AN: This was definitely my favourite chapter to write so far so I really hope it comes through nicely. Let me know what you guys think!

Again, I need to thank all of you who reviewed and followed this story. I'm thrilled to know people are entertained reading it, because I'm definitely entertained writing it.

Enjoy!


Spike followed the wire all the way to the trigger point and satisfied that he once again had the right one, brought the cutters around it and in one swift movement, the wire was severed. "Third bomb is diffused," he announced, the cheerfulness half back in his voice. At least that was taken care of. Next step was to find Jules. Hopefully there wouldn't be anything else slowing them down starting now.

"Great job Spike," Greg's fatherly voice came through the comms, a soft sigh following his words, the relief obvious. He looked at his watch to see their demolition expert had once again lived up to the expectations and finished his task in 22 minutes rather than the 30 he had first promised. As predicted, after figuring out the first one, the other two had taken much less time since the bomb pattern had been the same on all three. "Grab your gear we're heading out. Eddie?"

Without voicing his question, the Team Leader understood what his Sergeant expected as an answer. He and Lead had made it to the subject's house minutes before and were now shuffling through his stuff, searching for anything that could help them find their missing team member, papers, clothes and objects flying around as there was no time to be wasted on keeping his house clean and undisturbed. "House is clear. No sign of Jules," Ed deadpanned, hiding the worry behind his tough façade. But his actions spoke volumes as he was nearly trashing the man's house, both in frustration for coming up blank and because he didn't think the man deserved anything else than to – at the very least – have his house trashed.

"Copy that, we're on our way," Greg's voice told them in their earpieces.

"Got a laptop," Leah urged and Ed looked in her direction as she walked his way before setting the computer on the dining room table. She opened the flip and brought it to life only to be met with a screen asking for a password. Of course, it couldn't be that easy. "Spike, I got a password protected computer. Can you walk me through?"

As their tech specialist acknowledged from the SUV he was sharing with Raf – while Greg had taken a second one in case they needed to split up later on – Ed nodded at Leah, allowing her to stay on that task. Computers held a lot of secrets, if not for files then for emails, pictures and browser history. So far, it was their best shot at getting intel. Meanwhile, he went back to rummaging through the house.

It was only a few minutes later that Leah cursed under her breath, loud enough for her mic to pick it up.

"Leah?" Ed questioned through the comms as he had now moved to the basement.

"Sorry," she started, apologizing for her use of words which were very unlike her. "I think the hard drive just formatted itself."

Even though Raf was the only one right next to him, they all clearly heard Spike's frustrated sigh. If Leah had done everything he had told her to – which he had no doubt she had – then it could only mean one thing. "He probably knew we'd try to bypass it and programmed an auto-format," he said, his voice sounding a bit defeated. "I'll work on it when I get there. Wouldn't be wise for him to lose everything without a back up, though. So look for external drives, USB keys or anything that could contain digital information."

Leah copied and left the laptop on the table to go back on a blind scavenger hunt, looking for information they weren't sure they would find. When she walked by the window that led to the backyard, movement caught her eye. She quickly approached to investigate, wondering if the rest of the team were already there but not recognizing the figure that was heading for the patio. "Ed, I got movement. Back door," she urged in a hushed tone as she took her weapon out, her eyes remaining on the man in the yard as he made his way to the door.

Merely a few seconds later, Ed's steps hurried up the stairs and to her side, his weapon already drawn as well. "Boss, what's your twenty?" he asked in case they needed back up.

"Seconds away."

"Copy," he quickly said before giving Leah silent instructions with a few waves of the hand and soon, they were both in position, hidden on each side of the door, ready to pounce on whomever the man was.

Except the man paused with his hand on the handle as his eyes scanned through the small window in the middle of the door. He quickly spun on his heels and ran back the way he came.

"He's on the run!" Leah exclaimed and Ed made his way out, falling into pursuit of the man while the former Firefighter went for the front door, hoping to come out and cut his route.

