quietly, he pulled his own phone from his pocket and set off the text tone. Time to do a little white lying.
“Hotch, gotta take this, I’ll be right back.” To Hotch’s credit, he simply nodded, never fully leaving the brainstorm conversation.
Morgan slipped outside and started flipping through his contacts, truly hoping that the person he was looking for hadn’t changed her number when she entered the service.
Three rings later, he was right.
“Derek?”
The agent leaned against the brick exterior of the precinct. “Hey Nile. I need your help.”
There was a pause before she answered him. “You know, I told Spencer to give my number to you, not the other way around.” The words may have been snippy, but the tone was clearly a tease.
He smirked, despite the situation. Trust Nile Freeman to get him to calm down in under thirty seconds. The smirk melted away though, because he was about to break her heart.
“He’s why I’m calling. He’s been taken by our unsub. And he left his work phone behind. But he has his other one on him. I need the number.”
The contentment on the other line immediately became tense. “Of course, I’ll text it to you right now. Don’t have it memorized yet. Do you need our help?” It was clear exactly the ‘who’ she was referring to was.
“No, but if you’re still in the states, head for Vegas anyway. After this, the kid is gonna need a pick me up. And don’t think I’m gonna miss yelling at you as well!”
Nile let out a small laugh. “We were already driving that way, avoiding Chicago. We’ll be in town by tomorrow. I’ll text you. Now go save my new little brother.”
Morgan said his goodbyes and within fifteen seconds, he had the second phone number. Now how to bring it to the team. He quickly called Garcia.
“I thought you forgot about me, Derek Morgan! It’s been six hours since we last spoke.”
Normally Penelope Garcia’s voice would calm him (or rile him up, if he was honest with himself). Not right now, though.
“No time for games, Garcia. I need you to trace a cell phone for me. It’s for the case.”
“Derek, I just hung up with the others. They have nothing. How do you have a phone?”
He let out a sigh. Another white lie. Reid was going to probably kill him for this, but right now, he didn’t care. “Reid got a new cell phone not too long ago. For when his nightmares are really bad. He calls me. We just didn't want it on our work phones.”
There was a pregnant pause. “Give me the number. I’ll get the truth from you later. You’re still a terrible liar, Morgan.”
“Baby girl, I will spill all my secrets, but first, we need to find this phone.”
“I shall call when I have something for you.”
She hung up in his ear. Damn it. Of course she saw through him. She always did. But she did it out of love.
Morgan walked back into the station. “Hang on just a little longer, kid,” he muttered, out of earshot of the BAU. “We’ll find you soon.”
Reid let out a loud scream.
His father had not said a word to him once he knew that his son was awake. Instead, he was burning cigarettes into the skin around his neck, one after another.
It burned so bad. Worse than when he felt the flames from Randall Garner’s bomb. Worse than the rush of the dilaudid in his veins. Worse than anything he’d ever experience.
A sixth cigarette fell to the floor. Light click. Smell of burning tobacco. Burns.
Screams.
He couldn’t get his voice to work. Everything felt raw. It hurt. So much.
William still didn’t speak.
Finally, after half a pack was extinguished onto his body, the older man paused.
“Do you know why you are here, Spencer?”
Reid shook his head, trying to see him. But the other man made a point to stay behind him.
“Your little stunt from a few years ago. When you accused me of killing Riley Jenkins. You cost me my job, my credibility, everything. So now I’m going to take it from you.”
Before Reid could push a word out of his mouth, something slammed into him. A baseball bat. Right into his ribs. Any air that was still left in his body was immediately lost.
Reid gagged. The bat came down again, this time at his knee. The one that he’d been shot in. He heard a crack, and then pain flared through his leg.
Another swing. His arm.
Another. His wrist.
Everything felt far away. The world was spinning. He almost couldn’t register the pain in his body, there was just too much.
One more swing. His head. The world tilted as the chair he was tied to finally overbalanced, landing him on his side. Blackness crept into his vision, but didn’t take hold.
And then he heard a sound that he was honestly hoping to avoid today. The sound of a gun being cocked.
“You ruined my life. So I’ll ruin yours.”
Time stopped.
Then the door crashed open.
“FBI! Drop the weapon!”
“Reid!”
“Step away from him!”
The voices all came out once. He knew those voices.
A gunshot rang out.
Silence.
In the days that followed, he’d come back to that moment, when it seemed like time had stopped. So much could have been lost.
Luckily, he was able to lie to the team.
By the time the BAU was surrounding Spencer Reid, the burns had all healed. The breaks were just a painful memory. The headache was still there, but that was because head wounds always seemed to take the longest to heal, only bested by limb regrowth. He’d been lucky that the two blows to the head had not broken the skin. There wouldn’t have been a way to explain that.
Never had he been more happy with how a case ended. Reid’s father was in the morgue. He attempted to fire at him during all the chaos of the team storming in. Morgan shot him through his temple, “with extreme prejudice,” he would later tell Reid, after everything calmed down.
As it turned out, Morgan had used the same story on the team about his second phone. Garcia had been able to trace it to his childhood home, which at the current time was between owners. That was where William Reid was committing his murders. From the time she locked onto his phone to when Morgan kicked in the door, only twenty minutes had passed.
The stressor was not Reid’s accusation. William had been cleared from that only weeks following their departure. The true stressor was that he’d lost his job because of another young man, who’d accused him of sexual harassment, and had the evidence to back him up. That had been the first victim, Grant Kelly. It was pure coincidence that they’d looked alike actually. Kelly had been killed only a week following William’s firing.
The EMTs at the scene had quickly cleared him, finding no permanent injuries. Within two hours, they were back at the hotel, dealing with the adrenaline crash. They were planning on leaving the next morning, mostly because Reid was begging for a nap.
After a quick shower to clean away the stress of the day, Reid sat down on his bed with a loud sigh. Today had not gone the way he’d thought it would. But now, he could-
His text tone pinged.
So, exactly how many casinos are you banned from?
He didn’t bother texting a reply, instead choosing to call. “Every one of them in Vegas. Which tells me you’re here. So much for going after the doctor?”
A loud male laugh came through the speakers. It was clear that Nile had put the phone on speaker when he’d called. “You know us too well, Spencer!”
Spencer good naturally rolled his eyes, even if they couldn’t see them. “Do I even want to know?”
This time, Nile’s giggle came through clear, almost completely hiding the soft chuckles of the other man. “Joe would like to get married again in Las Vegas. Will you join us in celebration?”
Spencer smiled. He needed his family today. “Sure. Let me just tell my boss I want to see my mom. He’ll give me a couple days. It’s tradition when we have Vegas cases.”
While the others were cheering through the phone, he quickly texted Hotch from his newly returned work phone. Hotch, forgot to ask. Can I stay a few days? Need to check on my Mom.
Within seconds he had his reply. Morgan already asked for you. Be back by Monday. And don’t let Derek break his bank account.
“Guys, I’m here until Sunday.”