The Hills [ S.R. ]

chapter 14

Spencer woke up the next morning glancing at your phone on his bedside table. Maybe the whole night had been a dream- no, a nightmare. Maybe you'd be in your apartment, making coffee for the two of you, waiting for his knock at your door. Maybe you were planning the next hangout you'd have together. He had enjoyed his first picnic so much. She was so thoughtful, and the way she looked under the warmth of the morning sun, the way her nose was perfectly shaped for her face, the stud on the left side sparkling. He loved the way her smile, her genuinely happy smile, made her eyes squint. The sparkle in her eyes under the lights of the Target where they first met. He couldn't help but laugh. He knew he could see almost perfectly without his glasses, he was just hoping, silently praying the pretty girl next to him would speak to him. He loved how angelic her voice always sounded, morning, afternoon, and night. The way her voice could convey every emotion in the songs she sang in the shower, unapologetically loud. Unapologetically herself. He allowed himself to think back to the morning before. The morning before she had her nightmare, before she cried, before she slipped through his fingers.

It was around 6am. The light begging to engulf Spencer's room through the thick curtains. He looked at (Y/n), to really look at her. He studied her features the same way he did every time before. Even with an eidetic memory, he absorbed every calm breath she took, the way her body moved with each inhale and exhale, like he would forget it the second after. He slowly reached out to gently tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. His eyes grazed over her resting figure. All he could think about was how he hadn't appreciated anyone's presence as much as hers. He smiled, grateful for his best friend.

He thought about the way it was when they first met. The phone calls they had, the stories they told. Sifting through every memory he had of her, of her voice, begging to remember something that would help to find her. He couldn't lose her. He rubbed his eyes harshly, releasing a frustrated grunt. 

Suddenly, he stopped, frozen in place looking out his window before a smile was plastered on his face.

...

The office was buzzing with agents answering phones, walking from their desks to the fax machine or coming in and out of the kitchenette with cups of coffee. Spencer burst into the roundtable room, looking around at his team reading over the files he had retrieved from (Y/n)'s apartment the day before.

"Guys, I remembered something this morning," Spencer said with a slight smile.

"Well? Spill the beans sugar plum! Tell us!" Garcia said enthusiastically.

"I woke up this morning, playing back the phone calls we used to have and she told me once about a friend she had. They were really close for a year, she even took her to a concert before they fell ou-"

"Get to the point Reid," Hotch said eyes narrowed in impatience.

"Well basically, they had a secret code so they could pass notes in class without getting caught. Then in high school she developed her own shorthand; certain drawings for common words and dots and lines meaning letters and when put all together they'd form sentence fragments. She used it to study for her sophomore history class," Spencer finished. JJ and Prentiss looked at him, searching his eyes for something before making eye contact and nodding their heads at each other. Spencer ignored it and continued, "Basically, I can decode the journal." He took out a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. "I got this from the box under her coffee table this morning, she told me it'd be there."

"Well what are we waiting for? Let's get to work," Rossi chimed in.

...

It took Spencer until 3 pm to fully decode the journal. Luckily for him, everything was straight to the point in sentence fragments. The rest of the team had split up. It turns out the numbers Garcia found weren't direct lines to Sasha's or (Y/n)'s parents. It took Prentiss a while, but she finally got Sasha to give up her parent's phone number. She said that (Y/n) didn't know her parents' as far as what she was told but Spencer had found it about a third of the way into the journal. It had originally been a sequence of letters, but he used the order of the letters to figure out what numbers they were. JJ had made the calls to the parents and like predicted, they were reluctant to help; that is until they had found out (Y/n) had been kidnapped. Sasha's parents said they didn't know where Edward was but they did know the name of the man behind it all. 

His name was Jericko Menendez. He had done some business with Sasha and (Y/n)'s fathers and a job went bad; they were meant to assassinate someone but they were unsuccessful. To Menendez's dismay, he was the only one of the trio to be caught. He was reprimanded for his lack of efficiency and eventually was forced to find his accomplices; hence, why they were all working with The Hills. The families had to disperse across the nation, the globe was also an option but they opted not to do that. They had also shared that Edward had something very valuable in his possession which was given to him by his dad.

It was a flashdrive. Not only did it have the details of the job- the target, the client, others who were contracted to do the job- it also had an extensive list of facilities this specific organization used to hold prisoners. Basically, if they can find where Edward kept it, they'll most likely find where (Y/n) is. They had work to do and they needed to do it fast. (Y/n)'s parents also didn't know the location of their son, for his safety of course. Spencer had told Emily to ask them if they knew that Edward had been sending letters over the years. They had no idea but they knew that was dangerous and had told him before he left that he wasn't to have contact with any of them. The team assured their parents he didn't have a traceable postmark so his location had yet to be compromised.

The reason why the families still received such a large sum of money was to draw them out so that they too could be punished for not doing the job. However, since they all used highly encrypted Russian offshore accounts it couldn't be traced back to them. The only reason they were able to find (Y/n) was because she had shown up in a small town newspaper after working on a case in undercover ops. The team had concluded they had been surveying her since then. They kept as many tabs on her as they could.

Now, most of this information had been in the journal that Spencer decoded. But what he didn't expect to find were the coordinates in latitude and longitude of where Edward was. Spencer warmed Garcia to really crack down on her security before looking it up, if they were hacked all the work they had done would be for nothing. They'd get exactly what they want. The flashdrive, and the siblings dead. After approximately fifteen minutes everything was secure and ready to look up the coordinates. It turned out to be a school, a middle school. Right in the heart of Virginia, Virginia Middle School. The pair shared a puzzled look. If they were three years apart and (Y/n) was 25, that made Edward 22. What could be be doing at a middle school if he was 22? They assumed maybe he was a long term substitute teacher. They did some digging and found they were right. The credentials had been bought through the use of a bank account which was made with an alias. His cover was Roberto Hermin. He had been at the school for a while, picking up extra shifts as a fill in janitor to help out. Spencer wasn't surprised, (Y/n) always said he was the most generous person she had ever met. The news was shared with the rest of the team. Hotch picked Morgan and Reid to see him the next day.

Spencer felt like time was running out for (Y/n). He grew impatient with the team. He knew they were all trying their best and he knew he couldn't do anything half-assed because it was your life on the line. That night, as he laid in bed, he couldn't help but worry about you. You had been through enough trauma and yet you were forced to endure more. At that point, he couldn't even call it an occupational hazard. It was the byproduct of a mistake that her father made. Spencer was angry at the world, at the universe. The only person who's ever understood him in his entirety, who's ever cared enough to understand him in the first place, was taken from him. She was God knows where and there were men doing God knows what to her. His jaw clenched, face contorted in anger. He stood up and slammed his fist onto the surface of his dresser. He looked at himself in the mirror. He was a completely different person when it came to you. He knew it was a fine line between the emotions you made him feel and the emotions he had the potential to feel because of you. He needed you to come out of this alive. If you didn't he would blame himself for the rest of his life. 

A/N: 

This chapter is shorter than I would've liked but it's so hard to come up with stuff for this part... I realized there were also a lot of loose ends. I think instead of ending it at 24 chapters like I planned, I'm going to make it a little longer so that it's more full circle yada yada.