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Aaron realised the sheriff and his deputy were the unsubs they were chasing just a few minutes too late – in a small department, their range of vehicles were limited and he found himself in a cruiser with the pair. Alone.
And their profile ended in suicide.
Discretely as he could with his phone in his pocket, not wanting to alert either man to his realisation, he keyed in a message to the team. Three letters. He held his phone, waited for it to buzz with their reply, with some confirmation he wasn’t the only one who knew. That they recognised the trap he’d inadvertently walked into. The signal was spotty, and if it did go through…
The reply did not come in time.
Behind him, Byrnes, the deputy, called his partner’s name. Aaron saw him glance over at him via the mirror. Saw the other man nod tightly.
Thompson jerked the wheel and they lurched violently towards the sheer rock face. The grim determination on his face was set like steel.
Out here were dangerous, steep, and often unguarded – and the mountain pass they were speeding down was no exception.
Aaron leant across him and wrenched it right, fighting the man’s grip. Their tyres screeched.
A pair of unsubs, one dominant, one submissive.
Byrnes’ hands forced his shoulders back. Aaron ducked forwards to avoid them.
Their destination was a red herring but they knew that, had stood and listened to them close in on the pair through their profiles. They were in it together. Intended to end it together.
As Aaron elbowed Thompson in the ribs Byrnes slammed his head into the headrest, the impact juddering right through his neck.
They were veering steadily to the side, and it was only the rocks which abruptly rose either side of the road keeping them from going over the verge. Thompson let out a low groan but clung on to the wheel with a white-knuckled grip.
Byrnes threw the passenger door open. Air whistled by. Aaron slammed the breaks and they lurched forwards, but Thompson stamped on his foot and kicked it aside. Thompson glanced in the rearview mirror and spun the wheel sharply to the right.
Aaron lost his hold on the steering wheel and braced himself against the dash, wind beating against his back. Its roar was deafening. The car rumbled over the worn asphalt. He swayed with every jolt.
The SUV behind them flicked on its lights.
Byrnes twisted into the space between them, his friendly smile an angry grimace, and planted his foot on Aaron’s chest.
The cliffside was coming up.
Byrnes kicked.
Everything around him slowed.
He fell and the air buffeting around them softened; his stomach lurched as he felt his centre of gravity tip past the rim of the cruiser. And for a sickening moment Aaron let go and held on to nothing at all.
Instinct prevailed.
Aaron laced his fingers together behind his head and turned his face to the crook of his elbow just as the grey rushed up to meet him.
The SUV’s behind the cruiser it’s—
He bore the impact with his shoulder, fire shooting through it and along his spine, and rolled. Bone crunched between his head and the road. The world became a dizzying array of sky blue and darkness. Grit crunched and his skin seared.
The engine roared. Aaron closed his eyes and saw Jack. His hair fluttered in the rush of air—
It skidded past, pelting him with a spray of gravel.
Pain rattled through him like a stone chipped across the road. Thrown onto a hard landing over and over, skin scraped raw, all he could do was bear down, tuck his chin to his chest, his ear whining a high-pitched note.
He hit the edge of the road and everything was softer beneath him, grass cushioning hard-packed earth, but sticks and stones stabbed through his clothes as he rolled. His shin slammed into a stubborn rock and sharp pain exploded through the bone.
As he slowed he grasped at the shrubbery around him, blistered palms screaming. Sharp weeds cut his face without his hands to shield it. His heels ground into the dirt. Aaron sucked in a desperate breath and dropped his head into his hands, steadying himself amongst the vertigo.
The side of his face was a stinging mess of pain, hot blood streaking down his neck and soaking into his collar, from his hairline to the torn up skin on his lower lip. Aaron spat out blood and rolled onto his back, squinting at the sudden brightness.
He touched his face with a wince. His fingertips grazed the raw skin in the shallow scrapes and came away smeared with blood and dirt. Aaron lifted his head tentatively and was relieved as the ground seemed to stabilise beneath him, his dizziness fading. The tinnitus hadn’t.
Shoes scuffed on gravel and his hand flew to his holster. The movement sent a sharp jolt through the shoulder he’d landed on.
“Whoa, it’s just me,” Morgan called.
Aaron cleared his throat. “Did you get them?”
His voice was slurred, his lip swollen and mouth insistent on filling with blood, but it made enough sense that Morgan understood. “Yeah, they… there’s rangers down there but I think they’re probably dead.”
Morgan knelt beside him with a sharp whistle.
“It looks worse than it is,” he said, though the very words pulled at the burning muscles beneath. “It’s OK.”
“…uh-huh.”
Aaron propped himself up on his good side and raised a hand to his ear. There was no new blood despite the ringing. The movement sent a surge of pain through his head and he groaned. Though he’d saved himself from slamming it straight to the asphalt, his arm hadn’t been much softer an alternative.
The blood dribbled down his forehead and he wiped at his brow. His forearm prickled with sharp heat, his shirt sleeve in tatters.
