Crowley felt like his skull was on fire.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed since his vision had gone dark in the park, but he knew even without opening his eyes that he was no longer there. He could tell there were lights on behind his closed eyelids. He knew he had to open them and take in his surroundings, yet he dreaded the pain he was sure would accompany it when the light hit his pupils. He had to know though. He remembered an explosion… and a voice. Had Adam's team caused enough trouble and got away? Had they found him and extracted him? Was it actually one of his team members he had heard in the struggle, or was it…? He had to find out! Slowly he squinted his eyes open. He tilted his head and groaned from the pain. Whatever those two thugs had hit him with had been heavy. He barely felt like he could move. He could feel his arms lying limply on his chest, but everything felt heavy and sore.
His vision swam for a moment before shapes began coming into focus. His stomach twisted. Nothing looked familiar. The room around him was not a hospital room, nor was it his hotel room, or Newt's safe house.
Instead he appeared to be in a sparsely furnished flat. The walls were dark, and the carpet looked in need of a shampooing. Against one wall there was an empty shelf and what looked to be a shipping crate. Crowley had determined that he himself was stretched across a supremely uncomfortable dark leather sofa and at the opposite end of the room stood what appeared to be the only other substantial furniture in the place, an imposing black marble desk.
Despite the throbbing in his head, Crowley made to lever himself upright, only to discover the reason he'd felt unable to move when he first woke up: his hands were cable-tied together at the wrist and fastened firmly to his belt against his right hip.
A surge of fear shot through his body, momentarily dispelling the pain in his head. Instinctively, he kicked his legs and found them also bound together with something much heavier than zip-ties. Before he could struggle further, he heard a door behind the couch swing open and a nasal voice with a faint Russian accent and a buzzing speech impediment droning into a phone.
"Yezz Red, I appreciate your flexibility... Glad we settled it all out... I trust my man's payment wazz sufficient?... Excellent... Azzz I said, have your azzets out of New York by Saturday... Do Svidniya."
Crowley didn't need to see Beelzebub to know who had entered the room and closed his eyes again to feign unconsciousness as he heard her make her way to the desk.
Beelzebub rang off and the room fell silent for a moment.
"I know you're awake, Agent Crowley," Beelzebub said matter-of-factly.
"Well I'd have gotten up to say hello but I'm a bit tied up," he said as casually as he could. "Don't suppose we could have something done about that, could we, Comrade Zlaranova?"
The diminutive ex-KGB agent merely glared at him. He knew it had likely been years since she'd used her given name.
"No, I believe I'll leave you right where you are," she said, reaching for a decanter on the side of the desk and pouring herself a drink.
"I did want you to know that your sztunt in the park last night wazz an utter failure. I've juzt confirmed Mr. Arkangel completed hizz transaction twenty minutes ago."
"If you just brought me here to gloat you should have had your boys finish me off in the park," Crowley groaned, his head was starting to hurt again even as he took stock of every way he might escape. "This is truly torture."
"I had every intention of it," Beelzebub said coolly. "Would have looked like a mugging gone bad had it not been for your man's trick with the exploding dog. That wazz a nice touch, I admit."
Well that explains the explosion at least, Crowley made a mental note to thank Newt if he made it out of this and wondered idly if his team had at least captured Gabriel's man in the bedlam.
"Leaving a body near the zene of an explosion would have raized too many queztions," Beelzebub buzzed on. "You're now in my penthouzz. I'm leaving soon, but I azzure you, you won't be."
Crowley reevaluated the room and a sense of realization dawned on him. The room wasn't sparse because Beelzebub was a minimalist, it was sparse because she was moving, or more accurately, evacuating.
"The bombs are going off in New York then?" Crowley surmised out loud. If he could keep Beelzebub talking at least he might buy himself some time. "That's why you told the arms dealer to clear out."
Beelzebub didn't bite; instead, she just stared at him and took another sip of her drink, almost looking like she was enjoying this.
"What's the plan then? Upend the American economy? Avenge the toppling of the Soviet Union? Why's Arkangel going along?"
Crowley was speculating wildly. That idea sounded like a stretch even to him. There were people who could profit from war, but he didn't think an American businessman with no apparent criminal history would be cold enough to let hundreds or thousands of U.S. civilians be bombed on the street just for money.
