nina cried power [SPENCER REID]

twenty-two.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
DOUBLE NARRATIVE

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Spencer reads and reads and reads. Once he's started, he cannot stop.

The diary began when Nina hit the road for the first time after she committed to her career as 'international woman of mystery' (or, killer, if you want to be brutally honest about it). The book is thick, but the pages are full, no space is wasted, as if she wants to keep the rest of her life in this one leather bound lump of pages.

The following excerpts are in order, from just after her first kill, to the murder of Lebenov. They're classified, but who cares? They're kinda important.

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I don't regret the kill. Am I the only woman alive who wants to watch the world burn a little bit in my own favour? Am I the only woman who feels like being alive is just a performance for men, or am I REALLY completely fucking alone? Because my life feels like it's being run by men and their fantasies, and I cannot escape, I can't get anywhere. And I'm so tired. But the kill made me feel ALIVE.

It felt good.

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Nina does not feel good.

On the second day of recovery, the fever sets in. Even Prentiss gets concerned, and calls for a nurse as she hurriedly pulls Nina's bedsheets off her sweating and shivering body. Nina doesn't remember, but according to the agents she'd been screaming at them to open a window (she only knows this because, when she awoke again, it was in a fit of cold, and she'd screamed at them to shut the windows).

She's given antibiotics to kill the infection, her bandages redressed, her mind put to sleep with more and more drugs. She sleeps constantly, but her brain never rests, because in her sleep she simply drowns in a maelstrom of images from her past.

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Tonight thoughts of my dad are choking me. I can't sleep. I'm watching the sunrise in Rome though. And he is probably getting his asshole resized in prison, I hope. Ha. That's morbid, sorry. But it makes me angry that I can still live in such ethereal beauty, and be caught up in the workings of my own head and memory. It's like, someone else should be seeing this sunrise. Someone who can appreciate it.

But in terms of importance and the way it feels, it's like this sunrise is already a memory and my father is the thing that's really existing with me right now. Does that make sense??