A/N: This one shot is dedicated to the lovely Luce (llgwrites on here and lclrgsl on tumblr), who was my Klaroline Gift Exchange giftee on AO3! It's really dark and not romantic at all, so please read the description if you're sensitive to triggers!

Happy Reading!

xxx

"Niklaus Mikaelson." Caroline said, smirking at him as he finally woke up.

Klaus felt groggy, the last thing he remembered was walking into a dark ally because he heard a women scream. He saw a mop of blonde and before he could even react he felt a heavy weight hit his head and he blacked out. He supposed that the mop of blonde hair belonged to the gorgeous blonde standing in front of him. He'd seen her before, he just couldn't remember where right now. Probably because of the dull ache at the front of his head, near his brow.
She was leaning against a desk on which metal devices (torture devices, his inner voice corrected him) were laid out. Her black catsuit was matte and she had handguns hanging from the belt around her hips. He saw the handle of a knife sticking out of her left boot and an array of black, glistening throwing stars around her right thigh. Her blonde hair was open, falling freely over her shoulders and down her back. She looked too sweet to be a killer, but there she was, looking at him with a calm, cool and calculating expression and a slight smirk on her lips.

"Don't you recognise me?" she asked, walking towards him. Klaus kept his cool, looking at her expressionlessly as she approached him and crouched down so they were almost on the same eye level. He was bound to a chair, and he tensed his muscles to test out how tight the ropes were around his body. The result wasn't exactly giving him any hope that he would come out of this unscathed. He wondered when she would snap and kill him off even if she hadn't gotten the information she wanted.

"We danced at the ball your family hosted. You didn't know who I was back then." She smiled and her big blue eyes glinted dangerously. He's seen those eyes before, he remembered. The woman was Caroline Forbes who turned out to be Caroline Petrova, adopted member of the Petrova family and best female assassin of Gemini, the gang which his family had stolen from. Gemini were the gang of which they had killed the leaders during the heist, the core being the group of biological and adopted siblings whose parents the Originals had murdered in order to get The Cure, the most promising synthetic drug in development.
He growled at her as he took a better look at his surroundings, scanning the warehouse for any possible exits, trying to asses where exactly he was and calculating the probability of Elijah having sent out a search party by now. By the sounds of it they were in a residential area, opposing to the abandoned area he had expected. He heard cars and people, even thought that he could make out music somewhere. He could scream and hope that it got enough attention for someone to investigate. But then again, it was an abandoned warehouse, so who would bother to investigate? They were on the first floor by the look he got out of the broken, grimy windows and he couldn't make out the moon, but he didn't feel like a lot of time had passed.

"Aww, he's growling. Did I anger you?" Caroline cooed, straightening. She took off her black leather gloves and tied her hair into a ponytail before she put them back on, taking a sharp knife off the table before she turned back around.

"Now, I guess you know why you're here." she said, stroking the knife lovingly as she stopped in front of him, making eye contact with him.

"Because of The Cure." he replied calmly.

Caroline looked elated. "Ah, he finally talks! And yes, The Cure you stole from us, The Cure because of which you murdered my parents." she confirmed, her smile looking stony by the end of the sentence.

"They only were your adoptive parents, why do you care?" Klaus smirked when Caroline's smile fell at the question.

"Because they raised me." she spat, "They took me in when I was four, when my mother died of cancer after my father had already abandoned us. Because I can't help but feel like something is missing ever since they're gone. And me and my siblings owe it to them to at least get back The Cure, for which they died." She leaned in until their faces were centimetres apart, her free hand resting on Klaus' arm, which was bound to the arm of the chair. She almost broke his arm with the pressure she applied. Caroline straightened after a few seconds of intensely staring into Klaus' eyes, the stony smile was back.

"But on to what I want from you. I want to know where your labs are. I want the location of every last lab in which you're carrying on our research. I want the name of every scientist in your labs, of every person who knows about The Cure in your camp." Caroline said softly, tilting his head up with the tip of the knife, pressing the tip hard enough against his skin to break it. A steady stream of crimson drops was flowing down Klaus' pale neck, soaking the collar of his white dress shirt.
"And you seriously expect me to divulge that information to you, sweetheart?" Klaus huffed, an arrogant smile on his face.

Caroline smiled sweetly, applying a little bit more pressure on the knife, widening the cut in the skin stretching over his lower jaw. "I do, but it doesn't really matter if you don't, seeing as Rebekah, Henrik and Kol are being held captive just like you. One of you will break." she shrugged, withdrawing her knife.

"Elijah and Finn are bound to notice that their four younger siblings are missing."

"If it just weren't for Elijah and Finn being busy with the lab of your HQ being stormed by the police based on an anonymous tip, and with the lab at the other end of the city which is going to blow up in..." she paused to look at the pager on her belt, counting down the seconds, "now."

Klaus tried to keep his cool, but he felt himself paling. Of course they didn't have anything incriminating in their head quarters, but if Caroline was talking about the lab he thought of they were fucked. It was their main lab for their research on The Cure. It would set them back weeks if all the data was destroyed. Of course they had copies of all written research, but you couldn't copy a living and breathing test subject.

"So, how about you tell me about the locations of the rest of your labs?" Caroline asked, pressing a button on something in her ear before she continued. She switched the sharp knife for a dull one and walked towards him, sitting down on his lap so they faced each other.

