"I said, put the gun down." There was no uncertainness in the man's voice. If Jack didn't comply bad things were going to happen.

Jack hesitated and one of the other goons grabbed Riley by the hair and yanked her toward him. She let out a yelp of pained surprise.

"Hey, hey!" Jack growled. "I'm puttin' it down. Just take it easy."

Jack slowly moved to put down his weapon, eyes locked on Riley's, trying to tell her with everything about himself that this was going to be okay. Before he could rise, the first of the guards kicked him hard in the stomach and brought the butt of his gun down hard behind Jack's ear.

Even gasping at the pain in the gut he had enough presence of mind to try rolling out of the way, so the pistol only hit him a glancing blow. But it was still enough to disorient him and make it impossible to get back up on his own. The guard not pinning Riley grabbed Jack by the arm and hauled him to his feet.

Jack grunted at the pain in his swimming head and wretched, trying hard not to throw up, but only being partially successful. He wasn't sure if he had a concussion, or if he felt like losing what little he had in his stomach from getting kicked in it, but either way, he wasn't equipped to fight back before the guy got his hands secured with zip ties.

Jack thought about fighting back as soon as his eyes stopped watering, but saw the other guard with his weapon pressed between Riley's shoulder blades. Now was maybe not the moment to take a stand. The first guy gave Jack a shove. "Didn't you see the no trespassing signs, man? Boss is gonna wanna talk to you."

Jack made his feet start moving as the other guard maneuver in front of him with Riley, just so he could see the gun digging into her back. Jesus, it was hard to stay cool and make a rational decision when you were as pissed off as he was at the way they were handling her. But he managed it.

They hadn't gone very far when they were shoved through a door into large storage room. When the men started securing them to the bar of a large rack, Riley let out an almost panicked whimper. "Hey, it's gonna be okay, kiddo. I got this," Jack assured her.

Speaking out of turn earned him another punch in the gut that left him gasping. He dropped his head, closing his eyes for a minute and just focusing on breathing in the hopes that he could keep from being sick. He lifted his head when a nasally, higher pitched male voice said with deadly amusement. "Oh, it's you again."

"I'm like a bad penny," Jack agreed, through panting breaths.

"What are you doing here?" The Pawn asked pleasantly. Jack just narrowed his eyes. "Hit him," The Pawn ordered.

The guard picked up a roll of change off a nearby table and held it loosely in his fist, then he socked the currently defenseless Jack hard in the face. As soon as Jack spat out the inevitable blood, he glanced at Riley, whose face registered his pain like they'd struck her, and quipped, "If you and Lamaire didn't represent the art world's third biggest crime family, I'd say to kiss my ass, but given your status, I will say, slurp my butt."

"Oh no, Jack. Not Hudson Hawk quotes," Riley murmured under her breath. The Pawn and his men didn't quite catch it, but Jack did and gave her a fond, albeit bloody, smile. She remembered.

"I don't like repeating myself." Jack responded by spitting out more blood. "Hit him again," was the bland order that was complied with without hesitation, with the blow this time being landed on his left kidney.

Jack cursed, then quoted, "Is looking like a constipated warthog a prerequisite for getting a job in the art world?"

The Pawn tried a different tack. "How did you find me?"

Jack smirked. "I feel like a dolphin that's never tasted melted snow. What's the color blue taste like?"

"What the hell?" the guard working him over grumbled, and punched him in the mouth without being ordered to, then followed it up with a couple shots to the ribs, just because this guy was pissing him off.

"Are you done?" The Pawn asked, irritation becoming more evident in voice, giving lie to his otherwise impassive demeanor.

"You donut-hole-eating, son-of-a-bitch, take-it-in-the-ear-for-a-beer, rat bastard," was followed by a hail of punches that left Jack choking for breath and he heard Riley's almost sobbing breath next to him. She wasn't cut out for this, he thought to himself, didn't belong in the field, no matter how good at her part of missions she often was. He had to protect her from this somehow. And baiting the bad guys seemed like it was working.

Jack opened his mouth to say something else. He couldn't think of anymore random quotes to throw at these guys, at least not from Hudson Hawk, so he was about to just get really personal, when the Pawn cut him off.