"Police! Stop right there!" Ed yelled at the man who didn't even look back and picked up the pace. Thankfully, Ed's intensive training allowed him to chase the subject with ease. As they made it towards the front of the house, Leah came running out but the man spotted her and switched directions into the road, heading away from them.

While both officers were in pursuit, Greg's SUV pulled in the street, the tell-tale blue and red lights flashing as he sped up to block the subject's path, which forced him to make a swift right turn into one of the neighbour's yard. Ed quickly followed, Leah in tow.

"Eddie?" Greg asked, wondering where he needed him to be to try and ambush the man.

"I got him," he responded with confidence as the subject was cornered, climbing a chain-link fence to get away. Ed caught up with him and before he could disappear on the other side, the SRU Team Leader held his weapon with one hand as he grabbed the man's belt with the other and pulled him down with strength, then shoved him on the ground. "Stay on the ground! Hands on your head, now!" he shouted, weapon aimed right at him in case he pulled one of his own.

Leah had made it to their side just as the man was shoved to the ground, trailing her own weapon on him as well. When he complied and brought his hands on his head, she kneeled next to him, quickly searched him to find a single 9mm, handed it over to Ed and then cuffed him before pulling him back to his feet. "Subject secure."

Greg nodded, mostly to himself as he got out of the parked SUV, seeing Raf and Spike's vehicle come to halt behind him. "Spike, computer. Raf, keep digging in the house. There's gotta be something in there that will clue us," he dispatched before jogging to where his other team members had gone.

Meanwhile, the Team Leader let his weapon dangle on his tact vest and took a menacing step forward, right into the man's face. "Who are you!?"

"I'm no one, alright?" he said as he tried to edge away from the officer, but Leah held him in place.

Ed wasted no time going from annoyed to pissed off. He grabbed the man's collar and pulled so he was right in his face. "You need to tell me right now where our officer is." His tone meant no non-sense but it didn't seem to faze their subject at all as he remained silent. Sending him a glare, Ed dug in the man's pockets, finding his wallet first, and then a phone.

Greg arrived to their side just at that moment and picked up the wallet from Ed's offering hand. Sliding his driver's licence out of its slot, he read the name on it. "Spencer White," he read out loud, looking at the man and validating the small image was the same as the live one. Satisfied, he handed it over to Leah and she nodded, darting to the SUV to go make more research on one of their SRU issued laptops. Ed took her place holding onto White and gave his Sergeant the phone. The officers' movements were smooth and in sync as they silently went about what they knew they had to do, as if they had it choreographed.

Greg then focused on White for a moment. "Spencer, I think you should start talking before your phone and your record does it for you. Cooperating can only make things better for you now." He let that sink in for a moment before he pressed on. "Where is our officer?"

"I don't know where she is."

The fact that he used a pronoun that was gender specific made both Greg and Ed share a look. Either he knew and was lying to them, either he was aware of which officer was to be taken, confirming their earlier theory that Jules had been the intended target.

Greg tried a different tactic. "What were you going to Dorian Flynn's house for?" As he was met with silence as well as a hateful glare, the Sergeant pursed his lips. The man was empty handed except for a weapon, meaning he didn't come to drop something off rather than pick something up. Greg addressed his team. "Team, he most likely came to retrieve something, Spike, it may very well be the laptop."

"Working on it, boss," came the immediate response.

Giving the subject another glance, Greg then looked at Eddie and pointed back to the street with a head-tilt. Ed took the subject along and Greg followed in their footsteps. He scanned the phone's content until he found what he had been looking for. "Winnie, I'm gonna give you the phone number that I'm about to use to make a call. Patch it through to the team."

"Copy that."