"I didn't hear you, Klaus. Where are the labs." she repeated her question, one arm on his shoulder as the other rested on his' bound arm. He felt the dull, cool metal press against the back of his neck as her sweet citrus breath hit his face.

"C'mon, don't be a spoilsport." Caroline said lowly, licking her lips.

His eyes fell to her lips, following the motion of her tongue. He couldn't help himself, but she was attractive and he'd felt something when he danced with her at the ball. Of course that was before he knew she was his enemy, but the attraction he'd felt that night was still there. He didn't mind her sitting on his lap, he liked it. He just would have preferred the absence of the knife which currently broke the skin at the back of his neck.

"Be a good boy and I'll reward you, be a bad boy and I'll punish you." Caroline whispered hoarsely, sliding off his lap to exchange the dull knife for something else. She returned with a hammer.

"Ready to tell me where the labs are?" she asked him, but he stayed silent. Caroline looked at him expectantly before she sighed, shaking her head in disappointment.
"Well, I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm really not." she shrugged before she swung the hammer and brought it down on one of his bound hands with full force. Klaus felt the tears in his eyes as he clenched his teeth, they both heard the snap and crushing of his bones. She hummed and smiled at the discoloured skin, crouching before him and placing her thumb on the broken spot. Caroline softly applied pressure and Klaus clenched his teeth tighter, blinking back the tears which gathered in his eyes. He's been through worse.

"Still not cooperative? Pity, cause I'd genuinely prefer fucking you to breaking you." Caroline sighed, abandoning the back of his hand in favour of his fingers. She used the hammer to break one of them and used sheer force to break another. When Klaus showed no reaction at his fingers being broken Caroline retrieved the dull knife, cutting the tip of his ring finger of, blowing a strand of hair out of her face as she did so. She watched him swallowing down the scream and blinking back the tears, watched him as he tried to keep on the mask.

"Is that all that you've got?" he finally asked, his voice strained.

"Not even close, but I like to watch you falling apart." Caroline replied, tilting her head. When he didn't say anything she continued to break his bones. First his other hand, then his elbow. He finally started to scream when she crushed his knee, kicking it with the heel of her boot for good measure. He finally started to sob when she used the dull knife to open the skin above his crushed knee, he completely broke down when she stuck one finger into the flesh-deep cut, moving around the bone fractures. He screamed, he sobbed, he even lost consciousness when Caroline finished repeating the procedure on his second knee, rendering him unable to walk. He screamed and moaned and sobbed in pain, and yet nobody came to his help.
He woke up to Caroline slapping him, and took in a sharp breath at the pain which overwhelmed him. Caroline watched him with a smile on her face as he tried to regain his composure, tried to grip onto the last shreds of his dignity. It was almost cute.

"Our play time is almost over, Klaus. Willing to divulge any information yet?" she asked. His eyes were immediately drawn to the device she had in her hands, this time nothing to torture him. She held a throwaway phone in her hands and Klaus had a bad feeling about this.

"No." he replied hoarsely as she sat down on the desk across from him. It was empty except for a black bag.

"You know, you were out for quite a while, almost twenty minutes. And seeing as I had a sixty minute time frame to get any information out of you, our time together is obviously over. But I thought I'd wake you up for the grand finale." Caroline smirked. She held up the phone in her hand.

"I'm going to cut you free of your restraints before I'll press the send button on the SMS which will tell my sister back in HQ that I unfortunately couldn't get any info out of you. And the fun part is, is that it'll also trigger the countdown on the bombs I had time to place while you were out." she explained as she kept on toying with the phone.

"From then on I'll have one minute and thirty seconds to get out of the building and away form here, which is more than enough time seeing as I conveniently parked my motorcycle in the alley behind you. And you'll have ninety seconds of pure terror because you can't stand and get out of the windows like I will, I blocked the exit downstairs so you can't crawl out either and I know that your last thought will be filled with panic and terror. Just like my parents' last thoughts probably were." Caroline smiled, happy with the plan.

She hopped off the desk and put the black bag down before she pulled a sledgehammer out. She started to smash the desk into bits and pieces. "Of course I can't have you trying to use the desk or the chair as means of escape." she explained over the sound of splintering wood, of metal on cracking wood. She cut his legs loose and Klaus barely suppressed a scream when his broken knees were moved. She continued to cut him loose and he couldn't even hit her with his broken hands. She immediately grabbed him by his arms, rendering him unable to use those against her as well, and dragged him off the chair. She smashed the chair as he tried to crawl towards her bag without her noticing, but she was finished before he even got close. Caroline smiled at him as she skipped past his crumpled form, putting the hammer back into the bag which she slung over her shoulder. She retrieved the phone from a bag on her belt and smiled as she checked the time.
She pressed a button on the phone, starting to run when a 'ping' resounded and ticking filled the room around them. Caroline threw the phone against a wall in the midst of her run and Klaus watched it falling apart at impact. There went his last hope. He watched Caroline as she lifted herself onto the windowsill, which was too high for him to reach, and fasten a grappling hook at a corner of the broken window.

"See you in hell." she said as she winked at him over her shoulder and jumped out, the mob of her blonde ponytail the last thing he saw of her. Klaus gulped when the realisation that this was it hit him. The ticking of the bombs surrounding him sped up and he heard the roaring of a motorcycle from where Caroline had vanished.
"Fuck." he muttered as he laid down in defeat. The last thing he heard was a high beep before the world around him was devoured by heat and flames.