“Don’t move,” Morgan said. “Your neck—”
“Didn’t hit anything,” Aaron said. His shin twinged but the scrape was minor compared to his face. He did not want an ambulance and he definitely didn’t need one.
He bit back a groan as Morgan put a hand on his injured shoulder and pulled away from the touch.
“Didn’t hit anything,” Morgan teased. “Sure.”
Aaron flexed his fingers, numb with pins and needles, and pain wired through his shoulder. “I think it’s just dislocated.”
He took the hand Morgan offered and got to his feet. As he stretched out, his body lit up with pain, tender and sore from the terrain, and the muscles at his shoulder spasmed. Definitely dislocated, and his wrist was beginning to nag badly enough it might not just sprained.
“It might be better than it looks but it looks awful,” Morgan said. His hand wasn’t far from Aaron’s elbow as they picked their way back through the forest edge. The road was bathed in flickering police lights.
He’d gone more forwards than he thought, given as Morgan was angling them back along the road as well as towards it. As he reached the asphalt, a sudden wave of vertigo caught him off guard and his leg gave out. He stumbled. His sock was soaked with blood.
Aaron hitched up his pants leg and—yes. That would explain it.
“Jesus,” Morgan said, glancing at the bloody gash where the stone had ripped off a chunk of his flesh. “You said you were fine!”
“I thought it was a scratch,” he said. The wooziness made his thoughts sluggish and he spoke before thinking, vaguely defensive. “And you listened.”
“So just for the record,” Morgan said, “you’re telling me not to listen to you.”
“It felt like a scratch,” Aaron protested.
They passed a dark smear of blood, which trailed off at the grass edge
The guardrail was a twisted mess of metal, bent outwards over the rock face. Thompson and Byrnes had achieved their goal; he doubted they’d be discovering anything other than bodies.
Past that, their SUV hadn’t come out unscathed. A jagged line cut through its paintwork and the front bumper had crumpled. He wiped away blood. “Is everyone all right?”
“We’re fine,” Morgan said. “Worry about yourself for once.”
“You hit the side,” he said. Speaking pulled at his split lip and he dabbed at the corner of his mouth.
“Barely touched it,” Morgan said. “I didn’t have much time to get out the way.”
His head ached. “When did you notice they were the unsubs?”
“When Thompson tried to throw you off the cliff.”
“No, the lights.”
“When you went to the side I figured it could’ve been some kind of medical thing with Thompson, but when the other guy grabbed you, I realised they fit the profile.”
“Stupid position to try and kill me,” Aaron said. “You were right there.”
“Desperation,” Morgan said. “Arrogance. We weren’t on to them because they were good at planning.”
Someone had procured a first aid kit from one of the other police cars – now parked to barricade the road. Still a little drained, he refused a seat but let himself lean on the hood of one as he pressed tissues to his face. They came away covered in blood within a minute and did little to dislodge the gravel, just dragged it around in the wound, but they stemmed the flow. Morgan came back with one of the detectives offering them a lift to the ER.
With the rush of adrenaline starting to subside, his shoulder was starting to eclipse the stinging on his face and his leg was a close second; Aaron protested but Morgan spoke over him and accepted it on his behalf.
The glimpse of his face in the car’s mirrors had not been flattering, and the mess resembled raw meat in a way that made his stomach flip if he thought too much into that. Even so Aaron had almost forgotten by the time they arrived and the stares baffled him until he responded to the receptionist asking his name and tasted blood again.
It got him a bed. Probably more for other people’s sake than his own but he wasn’t going to complain about being further away from the centre of the noise.
“You don’t have to stay,” Aaron said.
“And have you walk out the moment I’m gone?” Morgan said.
“I’m not going to walk out.”
“You told me not to listen to you,” Morgan reminded him. “It was just a scratch, remember?”
“Funnily enough,” Aaron said dryly, “being thrown out of a moving car is a slightly confusing experience.”
He just hoped Morgan didn’t get it into his head that he might have a concussion, because that meant a scan if they were extra worried and landing like he did… admittedly might warrant that concern. His ear was still whining but it wasn’t as loud. He hadn’t told Morgan because that was tantamount to outright asking for an MRI.
(It made no difference in the end, because like he suspected, they wanted him to undergo one to rule out damage to his head and neck.
He supposed it was a small price to pay considering what might’ve happened if he hadn’t landed as luckily as he had.)
Morgan was still waiting when they brought Aaron back. It was unnecessary but, well, he couldn’t say he didn’t appreciate it.
“You might want to step out,” the doctor had suggested. “The sound can be uncomfortable to hear.”
Morgan deferred to Aaron, who didn’t mind him being there; his shoulder was sat partially out of the joint, instead of completely, and he bore both the pop and the sharp spike of pain as they got it back in with minimal complaint. His wrist was a torn muscle, which explained the pain, and in all honesty he was mainly relieved it wasn’t broken.