"You think so szmall..." Beelzebub said with a sly grin. "What makes you think I have any loyalty to the Zoviets after what they did to me?"
Crowley said nothing. He studied the other person's face and waited for her to give something away. A ray of emotion had cracked her cool facade momentarily and Crowley thought he detected a flicker of anger in the cold blue eyes behind the swath of messy dark hair and mottled scarring that obscured them. Yet as soon as he thought he saw it, it was gone.
"Thoze cowards gave up the fight," Beelzebub spat. "Why should I give a damn about avenging them?"
"Then why a bomb?" Crowley asked, secretly pleased he hadn't been corrected on that matter. MI6's best guess had been a bomb, potentially a nuclear one, from what had been pulled from A.G.N.E.S.'s transmissions, but they'd not confirmed that was what Arkangel was buying.
Until now that is, Crowley thought smugly.
"Why nuke New York City if you aren't trying to settle a score from the Cold War?"
"Who szaid I'm not trying to zettle a score?" Beelzebub countered. "Thizzz is personal."
Before Crowley could press for more information, she continued. "Now, if you're done azking sztupid questions, I'm afraid it iz time to szay goodbye, Mr. Crowley."
Beelzebub raised a hand to lazily snap her fingers and Hastur and the other attacker from the park entered from the same door Beelzebub had come in through.
Crowley was somewhat pleased to see Hastur was sporting a bandage on his arm and a black eye.
At least I did some damage on the way down, he thought.
"Hastur, Ligur, take care of Mr. Crowley. It's obvious he knows nothing elze of importance he could have passed on," Beelzebub said, sounding almost bored. "Oh! and do it quietly! We don't want the neighbors to zuspect anything."
"Sure thing Boss," the man who was apparently called Ligur said.
Beelzebub nodded, pulling a black suitcase from under the desk and turning to leave. "Good. Juzt dump the body when you bring the rezt of the boxes to the boat."
Beelzebub turned back and nodded once more to Crowley. "Goodbye, Double-zix Zix, it'z been fun."
Then she was gone, and Crowley was left bound and facing down the two henchmen.
"Hi guys," he said nervously.
Hastur stared him down with humorless, dead eyes and Crowley tried not to visibly gulp as he struggled to think of a way out.
"How should we do this?" Hastur asked.
Ligur looked around the apartment for a moment until his unsettling iridescent eyes settled on a door across the room.
"I've got an idea," he said with a sadistic smirk. "Go run a bath."
Hastur looked dully at his partner and Ligur jerked his head again towards what Crowley guessed was a bathroom. "Jus' do it," he snapped. "We gotta dump the body on the way to the boat, right?"
Hastur nodded, still not understanding what Crowley was starting to see as Ligur's plan.
"We can still make it look like a robbery gone wrong. Who's gonna check if a drowned body in the harbor was dead before he fell in?"
Hastur, finally getting it, grinned maliciously. "Right," he said unnecessarily, heading to the other room.
Ligur grabbed Crowley firmly under the arms and hauled him off the sofa to his feet.
The redhead staggered immediately and pitched forward to the floor as his legs, which were still bound together, had lost nearly all sensation.
Ligur let out a humorless guffaw at the spectacle, and Crowley took advantage of his momentary collapse, shifting his hidden wrist as much as possible against the floor, twisting his watch around his left arm so the long fingers of his right hand could brush its face.
Before he could get a solid grip on the gadget though, he was kicked swiftly in the ribs and hauled roughly to his feet once again.
"No stalling, Crawley," Ligur grunted in his ear before shoving him forward.
Crowley was surprised to discover his legs were bound loose enough for him to move, but in a heavy enough chain so as to make shuffling the only viable method of doing so.
"It's Crow-ley!" he spat back, not caring if he angered the other man. If the crazy, half-cocked plan he was hatching went pear shaped he didn't want to go down quietly. "Your boss is wrong, you know…" Crowley said as Ligur continued to roughly shove him across the room.
"'bout what?" Ligur snarled.
"Me," he said as if it were obvious. "She thinks I don't know anything more, but I do and I'm not the only one," he babbled, trying to make sure the other man's attention stayed on what he was saying and not how he was still squirming his hands to find the button on his watch that would activate the accessory's saw blade.
