Tequila || Spencer Reid

Prologue

Before Skye Montgomery became a name Spencer Reid couldn't say without feeling the floor drop out from under him, she was Skylar Rae Montgomery, a girl from Portland, Oregon, with a family that looked perfect from the outside.

Two loving parents. An older brother who hid his fear behind sarcasm and teasing, but who would have burned the world down if it meant keeping her safe. A quiet neighborhood. A childhood lined with porch lights, rain-slick sidewalks, and the kind of safety people only recognize after it's gone.

At fourteen, Skye was accepted into a private high school in Las Vegas. On paper, it was an opportunity. A better education. A bigger future. Her parents sent her to live with her grandmother, never knowing that the city would become the first crime scene in a story none of them realized had already begun.

Because if Skye had stayed in Portland, she never would have met Mason. She never would have mistaken control for devotion, danger for passion, or a locked door for love. She never would have learned how easily a fairytale could be rewritten into a cautionary tale.

And if she had never met Mason, if she had never loved him, married him, survived him, then she never would have crossed paths with the man who would become the safest room she had ever known: Dr. Spencer Reid.

Their meeting was not graceful. There was no swelling music, no perfect timing, no universe pausing to take notice. There was only a crowded sidewalk, a distracted turn, and iced coffee exploding down the front of her shirt as she collided with him hard enough to make him stumble.

Spencer Reid—who could calculate odds faster than most people could form a sentence, who understood trauma signatures and victimology and the mathematics of human behavior—had no profile for her. Skye arrived in his life like a variable he couldn't solve, bright and breathless and apologizing too quickly, while some quiet part of him decided that this accident mattered.

If anyone asked him later what he would change about that day, he would shake his head, almost embarrassed by the softness in his own voice, and say nothing. Not the coffee. Not the chaos. Not the way she looked at him afterward, blue eyes wide and lit from within, as if she had walked through a storm and still found a reason to laugh.

She unsettled him in the best way. Skye drew out pieces of Spencer he had kept folded away: ease, impulsiveness, a strange kind of courage that had nothing to do with chasing unsubs through abandoned buildings. With her, he learned the value of rooftop nights and cheap tequila, even though he barely drank. He learned that laughter could be evidence, too. Proof of life. Proof of healing.

But trauma does not stay buried because someone asks it to. It waits. It studies familiar patterns. It follows the smallest trail back to the person who ran.

Skye's past found her in the dark, and by morning she was gone. No goodbye at the door. No final touch. Just an empty space beside Spencer and a letter left behind like evidence at a scene. She told herself it was protection. She told herself leaving him was the only way to keep him alive. And if the choice came again, she would make it again, because loving Spencer meant saving him, even if it meant destroying herself. What none of them knew then was that Skye hadn't left alone. She had taken a piece of Spencer with her.

***
Welcome to the new and improved version of Tequila. Since I lost the whole book, I get to start from scratch.

Please read this at your own risk, and if any of the things mentioned trigger you, please just take precautions and be safe. That being said, this is a Criminal Minds book, so there will be mentions of blood and gore and stuff like that, but also slight mentions of SA not descriptive, just hinted that it happened.

So please proceed with caution if anything like that triggers you.