"NO!" Jules yelled again even after Flynn had pressed the trigger button on his phone. She couldn't bear the idea that some of her teammates would be victims of bombs because of her, because this lunatic had not believed that she didn't hold any other information. She watched the screen in horror, waiting for the white dots to fade away, the proof that the explosion killed her friends. The wait was unbearable, with every passing second, her emotions threatened to overflow, her body shaking uncontrollably. But eventually, too many seconds passed, the three white dots still there and moving.

Hope replaced fear in Jules' mind while for Flynn, it seemed to go the other way around. He looked down at his phone and pressed the button again a few times, only to realize it wasn't working.

Soon the white dots were quickly moving away from the scene, seemingly driving in two different SUVs. It gave Jules faith that they might have figured it all out and were finally coming for her, relief that they were alive and strength to keep trying to stall Flynn. She saw the shift in her captor's behaviour as an opportunity, control slipping out of his hands momentarily. It was her opening, her shot at talking him down and she was determined to use it.

"Dorian, listen to me," she started, her voice levelled and calm like it was whenever she was negotiating. It was miles away from the panic she had just felt not a minute ago. "You need to stop what you are doing right now. Abducting an officer is one thing, attempted murder is another. Don't make it worse for you."

"Worse for me?" he echoed in a near shout as his head snapped away from the computer screen and towards her. Anger flashed in his eyes. He pocketed his phone, obviously realizing the problem wasn't on his part rather than the SRU disarming the bombs, and then closed the distance between them, stopping when their faces were only inches close. "Darling they just made it worse for you."

His face was threatening, his voice sombre and yet, Jules held his stare without showing any sign of weakness. If he got off on damsels in distress, she was going to make sure to disappoint. While she couldn't say she felt good about what this foreshadowed, there was no way she would give him the satisfaction of having any control over her – at least not more than he already had. Now that she knew the team to be safe, she would die before giving him any other clue as to what was going on with Sam's mission, no matter how small they may be. He had nothing on her.

Flynn got out of her face and moved around her once again, disappearing in the corner of the room she couldn't see. Soon, she heard something rattling on the cement ground. It didn't sound heavy so it was as if he was purposefully letting it slide for dramatic effect.

When he appeared in her line of vision again, she could see that he was carrying a wooden baseball bat. Jules felt her throat constrict and she swallowed hard. She was well aware of his next intentions but she still voiced it. "What are you gonna do with that?" Again, her voice was incredibly levelled for the situation she was – or was about to be – in. Her pride was taking over; she wasn't going to let him win.

He gave the bat a soft kick while still holding the handle so it flipped vertically from the ground and settled against his shoulder. "I'm gonna either get answers, or great satisfaction."

Jules' heartbeat picked up a notch as he confirmed her worries but her face remained stoic. Trying to sound as confident as she wanted to appear, she waited a second before she spoke. "You can hit me all you want, it's not gonna change the fact that I know nothing." While she couldn't claim she'd been hit with a bat before, she knew enough about baseball to be aware that the force and the velocity coming from a full swing could break bones.

And while she had no desire for him to test that scientific fact on her, he seemed to have the exact opposite in mind. "We'll see about that," he said as he took a swing towards her, holding the bat with both hands.

Jules' body tensed, trying to ready herself for the blow but nothing could have prepared her for that. As soon as it made contact with her rib cage, she couldn't help but to let out a cry of pain that was stopped short when her diaphragm contracted from the blow and caused the wind to be knocked out of her momentarily.

She finally managed to inhale after too many long seconds, getting air back in her lungs. But the motion of her chest caused the pain to worsen and she moaned in agony. To have heard about the kind of ache it caused in first aid classes, she realized he might have broken one or more of her ribs. Her teeth gritted from the frustration of having to suffer through this because she couldn't get through to him.

Hanging her head down as she tried to take small breaths of air and keep the discomfort to a minimum, she fought the undesirable tears building up in her eyes. All she wanted to do was to curl up on the ground until the pain ended, give her sore body a much-needed break. However, she knew at this point that her comfort was the least of his priorities.

