When Elliot crashed through the door, gun cocked, announcing the presence of the police in a gruff yell, he found her. At last, his eyes rested on blessedly familiar features, dark hair, wide-set eyes, crooked nose. But even as the joy of the finding washed over him, reality blackened his hopes.

She lay in a heap of twisted limbs, bonelessly slumped on the filthy cement. Even in the dim light and chaos, Elliot could tell that she had not even flinched as police poured into the old house. Fearing the worst, Elliot rushed to her side, dropping to his knees and pressing two fingers under jaw, searching desperately for a pulse. He found one. But, as he knelt protectively over her prone form, Elliot fought to choke back the anguish knotting his chest.

His fingers stretched to touch her again, to reassure himself that she was alive and warm, but they ghosted along, never quite making contact. He simply could not bring himself to touch his partner's beloved face, now filthy and mangled nearly beyond recognition. Her eyes cracked open and came to rest blankly on his face. Elliot searched for any trace of the vivacious woman he loved as his own sister. He found none. With forced and trembling movements, he rested his fingertips on her shoulder.

"Liv, you're safe. The bus is coming, Liv, just a few more moments." Even to his own ears, his voice sounded false, strained. He felt sick. Over the weeks, he had prayed, pleading with God that he would find her. And now, strangling sobs boiling just beneath the brittle sheen of composure, he regretted his pleas. This was not Olivia. This was merely a shell of his partner, a cruelly smashed shell somehow still clinging to life.

Turning back to the chaos, Elliot screamed to everyone and no one in particular. "I need a bus! She's a detective, she needs help!" A second man, body masked by a bullet-proof vest and bristling with the tools of his trade, fell to one knee at Elliot's side.

"Jesus," he breathed as he pulled the walkie from his belt. He spoke through the static, instructing the dispatcher in urgent tones. Clipping the walkie back into place, he glanced lingeringly at the woman's morbidly fascinating, brutalized body before he stood to return to his task.

The bust, led by SVU, took place in a dilapidated house, insignificant but for the business run from the shadowy basement. Women were trafficked through the dankness, some sold quickly and some lingering for the enjoyment of the house's owners and their various associates and friends. Captain Cragen had received the tip two weeks after Olivia's disappearance and handed the file over to Elliot. The detective had been distraught after Olivia's kidnapping. He threw himself into his work with manic vigor, pausing only for the barest time needed to sleep and pay his family perfunctory visits. And so Cragen handed him case after case with sad eyes, hoping that the exertion would eventually lessen Elliot's consuming despair.

All thoughts of the criminals he was there to arrest were shoved violently from his mind as he continued to hover over his partner. Despite what he hoped were calming words, Olivia remained deathly still. Her eyes were still open in slits but her gaze had wandered to a blank stare at nothing. Elliot focused intently on the slow and shallow rising of her chest, the only sign of her continued vitality. Men and women moved in slow-motion around his crouched form and the roar faded to strange silence in his ears. Only her breath was important, his singular reason for kneeling in this god-forsaken basement, and would be damned if his attention faltered. She had hung on this long. He owed his devotion to her now.

Olivia sat hunched on a barstool, leaning over the mahogany bar and her sweating glass of scotch and ice. Her eyes were closed in exhaustion and her forehead rested in the palm of her hand as she searched for solace in herself and in her drink. Her aching body screamed for sleep, for the warm comfort she could find among the blankets and pillows. But she could not force her legs to move, could not face her eerily dark and empty apartment just yet. For the moment, she just needed the kind of aloneness one could only find among a crowd of laughing and toasting people. So she sat and nursed the scotch, enjoying the calming clink of the ice against the glass, and readying herself for the short trip home.

Raising the glass to her lips, Olivia took a long sip, letting the icy temperature and the liquor's burn slide across her tongue. She set the glass back onto the bar, letting it thump down a little harder than she had intended. Head beginning to ache, Olivia moved to massage her temple with one hand but found it leaden, the effort to lift it from the wooden bar too much for her. Alarmed, her head snapped up to search the faces of the patrons crowded around her but the sudden movement caused her vision to swim. As if in slow motion, Olivia saw rather than felt her body fold in on itself and, inch by agonizing inch, slide from the stool. As she fell, her mind screamed, repeating a mantra deafeningly, over and over again: this can't be happening.