Chapter Text
The rainfall over Abingdon, Virginia seemed relentless. It was rather apt however since it was mirroring the cold weight that had settled in Emily Prentiss’s chest the moment the DNA hit came through the CODIS database.
For over a decade, Emily had carried a secret that tarnished the carefully curated image of the Prentiss family. A secret greater even than her illegal abortion as a teenager.
This secret was far more explosive, for one night when alcohol had loosened the temper and tongue of her usually ice Queen diplomatic mother she had revealed a truth that had been carefully hidden from the world. Mid drunken argument, the worst Emily can ever remember her parents ever having, her mother threw the words at her husband which had rocked Emily's world, “I’m not the one who fucked some Chinese gutter whore and got lumbered with a bastard!”
Emily remembers keenly how her breathing had halted in shock as she hid at the top of the stairs, listening to her parents slander and rage against one another, revealing the existence of her half sister. The next day, when sobriety had returned and her parents had formed some kind of detente or contract that returned them to being cooly, politely civilised husband and wife to each other, she had asked where her sister was. Her parents had exchanged a look and her mother laughed uncomfortably before they both swept aside her question with assurances that held the edge of threat that she must be mistaken or have dreamed such a thing since she had no sister.
Certainly none to concern herself with.
Emily had not forgotten though. She had pretended to, but she had searched herself and as she aged and her resources expanded that search bore fruit.
She discovered her father’s long-buried affair had indeed resulted in a child, a baby girl born in secret, her biological mother seeming to disappear shortly after she was born. A disappearance that always made Emily uncomfortable. Her mind shield away from asking the question her gut whispered to her…”Had her parents or her mother made this woman who had birthed her half sister disappear?”
Emily could find no proof of such, but instead found that rather than her father doing the right thing in protecting, providing for or raising his new daughter he had found a means to dispose of her too.
Emily's stomach always turned as she saw how appearances and expectations of their station always trumped family for her parents.
To protect his political standing, his marriage, and his wife’s elevated prestige as a diplomat, Emily's father had quietly arranged for the infant to be placed anonymously into the care system.
He hadn't even bothered to arrange a good family for her. He had just dropped her off in an overburdened and under resourced New York Orphanage.
By the time Emily was old enough to have used her own money, time and resources to uncover the truth years had passed, the trail for her sister was already cold.
Her father had finally admitted to the child and spoken of her exactly once when Emily had confronted him with her evidence and research a few years later. He had been cold and dismissive even then. Informing her that the little girl was a mistake, the result of a one night stand. The woman, Jiaying, had been in a relationship with vet named Cal and they had quarrelled. Jiaying had stormed out and met Emily’s father at a bar. It really was no great romance, just an angry drunken mistake, but Jiaying had kept the baby. Cal had apparently even known and agreed to stay with Jiaying to raise the child, although after Jiaying’s disappearance, he too had similarly vanished. Only for Jiaying’s seeming obsession with bloodlines, her father would never have known about the child…perhaps that would have been better.
Emily’s half-sister had been registered under the tragically forgotten name 'Mary Sue Poots', before shuffling through an endless cycle of group homes, short-term foster placements, and orphanages until the age of fifteen, when she seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. A troubled child, her care records showed multiple instances of Mary running away and she had been soundly labelled as a trouble maker with a low priority or likelihood of finding a forever home.
The reality Emily uncovered during her private investigation got darker than mere neglect however.
The foster parents who had last logged Mary Sue in their custody, the Stinickis, were eventually convicted in a horrific multi-agency, cross country child trafficking bust. They were currently now serving consecutive life sentences for child neglect, cruelty, sexual assault of minors, human trafficking, and the gruesome murders of children who had either fought back or suffered fatal abuse at the hands of high-paying clients in the trafficking network.
The Stanikis and a host of other foster parents, social workers and youth workers across the country had operated under the radar for years by targeting vulnerable, ethnic, or troubled children in the system with no living relatives and who were expected to time out of the system without ever being adopted. They were kids the system easily overlooked if they “ran away.”