The tip of the bat leaned against her chest and then pushed under her chin, forcing her head to tilt back up until Flynn could see her pained eyes. Jerking her head to the side so she was free from the bat, she still kept her head up, fighting through the pain to stare at him, defiant. It was obvious by the way he kept grabbing her chin and making her look up at him that he was trying to show her he was in control.

"Wanna try that again?" Flynn asked as if expecting this to refresh her memory and give him the answers he sought.

"You know I can't give you what you're asking for. There's no reason for you to do this." She didn't want to sound like she was pleading despite her last effort to get him to see reason so she continued. "Unless it's because you enjoy beating on women."

"Only the mouthy ones."

On that note he swung again, this time hitting her straight on at the hips level, to which she responded with yet another painful cry. With the concussive force and because of how she was nearly suspended from the ceiling, the impact caused her body to swing back and forth, hanging from the chains for a moment until she could manage to settle her feet down again. Her entire body wanted to just shut down and save itself the torture, her muscles giving out, her breathing fast and shallow. But her head refused to give him that contentment.

Ignoring her reaction entirely as if nothing happened, Flynn carried on. "You're gonna give me the names of his crew members, if nothing else." She didn't fail to notice how he had switched from questioning to requesting. Jules' eyes moved up to look at him. While she was sure he was taking some sort of sick pleasure in watching her suffer, his face was passive, almost aggressive. He meant business. Too bad she wasn't going to give him any.

Once again, her first thought was to tell him to go to hell but that wouldn't do her any good. Nor would remaining silent, she figured, but now that she knew her team to be safe, she had no reason to give him even the slightest hint of information.

Sam talked about his team quite a lot during their video calls, possibly because he was trying to relate to them like he did so well with Team One. However, Jules could tell that as much as he tried to recreate the same kind of family feeling he had with the SRU, nothing could ever replace what he'd left behind. She almost felt uneasy whenever he'd ask how the team back in Toronto was, afraid it might pain him more than do him good.

So yes, she did have that information, or part of it anyway. She knew some of them by nicknames, others by surnames only, a few by their ranks alone. But after everything Dorian had done to her, after everything he had almost done to the team and because of everything he wanted to do to Sam, she wasn't going to give him a thing.

"I will not," she said in a small tired voice as her level of energy was going down by the minute, pressing on all three words to make it clear that no matter how hard he'd try, she was done playing by his rules.

She didn't expect him to be happy about it however and he soon proved her right as he took two steps forward, stopping right in her face and grabbed her ponytail with his free hand, yanking it down and forcing her head backwards and her eyes up into his, to which she hissed. She didn't dare fight against it, afraid any extra movement might put a strain on her injuries.

"Funny how this time you're not denying having the knowledge," Flynn observed, speaking in a hushed tone but clearly audible due to their proximity. He pulled on her hair sharply once more and Jules squeezed her eyes shut but didn't utter a sound this time. "Don't lie to a subject, isn't that what the playbook says?" he asked rhetorically. Jules' eyes opened to look straight at him. Again, she didn't deny the fact that he was right. Her silence spoke volumes and Flynn's lips curled into a smirk. "Guess you enjoy pain, then." His smirk faded just as fast as it came and he let go of her hair. He started pacing around her slowly, letting the tip of his bat run along the edge of her waist, stopping in the small of her back when he was right behind her.

Jules stood still, again her eyes had followed his motion until she couldn't see him anymore. The bat dropped after a moment, ending the physical contact.

"So?"

His question was simple, the consequences of not answering it weren't. Yet, she already hated that she had to give him even the slightest piece information so she wasn't about to give him more, despite what it meant for her. So he hit a silent wall.

"Fine."

Pain exploded in her back as the bat hit straight on her left shoulder blade and then again seconds later right above the coccyx. As much as she had tried to ready herself and grit her teeth to keep from voicing her pain, the second blow was unexpected and, combined with the first, excruciating enough for her to let out another cry.

