A/N: Tell me… who are you?

X xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx X

"Sorry to interrupt, Mac, but…"

Six pairs of eyes moved towards the door, where a flustered, and evidently dead tired, Cap Patterson stood.

"My boys just found a small hidden room, like a panic room, except it has enough video gadgets to make CBS jealous."

"You heard Cap… get your cases and meet me downstairs. Adam, you're coming, too."

Cap shifted uncomfortably on his feet. "Mac… maybe it'd be best to leave Bonasera and Monroe…?"

The whole team stopped on their tracks and looked, first at Patterson, then at Mac.

"That bad?"

"Uh-huh"

"Thanks for the head-up… but we're all in this together as a team…"

Cap nodded and left. The ride back to Nico's place was a quiet and tense one. What exactly was awaiting them that Cap didn't want the female detectives to see?

As soon as they got to the scene, they started to process it without any instruction form Mac. The job was done silently and efficiently, dusting for prints and searching for anything else that might reveal something about the last person to come into this room. Adam was working his magic, his fingers speeding over a series of keyboards, typing commands here and there, trying to make sense of what was on the files.

"What do you have, Adam?" asked Mac after a while.

"Videotapes. At first I thought they were surveillance tapes but… I'm not so sure now. The cameras were not facing the doors or the windows, but rather specific places inside each room… not that it makes much sense to me."

"Bag and tag everything. We'll analyze it back at the lab."

"Uh… Mac?"

"Yes?"

"There's something that's bothering me. If Nico didn't have a chance to come back here, why's the machine playing a video that was stamped two hours before the raid took place?"

"Maybe that's the last thing the cameras recorded?"

"No… I've already found the last footage… the cameras were still rolling when Cap's men came in here…"

Mac frowned at the information and pondered for a moment. That could only mean that someone else had been in the room. Why switch the tapes? Mac could only think of a reason: someone had gone in the room looking for a tape.

"They found hundreds of tapes inside the psycho's house! CSI's secured them…"

"Wonder what they'll find in there…"

"Probably enough material to build a gay porn empire…"

"You think Flack and Angell have their own sex tape?"

"Shut the fuck up and show some respect, will ya?"

"Sorry. I just…"

He didn't pay attention to the rest of the conversation. He knew now what he'd feared the most: they had the tapes. It wouldn't be long before they went through every inch of footage. Damn Barbeito and his voyeuristic streak! He also chided himself; he ought to have taken the whole thing and not wasted time looking to see if his face showed somewhere in those tapes. Now all that was there for him was to wait and see what they came up with… and in the meantime, he'd write a second report, one that would justify why and how he had been filmed at the scene long before the raid began…

Adam did his best to do his work and not look at the screen in front of him. Lindsay had asked to be excused a while ago, and had yet to return. Stella kept in her place, the only thing betraying her feelings were the tears that rolled down her face every now and then; and the uncontrollable flinching whenever the senseless torture she was witnessing became too much to bear. Sheldon Hawkes tried to remain detached by keeping things within the medical perspective, keeping track of the physical injuries being inflicted by taking notes here and there. Mac watched impassively, his thoughts and feelings guarded although his insides were totally revolted; what he saw went beyond a simple sadistic streak. He had seen bad during his days at the Marines, but this surpassed bad by a mile and then some. And although the tapes had no sound, in his mind he could hear Angell's screams, which made things a thousand times worse.

Danny Messer sat, restless, watching how his best friend was tortured. The silence of the room was broken time and time again by his cursing and his emotional cries. There were times where he had whimpered, and he was not ashamed of the tears that flowed freely. He cringed when the mallet came down time and time again, breaking every bone in Flack's right hand; he winced as he watched Angell, chained to a wall, as she was raped by several hooded men while a heavily beaten and shackled Flack stood by, helpless to stop it…

"She deserved that…"

Danny was taken aback by that thought. Nobody deserved that! Sure, she had hurt Flack at the beginning, but they were undercover and that was the role she had to play, but still… Danny had seen her hurting his friend and his emotional side had taken that sight and ran with it until he felt nothing for rage towards the female detective. "Transference! You can't punish Nico so you transfer your hatred to Angell!" His mind battled his emotions, but it was a lost battle.

"I hope she dies and rots in hell"

When he arrived to the hospital after his shift Danny couldn't help the uneasiness he felt as he found Flack's room empty. A nurse informed him he was still at Angell's room and the uneasiness turned into something nastier that gnawed his insides and threatened to spill like bile when he caught sight of the woman in bed. He focused on Flack instead, trying to get his feelings under control.

The tall man looked unkempt, with his unshaved beard darkening nearly all his face, and Danny cursed enviously; it took him 3 weeks to grow a decent goatee and Flack could pull a Grizzly Adams in 3 days. To add insult to injury, the man still had a full head of hair, thought Danny wistfully, as he unconsciously lifted a hand to touch his own thinning crown. The only consolation was that his was still all dark blond, whilst Flack was already walking down the salt n' pepper route.

Thinking he had his temper under control, he walked into the room.

"Hey man! How's things?"