Though the Stanikis claimed Mary Sue had simply run away one afternoon, local law enforcement had eventually concluded she was either sold into the network or buried in an unmarked grave somewhere. Her file showed a teenager with a sense of justice unafraid to question the nuns or foster parents who raised her, a child who had spit in the eye of authority and been unafraid to stand up for her fellow foster siblings in more than one case where her files had labeled her a trouble maker and someone at risk of making what her file alleged were potentially “false accusations” as such files always called them to protect the system. Punishing kids who called out abuse by labelling them a risk to future Foster parents rather than protecting them.
The crushing revelation that she had been too late to save her sister who was likely dead or at best, being used somewhere by some part of the trafficking network law enforcement had missed, had broken Emily's heart, but it had also forged her resolve.
It was the haunting ghost of Mary Sue Poots that had pushed Emily to excel in law enforcement, driving her to join the FBI so she could fight for the forgotten victims who slipped through the cracks.
Now, that very ghost was sitting in an interrogation room down the hall. She had changed a lot from the one grainy picture from the convent orphanage a kindly nun had given Emily while she had been investigating her sister all those years ago.
The BAU had been called in to investigate a series of brutal abductions targeting young women across Virginia.
The case had taken a dramatic and unexpected turn however, when earlier that morning the primary subject of interest was apprehended not by the BAU, not by a SWAT entry team, or even a local LEO, but by his latest supposed intended victim.
The local police had arrived to find a slight, Asian-American woman in her mid-twenties standing over the unconscious, severely injured form of Brian Dewey, their prime suspect. He had been completely neutralized and Mary Sue had calmly called the authorities.
When the team ran the woman's fingerprints and DNA to confirm her identity, the system flagged a partial familial match. It was a hit on the personal reference profile Emily had discreetly had Garcia upload into the federal database years ago, praying for closure like one of the victims families which Garcia routinely worked with in her support groups. Emily had always imagined such closure would come either in the form of a living but traumatised and damaged relative being swept up for some drug or sex offence or as part of a sting on another trafficking ring… or in her nightmares, Mary Sue was found as a cold case recovery. A Jane Doe body.
Yet, here Mary Sue Poots was alive, and looking remarkably calm, confident and put together.
She was currently going by the name 'Daisy', operating under a series of flawlessly fabricated identity documents that only for the DNA match no one would ever have questioned.
However, the relief Emily desperately longed to feel was immediately suffocated by the cold, analytical reality of the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Inside the glass-walled briefing room, Aaron Hotchner and David Rossi stood over the battle board, reviewing the crime scene photographs with sharp, uncompromising scrutiny. The evidence from the scene they claimed did not align with a simple act of self-defense by a terrified victim.
"The physical evidence from where Mary Sue claims to have been abducted suggests a level of tactical proficiency that goes far beyond instinct," Hotch stated, his voice devoid of emotion as he gestured toward the forensic reports. "The unsub, Mr Dewey, suffered compound fractures and strategic trauma consistent with hand-to-hand combat training. Considering he is a veteran with CQC training, even if it was only basic required courses for active duty personnel…it calls into question how Ms Poots could have overwhelmed him.”
The team was avidly drinking in the questions, Spencer's brows furrowed and then Rosie picked up the thread, “Furthermore, the timeline of the previous disappearances, the means of abduction indicates the likelihood of the presence of an accomplice,a submissive secondary partner who helped lure the other victims into a false sense of security."
"A classic dynamic," Spencer added, leaning against the table as he nodded, his eyes flickering across the crime scene photos on the battle board as his big brain put his new theory together. "Mary Sue could be a previous victim. An early one, a prototype from before Mr Dewey devolved…perhaps she was spared, groomed, and eventually integrated into the offender's methodology. But over time, the submissive partner often seeks to supplant the dominant figure and if he trained her to fight in case a victim ever fought back it could explain her ability to take Mr. Dewey down if she had surprise and familiarity with his style.”
Morgan’s brows furrowed even as he threw Prentiss an apologetic look. His deep voice was slower as he tried to add to the new theory, to puzzle it out in his mind, “If 'Daisy' is indeed Mary Sue as the DNA says then her entire background is a carefully constructed lie. Given her history, her trauma, and the complete lack of verifiable records for the last ten years, we have to consider the very real possibility that she isn't just an innocent survivor who got lucky today. She may be the secondary unsub, turning on her partner to play the victim and take control of the narrative."
