Truth and Lies

Chapter 10

** JJ's POV **

Damn, what is going on. I opened my eyes and realised I was not in my home. In fact, I've no idea where I am.

The lights went on and I immediately struggled to move before noticing the tight restraints around my waist, keeping me tied to a chair. The rest of the small room was completely bare, and there were no windows anywhere.

"What do you want?" I screamed.

"It's simple." A cold voice came from behind me.

My body froze as I heard footsteps echoing through the room. He pressed his hand on my shoulder and came into view.

"I want the truth."

"What do you mean?"

He didn't respond, but he slapped me across the face so that my cheek burned scarlet.

"I want the truth. Or else."

And he left. The lights went off as he shut the door, and I allowed myself to take a deep breath.

** Emily's POV **

"Hotch, she hasn't turned up to work yet. She's never been ill in the past four years I've been here, and she's never late."

Just as I walked into his office, Morgan came running in.

"Hotch, where's JJ?" He asked breathlessly.

"What do you mean? Didn't you see her last night?" I turned to him.

"She ran off at the end of the night. Something weird happened, because I didn't want her to drive in the state she was in, so I tried to make her lie down to recover from the alcohol, and she lost it and just ran off. I couldn't find her after that. I was hoping to talk to her."

Hotch looked between the two of us, and then called JJ. It went to voicemail.

"Gather everyone in the briefing room, and get Garcia. We need to find her."

In the round table room, Garcia was trying to pull footage from nearby street cameras. There was a brief moment when JJ was stumbling along the lit path across the street from Morgan's house, but then she disappeared from all cameras. Nothing.

"Can we track her phone?"

"I've tried, but there's nothing. I can't even pull her number." She was frantically typing so I pulled the laptop gently away.

"Penelope, breathe. Take a moment, we will not stop searching for her."

Hotch added, "Emily's right, we are going to keep looking."

"She's been acting quite weird recently, ever since that case in New York." I said.

"How?" Reid asked.

"I don't know, Spencer, but it didn't feel right. She was more closed up, like she wanted to say something but was worried about it. Did she say anything last night, Morgan?"

He shook his head. "No. All we talked about was childhood and getting to know each other. Just like first date stuff."

"So that's it, we have nothing?" Garcia's voice was trembling with fear. "We can't lose her, Hotch."

"I know, and we won't. We need to learn everything we can from her past, who she talked to, hung out with, dated, spent any time at all with." He responded, pinning JJ's picture to the board.