With immediate danger and the most pressing injuries ruled out, their next concern was cleaning out and dressing the wounds which composed most of the side of his face. In hindsight he’d have preferred another MRI, because both involved copious amounts of lying still, the scan was less painful.
He lay on his side as a doctor with a tray of instruments and a kidney dish for the gravel began to rinse the dirt and detritus from his face. None were deep enough to warrant stitches, thankfully, though his lip was torn in all the right places to make for awkward healing – not to mention the faint lisp the swelling gave him if he didn’t pay attention to how he was speaking.
“What time is it?” Aaron asked.
Morgan gave it to him. Aaron reached into his jacket and pulled out his phone – part of it. The rest were shattered remnants in his pocket. Predictably, switching it on did absolutely nothing. He thought it had held together remarkably well, all things considered.
“I was going to let Jessica know we’ll be back later,” he explained. “And about…”
He took in a sharp breath as the doctor eased a stubborn little stone out of his face.
“I’ll message her for you,” Morgan offered, and got out his phone. He found her contact and looked to Aaron expectingly.
He thought for a moment and dictated, “I’m in the ER.”
“Really?” Morgan said. “That’s what you want to lead with? I’m in the ER.”
“Don’t worry,” Aaron continued, pointedly glancing at his phone.
Morgan shook his head in disbelief. His laugh lit up his face, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Yeah, that’s – that’s reassuring, Hotch. I’m sure she won’t.”
“She knows what I mean,” he said, though Morgan’s amusement was faintly catching and he couldn’t say he was irritated.
“All right,” Morgan said, raising a hand in defeat. “It’s your funeral.”
“It isn’t major—don’t look at me like that,” Aaron said, and Morgan, who hadn’t looked up from the phone but whose expression had said enough, smirked. “—but my face is scraped on one side and it might make Jack uneasy.”
That was a fear he’d acquired in the aftermath of Foyet, that he’d one day come home with too much anger in his eyes or another man’s blood splashed across his hands. That he’d frighten Jack.
And like he always did, Morgan tore those thoughts right from his head. “You know he won’t care,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“I know,” Aaron said. He knew in the logical sense but that corner of his mind never went truly silent.
The warmth in Morgan’s voice did a good job of speaking over it.
“You gonna tell her about the shoulder?”
“It’ll only be sore for a day or two,” he said. Though the time it took him to recover from them fully was slowly increasing with his age, he’d dealt with enough dislocations in his life – the majority of them being when they were kids – that Jessica knew not to worry too much about them.
“And what do you want me to say when she asks why?”
The tweezers hit a particularly raw spot and he winced. “That depends how she—”
Morgan’s ringtone went off.
“—asks,” Aaron said.
“Hi,” Morgan said, settling back in the chair and stretching his arm across the back of them. “No, no, he is. Yeah. He – I’ll let him tell you that part, actually.”
He had to shuffle forwards to be able to reach Aaron’s head and hold the phone to his ear. Aaron found himself unintentionally looking into Morgan’s eyes, the flecks of lighter brown in the darkness, how they shone with amusement as he passed the phone over.
“What did you do?” Jessica asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. She huffed but some of the worry was dissipating as he spoke. “I fell, I’m only here because there was a lot of blood, but it’s minor.”
Morgan muffled his incredulity with a hand over his mouth, shaking his head.
“You fell,” Jessica said. “Hard enough that your phone is broken and you’ve managed to skin half your entire face. But you’re fine.”
“Yes,” Aaron said. “I just wanted to warn you because it does look worse.”
“Can Morgan hear me?”
“Not right now.”
“Can you put me on speaker?”
He did and held the phone between them with a creeping sense of resignation. The tweezers jabbed him again and a sharp breath hissed through his teeth. Though it wasn’t severe enough for them to keep him in, the blood loss was taking the edge off his consciousness and Aaron was a little groggy with it.
“What happened?” Jessica said. “He says he ‘fell’.”
“I’m right here,” Aaron said. They ignored him.
“He isn’t lying,” Morgan said, “it really is minor considering everything.”
“Everything being…?”
“The unsubs threw him out of a moving car,” Morgan said.
“Tell me you’re joking.” She sighed. “Aaron, they did that?”
“Yes, but—”
“No buts,” Jessica said. “You got thrown out of a car and that was a minor fall?”
“I didn’t say the fall was minor,” he said.
“Aaron,” Morgan said. “Stop digging.”
He rolled his eyes but fell silent. The raw skin stung. Aaron glanced sideways at the amount of grit in the metal kidney basin and was very grateful he’d come away with as little damage as he had.
“He’s okay,” Morgan said. “They’re just finishing up.”
“Have you ever had a case where nobody gets hurt?” Jessica said. “At all? Because I’m starting to think not.”
“It could’ve been worse,” Aaron said, stifling a yawn. It really was taking a toll on him.
“How?”
“Morgan could’ve hit me with his car.”