His hands are covered in deep crimson liquid, and even as he scrubs his skin raw, the color stains and the blood is caked under his fingernails as a filthy reminder that he was too late. He couldn’t save her – he failed her. She was the most important woman in the entire world and he’d failed her. The promise of always protecting her had been broken. And he could never take it back – just as he couldn’t take back the ugly crown of crimson that bloomed beneath her head on the day he had broken his promise, on the day he had failed her.

Tears stream down his face as he scrubs at the crimson lining the sink, staring at his cracked reflection through the glass. Red stands out in stark contrast to his pale skin, and he’s not sure if it’s because it’s embedded in the cracks in the mirror or it’s splattered all over his face. It doesn’t matter, it will never matter, because he’ll never truly be able to get it out. The red will always be there, a haunting memory of how he failed the only person in the world that mattered.

As he stares at the ugly cracks of crimson in the glass, he reminds himself that the color serves another purpose. It shows how he’ll never be too late again – even if he couldn’t save her, he’ll save others. He’ll always be able to save others. As he cleans the blood from the knife, he reminds himself that he’s doing a good thing. These people are filth, terrible people, and he’s doing the world a favor – doing the families of potential victims a favor. Is a serial killer really a bad man if he’s killing other serial killers – the ones that murder innocents?

He reminds himself that it’s his job to hunt these guys down – the credentials concealed in his pocket prove it. He may not be doing his job the way it was intended, but he’s still catching the people intended and he’s still making sure they get their equal punishment. It’s what she would’ve wanted. She was always proud of him, always proud of her son, the perfect, genius FBI agent. She’d be happy he was doing this, happy this was his way of making sure her death didn’t go unpunished.

And every time his blade sunk into another victim, he told himself this was for his mother. Everything he’d learned when he trained to become a behavioral analyst, everything he learned while in the academy, told him otherwise – told him he was suffering from a psychotic break from reality. But that wasn’t true! Those were all just lies, attempts to make him think what he was doing was wrong. How could avenging your mother’s death be wrong?

And every time the blade slices through the flesh of another piece of filth, he hears the faint echoes of his mother’s proud voice: ‘I’ll always be proud of you, Spencer.’