Every word felt like a physical blow to Emily, who stood rigid near the back of the room, her hands clenched so tightly into fists that her knuckles had turned stark white.
"She was defending herself," Emily interjected, her tone laced with a fierce, protective edge that she struggled to keep professional. "Hotch, look at her background. She survived a system that was actively hunting and selling children like her. If she learned how to fight, if she created a fake identity, it was to protect herself from being hunted again. Using skills she picked up while a victim of a trafficking network neither we nor any other agency really ever got a grip of the size of. We cannot automatically profile her as a killer simply because she refused to become another statistic in a body bag."
Hitch remained impassive, his face seemingly untouched by emotion. "Emily, we aren't judging her, we are looking at the methodology," Hotch replied calmly, though having known him so long now and thanks to her profiling ability Emily catches how his dark eyes held a note of quiet sympathy. "I know this is personal, but we have to remain objective -” he continued placatingky. “-The level of deception and technical ability required to build the identity she is currently living under requires significant resources and premeditation. We cannot rule out she was in league with Mr Dewey or that she is still part of the network who had extensive experience with forging documents to aid their trafficking. Until we can verify her movements over the last decade, she remains a person of interest."
"She is my sister," Emily said, her voice dropping to a harsh, emotionally raw whisper that drew a heavy silence over the room.
Reid looked away awkwardly, suddenly uncomfortable at Emily’s rare expression of emotional vulnerability, while JJ offered a soft, mournful look of support.
"Which is precisely why you need to step back from the interrogation," Rossi replied gently, placing a fatherly hand on her shoulder. "If she is innocent, the truth will come out. But if she has been compromised by the life she was forced to lead, either as a partner to Mr. Dewey, or as an unwilling cog in the trafficking ring’s machine, then you cannot allow your personal guilt over her past to blind you to what she might have become."
Emily felt a tear threatening to spill over her lashes. She breathed slowly, pulling out her little emotional boxes to compartmentalise all her feelings and pushing it all down. Reasserting her cool, professional mask.
The agonizing conflict tore through her chest: the profound guilt over her family's cowardly betrayal of an innocent baby, the desperate desire to wrap her arms around the sister she thought was in all likelihood dead, and the chilling, professional whisper at the back of her mind that warned her the team's theory was at least logically sound and theoretically possible…hell it was more likely probably because when had Emily ever known her life to not be complicated and her family not to be a disaster? The statistics alone were against Mary Sue, a teen in the dysfunctional system she grew up in, lost for over a decade, likely to some criminal influence, groomers or traffickers…it would be shocking if she was an innocent victim and not at least some form of criminal. The data, the statistics for at risk mixed race teens growing up in care in this country were against her.
Stepping out into the observation corridor, Emily pressed her hand against the cold glass of the interrogation room. The instinct to ignore the team, to take the half dozen steps to the door to the interrogation room and to enter….to introduce herself, was strong. Her phone feels warm in her pocket as her hand grips it, she wrestles with the idea of calling in the best most expensive lawyer she can find for her sister.
Yet, the other side of the glass. sat without concern was the young woman calling herself Daisy who appeared unshaken by her position. Was it familiarity with law enforcement that kept her so calm, or the confidence of the innocent? Emily couldn't tell.
Standing here…this was the closest Emily had ever been to her sister…and yet she was still so far away.
Mary Sue looked so small sitting in the center of the stark room, yet her posture was entirely composed, her dark eyes scanning the corners of the space with a quiet, lethal awareness that belonged to neither a simple victim nor a standard criminal. It made the fine hairs on Emily's arms raise. Mary Sue was hiding things. Emily knew it. Every undercover and sly instinct Emily ever had screamed at her when she looked at her sister that Mary Sue was not the mere victim she presented herself as.
Mary Sue turned to the one way mirror and seemed to look straight at Emily through the glass even though Emily knew such a thing was impossible. Emily’s heart raced as she analysed her sister's face seeing similarities in their dark set eyes, their high set cheekbones and prominent Cupid's bow.
Emily closed her eyes to vanquish her sister from her sight. Sighing harshly as her forehead came to rest on the glass. She felt trapped in the suffocating space between a sister's desperate hope and an agent's cold duty, knowing that whatever truth lay behind those guarded familiar eyes of her sister would change her life forever.
To be continued...