"Make him pay for flapping his mouth without answering my question."

The solid body shot, coupled with the mouth full of blood he already had made Jack pretty sure he was gonna puke. But he didn't have time to react, even with an involuntary bodily function.

"Again."

Slamming pain in his torso that was so sharp it shot down his leg.

"Again."

The guard landed another solid blow.

Riley squeezed her eyes shut. They were going to kill him. She was sure of it. And she was irrationally certain that if Mac and Cage hadn't gotten here and put a stop to this yet, they weren't coming. Tears were trying to leak out from under her eyelids, so she closed them tighter.

She almost felt relieved when the Pawn barked, "Enough." Jack moaned and when the Pawn asked, "Anything else to say?" he just shook his head. He wasn't going to cop to Mac being here with them, but he didn't have it in him to keep pushing buttons until he maybe caught his breath for a minute.

The Pawn looked ready to burst into flames with anger. It made Riley want to crawl out of her own skin. Jack made a point of maintaining eye contact with him as he went on. "Somehow, you managed to follow me here. A fatally stupid mistake on your part. But still, very impressive." Riley looked around. Mac would have figured out how to get out of these bonds by now, she was sure of it. She felt so damned helpless and this guy, this Pawn was going to hurt Jack more. Jack just glared back at the guy. It was all he had at the moment. The Pawn set his goons off to look for Mac. Then he looked at Jack with almost hungry anticipation. "…And you get to meet my boss."

When Lemaire strolled in carrying a cattle prod, Jack doubled down on trying to keep the attention focused on himself. The Pawn had revealed that they hadn't pinched Mac and Cage, so that meant his partner was on his way with armed backup.

He just had to keep this up a little longer. When he opened his mouth to bait the boss he heard Riley whispering, in near total desperation, "Stop it, stop it," like a prayer. But he couldn't stop it. Talking about nothing bought time. So, he kept it up.

Lemaire sneered. "The time for lies is over," he hissed. He knew Jack was an agent, that much was clear. "I would like to hear the truth. And we can begin with your real name and what agency you are working for."

"My name is Kevin Perkins, I'm a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys," was almost worth the look of disbelief at his audacity on Lemaire's face, until the man hit him almost in the chest with the cattle prod.

Mac had explained once why it was that electricity hurt so much more than other forms of torture … something about it being the thing your nerves worked off of anyway, and at that moment Jack would have given anything for Mac to be there already bailing him out. But he wasn't.

Lemaire kept up a rapid fire of repeated questions about who he was, who he worked for, and almost instant increasingly longer and longer shocks from his chosen weapon. Then he gave Jack a moment to breath, took him by the face and stared into his eyes. "I hope you know this can all stop, if you just tell me who you are. Tell me. Can you?"

Jack had the good sense to be terrified of more pain like that, and the deeply ingrained training to not let it break him. Not now. Not when Mac and Cage had to be somewhere nearby ready to mount a rescue. But he nodded anyway.

There was a flash of victory in Lemaire's eyes, that was quickly followed by a black seething fury when Jack spoke. Then his tormentor's gaze fell on Riley. "Perhaps your friend here will be a little more chatty, huh?"

Jack felt a little flash of pride when Ri shook her head and forced out the words, "I'm very introverted," but when Lemaire caressed her cheek, said she was very beautiful, Jack felt the way he had when he realized Murdoc had Mac.

Getting the attention back on himself was the only way to keep this from going from bad to worse. And once he got out of this, he was going to buy a big plastic bubble to keep Riley in. And maybe a pack of guard dogs.

Only a relatively few feet away, and knowing they were very outgunned and would wind up hanging alongside the rest of their team if they went in with only her weapon, Cage saw Mac looking around and whispered, "Now's the time Jack would ask if you had any brilliant ideas."

Mac had an idea, but not only was he not sure it was brilliant, he wasn't even sure he liked it. But Jack had been successful in distracting Lemaire from Riley, but the dealer had gone to work on Jack with that cattle prod again, and now his partner was near screaming with the agony of it. Mac didn't even care if it worked according to plan, as long as it provided enough of a distraction to ambush these guys.