Again, she tried to take shallow breaths to avoid too large movement in her rib cage but she was out of breath and it was proving hard. The anticipation of being hit and her body trying to recover from the blows brought her heart rate up and she felt as if she'd just run a marathon, it was unsettling considering she had barely moved.

Behind her, she heard the wooden bat hit the ground as if it had just been tossed further away. While she should have normally felt some sort of relief knowing he was done with it, she figured it might actually be the beginning of something else, if her profiling on the man was even only partly correct.

Hearing Flynn's footsteps behind her, she tried to adjust her position, trying to find a more comfortable one under the circumstances. Her legs were weak, threatening to give out and her arms were strained for being held in the same position for so long and because of her bruised wrists supporting part of her weight. No matter how she held herself something was hurting and it caused her to let out a low groan, frustrated.

When the man appeared in her line of vision again, Jules stared at him, following his steps until he stopped right in front of her. He was holding something in his hands and as her gaze scanned down she recognized a roll of brown packing tape. She swallowed nervously, her eyes moving back up to look right into his but she didn't speak. There were only a handful of things he could possibly want to do with that but the most plausible one increased her irritation. Words were all she had left and he was about to take that away from her.

Seeing as she understood what it was for, Flynn's lips curled into a smirk and he spoke up. "If you're not gonna tell me anything good, no reason for you to speak or for me to hear you cry, right?" he explained as if giving her an undeniable reason for what he was about to do.

She wanted to argue that she wasn't crying and wouldn't make a sound if he stopped beating on her but if those were her last words before he gagged her, she needed to chose them carefully. He was looking down at the roll, pulling a piece of tape when she spoke. "What I can tell you is that you're not making things easier on you." Her voice was tired and groggy as if exhaustion was taking over. "If I'm not giving you what you want, then none of this matters and all you're going to get is more trouble."

Flynn stopped, hesitant, and he looked back up at her. She felt like she might have hit a nerve, or at least raise some kind of doubt in his mind. His eyes narrowed slightly. "You're just trying to save your ass," he pointed out as he brought the roll to his mouth, stuck the tape between his teeth and with a swift movement, cut the piece loose.

Trying her best to ignore what he was doing, Jules carried on. "Maybe. But believe it or not, I'm also trying to save yours."

His scoff told her that the doubt she had planted in his mind was gone, or that he had decided to disregard it. "I'm not the one whose ass needs saving here, darling." Without hesitation, he smacked the piece of tape over her mouth.

An unappreciative complaint escaped her throat and where her mouth couldn't speak anymore, her eyes made up for. She glared at him as he repeated the process with the roll of tape a second time and added a layer to her gag, offset of about an inch lower than the first, covering more of her facial skin and ensuring that she wouldn't be able to take it off. Not only was he making sure she wasn't going to speak unless he decided so but he was also dehumanizing her, rendering her easier to kill if it came down to it.

Flynn patted her right cheek twice where the tape ended, as if looking at a job well done. "There." He was staring at her with satisfaction while she was giving him the very opposite, her mad features causing him to chuckle. "You're lucky you're too pretty for me to mess up your face."

Jules wasn't sure if this was meant to be a compliment and since she couldn't ask, decided it wasn't. The phone he had pocketed long minutes earlier buzzed and he took a few steps away from her to answer the call, setting the roll of tape on the folding table on his way out. Having his attention diverted away from her, Jules let her head fall back and released a long sigh through her nose that convoyed pain, annoyance and – she hated to admit – desperation. In this position she could see where the cuffs cut in the skin of her bloodied and bruised wrists. Her entire body was in survival mode, fighting through the pain and the soreness but it didn't want to respond properly, not how she trained it to. She tilted her head down until her vision showed her the floor rather than the ceiling. Realization dawned on her that if the team didn't find her soon, she wasn't making it out alive.