"If you think that blond fop what was snooping around about the gala's gonna swoop in and save the day, then think again," Ligur said with a snort. "Once we get you outta the way it's only a matter of time before Gabriel takes care of him."
Crowley jerked his wrist a bit too roughly at the man's casual mention of Aziraphale and the zip-tie cut into his flesh. He ground his teeth against the pain and focused on what the idiot behind him had just admitted: He couldn't have heard Aziraphale in the park, but he was alive, and the target was the gala.
Aziraphale you brilliant bastard! Crowley thought. His angel had been onto more than he'd realized.
"Of course I don't think that!" Crowley snapped. "Why would I be here if I didn't know he'd been caught, you git? I thought he was dead!"
"He should have been," Hastur said with a sneer. Crowley had been so preoccupied he hadn't heard the third man reenter the room, but he immediately halted his struggling with the watch. "Old Gabe just didn't want to get his pretty hands dirty."
As interesting as Crowley found the men's disdain for their boss' co-conspirator, he doubted a man willing to let his own country get nuked for Satan-only-knew what reasons would worry about dispatching one nosy British spy. There had to be another reason Aziraphale was being kept alive.
Maybe he knew even more than we realized.
"Well I'm sure neither of you fine gentlemen have ever worried about keeping anything clean," Crowley said with as much of a shrug as his bound hands would allow, giving Hastur and his grubby coat a pointed look.
He was answered with a dirtier than predicted fist to the side of his jaw.
Crowley staggered. He was sure he would have fallen over again had it not been for Ligur's death-grip on his shoulder.
Should have hit him in the other arm, Crowley thought as he worked his mouth around. He kept his head turned to the side as he attempted to click the joint back in place.
As he felt the painful but reassuring pop, his gaze landed on a side table and his spirits perked up. Sitting on a tray on the table were his gun, the lighter, and his smashed sunglasses.
Before he could fully process this information, he was shoved again from behind.
"Quit stalling!" Ligur barked at him again, jostling him to the side and shoving him into an obscenely large, ornate bathroom.
Had he not known the room was soon to be the scene of his own execution, he might have appreciated the artistically stark decor. The walls were all white, the floor was grey, and all the fixtures were glossy black marble, including a monstrously large bathtub sunk into the floor on the far side of the room. It was steadily filling. From this angle, it was difficult to gauge its exact size, but Crowley could guess it was several feet deep, shallow enough to stand in and keep one's head above water, but absolutely deep enough to drown in if one was lying down. He suspected there was some sort of Jacuzzi seat inside, but he couldn't see through the water, which appeared as dark as the ocean at night against the ebony marble.
"Get something heavy," Ligur ordered Hastur, as he rummaged through a nearby cabinet to produce an elastic bandage.
A moment later Hastur returned with a hideous stone sculpture of a fly, which Crowley had noticed earlier on Beelzebub's desk. In any other circumstances he would have questioned everything about its presence in the flat and its existence on this Earth, but at the moment he was too focused on the way Ligur began to mummify the thing in the reusable bandage and figuring out how they planned to use it to weigh him down.
It took little time before his question was answered. He struggled as Ligur moved to grab his shoulders from behind once again and Hastur looped the loose end of the bandage around his neck.
Instinctively, Crowley threw his head back, bashing Ligur hard in the nose.
For a moment, the other man let go and Crowley seized the opportunity, ignoring the refreshed pain in his head and throwing as much of his weight as he could towards Hastur.
The white-haired man dodged, and Crowley made to shuffle a step further away, but was stopped when the slack bandage was suddenly pulled taught, cutting off his air.
"Nice try Crawly," Hastur said mockingly. "Is that the best you could do?"
Crowley choked but managed to spit in the other man's face in answer.
Hastur sneered, tying a knot in the bandage to anchor Crowley's neck to the hideous statue. The release of the man's hands on the line allowed the redhead to take in a little more air, which he did with a gasp as a knife cut into his side from behind.
Crowley doubled over as much as possible in his bonds, unable to grasp his bleeding side as Ligur stepped around him, holding the bloody knife in one hand and grasping his bloody nose with the other.
"Go get the boxes ready!" he snapped at Hastur. "I'll clean up in here."
Hastur nodded then decked Crowley once more so he fell back into the tub. As he fell, he heard the splash of the statue being chucked into the tub after him.