Dear Reader,

You don't…you couldn't possibly…you can't understand…how hard it is for you when your tormenter and your savior wear the same face. However, I will to try to describe it to you. You wonder when you wake if you'll be beaten, forced to choose a victim or drugged back into a "helpful" sleep. When you do wake, those agonizing seconds, as you try to decide how you should act around him, last an eternity. Should you be respectfully scared? Should you be thankful, but desperate for help and information? Should you start begging him not to kill again? The only answer lies in the subtle micro-expressions of his face. One miscalculation and the whole balance, you've set up, is ruined. If you beg for Tobias' help to his father, he'll call you a weakling. He'll know Tobias is aiding you and he'll hurt him. If you act afraid of Tobias, he might decide his father is right and that you are a sinner who deserves to die. Raphael would force you to choose a person, who is most likely only guilty of a crime that would never justify death.

I realized that I was completely in his hands. The person who was just as likely to kill me was the only one who could save me. If he tells me to jump, I'd better ask "how high?" because if I didn't, I wasn't likely to make it out alive. He tormented me, and my family by playing my torture for them. But he didn't realize that I'd outsmarted him. I'd used his own method of torture to my advantage. I let a hint slip about "poaching" and purposefully got the bible verse wrong to alert my boss that I'm in a cemetery. It is because of this mistake and my smarts that my family found me just in the nick of time. Admit it, you wouldn't have made it that far.

The confusion that results when you're finally rescued…you killed him…he's dead. The conflicting emotions wage war on your heart and mind.

On one hand there's relief, more then you've ever thought possible. There will be no more torture, no more threats of death. You're still alive. There's eternal gratefulness, if your family had arrived any later, you would be dead and buried. There's the happiness that you knew your boss well enough to know he would understand your message.

On the other, you know how the victims felt just before they were killed. The fear, the anger and desperation, the hope, you know it all. For most of the victims you meet, the hope is sadly misplaced. You couldn't help them in time, their family and friends didn't look for them soon enough, and the killer didn't stop themselves. The knowledge that you killed your savior as well as you tormenter makes you feel guilty for killing someone your own age, a boy with his life ahead of him, and yet lucky that the only bullet in the six-chamber gun was in the first slot. There's appreciation for your seven-member family. The self-loathing that stems from becoming addicted to the drug you didn't even want to use in the first place, from the fact that it takes you so long to quit, that your family doesn't know for certain, that you aren't man enough to ask for help.

But time will always pass. As the days went on it became easier for me to ignore the call of the dilaudid. After a visit to my mother, I felt more myself then I had in a long while. The daily letters I sent to her didn't make any mention of trouble, which was a good thing. The doctors could tell something was off, but I can be quite the actor, as proven by my most recent adventures. Well, now that you have only the very slightest idea as to what I went through, I will leave you to chew on my words. You should feel lucky, and grateful that none of this happened to you (and that it probably never will).

Spencer Reid