His enthusiasm sounded hollow and fake to his ears, but his friend seemed not to notice.

"Doctors said that if she doesn't' have another seizure in the next 24 hours we can hope for some sort of recovery before the weekend rolls around…"

"Good. Good." But I'm not here to talk about her, dammit! "And you? Any news from the ophthalmologist?"

"She was around yesterday, but I told her I'd visit her later. I want Jess to come with me so we can discuss the options…"

"Delusional idiot" "Is it wise to wait? I mean, maybe there's something to be done now…"

Flack shook his head. "Things are exactly the same they were. Now or in three months or in three years, the ocular globe is smashed and the nerves destroyed. Even if I had the six million, they don't have the technology yet to save what's left of it. I'll probably end up with a glass eye that I'll pop out for kicks during family get togethers, just to gross out Linds and have Jess roll her eyes and make you and your squirts squeal in delight…"

"He's thinking family as in Montana and me with kids and him with… her…" "Charming. I'm sure you'll be a hit. How about…"

"Neurologist dropped by a while ago and said her readings are very good… no sign of permanent brain damage and her coma is not as deep as when she first got here."

"Dammit Flack; I don't give a shit if she ever wakes up! Talk to me about you!" "Good. But…"

"And the surgeon came to check her progress and said she's doing good. No important trauma to major organs and the grafts are healing nicely and there's a good chance the scarring will be minimal and she'll be a good candidate for reconstructive surgery…"

"Who cares if she ends up looking like a fucking jigsaw puzzle?" "And your hand? Have you started rehab?"

"Doc thinks I'll have to start in a week or two. Wants to make sure all bones healed properly first. That mallet sure did a number on it…"

Flack stopped talking as his mind fleetingly took him back to the moment when Nico decided to make sure he wouldn't attempt anything stupid, like trying to make it out of there alive. The idiot had assumed he was right-handed; assumption neither Flack nor Angell had bothered to correct. In the end, the fact that his good hand was unscathed proved to be pivotal in their survival.

"Hey Flack!" Danny's overly cheerful tone brought him back to reality. "Watcha say I roll you down to the coffee shop and see what they call food around here?"

"I appreciate the offer, Messer, but… I want to be here when Jess wakes up…"

"Bitch ought to be dead" "Aww, come on, man, it's not like she's waiting for you to go to open her eyes…"

"Knowing Jess, that's probably exactly what she's doing…"

Maybe it was the way Flack kept saying her given name; maybe it was the way he looked at her, so sickenly and adoringly. Maybe he was simply tired of keeping his feelings to himself after watching his friend being tortured for the past four hours. Whatever the reason, Danny snapped and his façade of concern crumbled.

"Flack… I think it's time you started to face the facts…"

"Watcha mean?"

"Well… it's all right for you to worry about… her… after all what happened, but you've been sitting her for five days now. Nobody is going to fault you for walking away and start worrying about yourself…"

"Lemme get this straight. You think I'm sitting here out of some sort of warped sense of duty?"

"Not duty… not exactly... more like a fucked up Stockholm Syndrome or something…"

"Danny…"

"No, wait! I mean it Don… you don't have to do this…"

"I'm here because I want to…"

"But…"

"Listen to me, Danny. I love her. I was just too stupid to let her know before, and then I got all wrapped up in the case this and the case that… and I thought that telling her how I felt would jeopardize our undercover assignment. How fucked up is that? Nico knew about us all the time!"

"Now it's not the time to be taking rushed decisions…"

"Rushed? There's nothing rushed about this! I've had feelings for her for as long as I can remember…"

"Okay, okay. So maybe "rushed" was a bad choice of words. It's just that now is not the best time to be making this sort of decisions…"

"What the hell has gotten into you Messer?"

Okay, buddy, you asked for it. "You don't owe her anything…"

"You have no fucking clue about what you talking about. I owe her, big time! She sacrificed herself to keep me alive; after all I'd done to her…"

"You didn't do anything!"

"Like hell I didn't! You don't know, Messer, you weren't there…"

"We found the tapes. We saw it all. I know everything that went down there…"

"Really? Guess you know now that I beat her and raped her…"

"And she sodomized you in return! You're even!"

"This has nothing to do with being even!"

"That's exactly my point! Listen to me, Flack! You don't owe the damn bitch anything!"

Stunned silence met Danny's last outburst, and he suddenly realized what he had just said.

"Flack, I…"

"Get out"

"But I didn't mean to…"

"Get out!"

"Flack, please…"

"OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT! NOW!"

Danny needn't be told twice. Had roles been reversed, had that been Montana on the bed, he'd probably be trying to beat the living shit out of Flack for even implying what he had openly said about Angell. Damn his temper for always getting the best of him! Leaving the hospital, he headed back to the Lab. He knew he'd had to come clean with someone about he had just done, and he went looking for Lindsay for absolution and for Mac for his punishment.

Back in the hospital, a lone tear rolled down the face of a woman who was neither dead nor alive.

X xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx X

A/N: Seems the story still holds a surprise or two, even for me.