When the packing peanuts exploded upward and started raining down in a blizzard of flaming starch, things happened very quickly. Cage was a whirlwind of punishing limbs, disarming Lemaire's guards and making them sorry they'd laid hands on a member of her team.

Mac, took a two-birds-with-one-stone approach and climbed up the staging where Jack and Riley were hanging and tipped it over, knocking Lemaire flat and getting Jack and Riley to where he could quickly and easily free them.

"Good to see you, Mac," Jack managed as his partner cut him free.

"Yeah, you, too," he said, bending to free Riley.

Now Jack had had a minute to catch his breath, his eyes searched the room. There he was. Jack spat some blood out of his mouth and strode across the room. "Hey!" Lemaire was savvy enough to know this wouldn't end well for him; he looked afraid. It gave Jack a moment's satisfaction that cut through his pain. "You wanna know who I am? I'm the guy that just broke your nose."

He didn't think he'd felt quite that satisfied punching anybody in a long time. He picked up and dusted off his jacket. He was panting, hurting, and wanted more than anything to sit down, but he was still too pissed off to rest. Mac approached him, looking about as concerned as Jack would have expected, but Jack just responded to the look with a "Thank you," and a fist bump.

Mac appreciated Jack's need to keep moving and bleed off some stress, so he just answered, "Anytime," and moved off to secure Lemaire. What Jack did was go wrap Riley in a tight hug, asking if she was okay. Lemaire had hit her in the leg with the cattle prod before Jack had managed to piss him off enough to draw him away and then she'd gone down hard when Mac tipped the staging.

Riley clung to him for a minute, assuring him she'd be okay and not quite able to force herself to let go for a minute. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into his neck as she thought her father would never have done anything like that for her. He was a man who couldn't endure her having the last slice of pizza if he liked the toppings when she was a kid. But Jack … Jack had not just endured torture, but asked for it to keep her safe.

She gave Jack one more hard squeeze and she was reminded that what he'd endured must have left him hurting pretty badly. They helped each other move toward some wooden crates so they could sit, leaning against each other. Riley thought again about how Jack had always been there to lean on.

When he'd left when she was a kid, she'd sworn she'd never forgive him. Turned out that it hadn't been so much Jack's choice as she'd always thought. Diane had admitted to Riley not too long ago that, after he'd beaten down a drunken abusive Elwood, she'd told him to leave.

Jack would never have told her that, was more concerned with her having a good relationship with her mom than about how she felt about him. She was about to tell him, but then she realized she couldn't talk about Elwood without giving away her current predicament. Jack's interrogation skills, or maybe it was his Papa Bear skills, had always enabled him to read her like a book. Instead she just whispered, "Thank you, Jack."

He answered her with a gentle squeeze around her shoulders. Jack was thinking of getting up again and seeing if there was anything he could do when Mac stepped in front of them. "How you guys holding up?" he asked, eyes bright with concern.

"We're good, bud," Jack answered, realizing that he sounded anything but.

Mac frowned at him, then gave a wry smirk and shook his head. "Sure you are." He gestured toward Cage. "We're gonna do a sweep, secure any more bad guys that weren't already down here." Jack nodded, then made as if to rise. Mac put a hand on his shoulder. "Matty has an exfil team on the way. ETA about forty minutes. That'll give Cage and I time to finish locking this place down."

Jack opened his mouth to insist that he could help, but Mac gave him a glare Jack was all too familiar with, since it was the once he usually used on Mac when the kid was being a stubborn pain in the ass. "You stay put. Both of you. You are less than an hour away from a smooth flight home and the attention of a medic who knows what you just went through."

"I've had a lot worse and helped you finish a mission," Jack insisted.

Mac shook his head. "Don't make me add to your list of injuries by kicking your ass right now, pal."

Mac and Riley exchanged a look and Riley gave him an almost imperceptible nod. "Stay with me, Jack. Please?"

Jack's expression softened, and he smiled at her, brushing her hair off her face. "Okay, Ri, honey. I'll stay right here."

Mac walked off to finish the job, concealing his smile until his back was to Jack. Riley had just been tricked into accepting support from Papa Jack and Jack had been tricked into not making his injuries any worse. Mac grinned to himself. Damn, I'm good.