T'Challa was speaking to someone on the phone in Wakandan and Shuri was eavesdropping.
"My brother is having him brought here now." She said, trying to placate Steve.
"We need to be out there looking for her." His voice was tainted with desperation; his fist clenched around the broken bracelet. In the back of his mind was a nagging suspicion, one that involved one or more of the Wakandans in front of him. He tried to push it out of his thoughts.
Natasha put her hand on his arm to try and comfort him, and he looked around, finding her in the corner of his eye. "Don't tell me it's okay."
The twenty-minute wait for Hendrik's arrival felt like days to Steve.
Two Dora's brought Hendrik in, his hands were bound in front of him, and he was white as a sheet. "We found him trying to board the last flight out to Frankfurt." Said one of the Dora's.
Steve was there in an instant.
"Where is she?" He commanded, grabbing Hendrik by his collar and lifting him clear off the ground before slamming him into the wall.
Hendrik was flapping. "I... I don't know..."
"Stop. Lying." breathed Steve. "Tell me where she is."
"Hendrik shot glances to Shuri, T'Challa, Ayo, Nakia and finally Sam who had his arms crossed over his chest, clearly hoping that hell would be paid.
"I-I told you, I don't know!"
Steve let him drop to the ground and took a few steps away, his hands on his hips, trying to compose himself.
"Perhaps he really does not know," said Ayo.
"We've only asked him twice, nicely," said Natasha, suspicious.
Steve and T'Challa flashed a look at Ayo at the same moment, before T'Challa walked over to Hendrik, picking him up off the ground and untying his hands.
"You have been a long time friend to this family because of your ties with my sister, but I promise you, if you do not speak the truth, right now, you will be sorry you ever heard the word 'Wakanda.'"
Hendrik's bottom lip was shaking. T'Challa pushed him back until he hit the wall and bared his claws with his hand drawn back, ready to strike.
"I-I had no choice!" He screamed through tears. "They were going to kill my mother in Germany if I didn't cooperate."
Steve stepped in next to T'Challa. "Who?" he breathed.
"I don't know!" he rasped. "They left me instructions in a black envelope with a burn phone. I had to call the number saved on it, and they told me that I had to get her alone with the dog."
"And it had to be tonight?" Steve reached a new level of anger.
"Yes.." Hendrik trailed off. T'Challa stepped away and let him sink to the floor.
"Tell me you didn't burn the burn phone?" Came Natasha's voice as she walked up to Hendrik.
He peered up at her, thumbing something in his pocket. She dropped to one knee and grabbed his hand, pulling the phone from his pocket.
Steve felt the smallest bit of relief at having a real lead, to have something that could lead him to be able to do something.
Shuri ran over and opened the flip phone. "I can trace the number, give me two seconds." She ran out.
T'Challa walked up to Steve. "We will find her." He said, putting his hand on Steve's shoulder.
Steve said nothing; he wouldn't believe any of them until he had her back. He was feeling so many things; he felt guilty for leaving her at the party with that man. He felt his heart breaking every time his thoughts wandered to what she might be going through; he felt anger, at whoever was behind this. He felt distrust at Ayo and perhaps even Shuri and Okoye. He felt like an idiot for not telling her how he felt weeks ago and he felt an urgency that he was finding harder and harder to suppress, to go out to try to find her.
Minutes passed before Shuri returned with a tablet. "I've found where the signal originated from, she said, pointing at the screen."
"Take him to the detention centre." T'Challa barked at one of the Dora's who'd brought Hendrik in.
"Yes, my king." She nodded.
The rest of them sprang into action, heading out of the throne room behind T'Challa to the Royal Talon Fighter.
Once they were in the air, Steve took the tablet and sat down, surveying the location on the screen with Nat and Sam.
"That's in Sudan." Said Natasha, frowning.
The cold clung to her bones as she tried to move again. The pain was still unbearable. She felt fresh tears stinging her eyes as she thought of Steve. She wondered if they were looking for her with a sense of hopelessness. She'd been here nearly a week, and no one had come. She was starting to give up hope that anyone would.
She reached up with her bound hands, raw at the wrists and touched the fresh wound on the back of her neck. They'd cut out a piece of skin there because they wanted to examine the runes that now ran in a thin red line all the way down her back. They'd questioned her relentlessly for three days straight, with no food and precious little water. They played loud music twenty-four hours a day, but she was so tired after the first three days that she'd managed to sleep through it for a short while.
They'd nearly drowned her a fair few times, burned her, electrocuted her and injected her with unknown substances that made her violently ill. They wanted to know who she was, why she was buried for so long and what her purpose was here. When they injected her, they always said that 'this would make you remember', but it never did. They wanted her to help them capture Steve, promising to stop hurting her if she agreed, but she flat out refused, angering them into hurting her more. She didn't know where Dog was and her heart broke at the thought of them having done something to him.
She felt weak and exhausted, hurting all over. All she could do was wait for one of her captors to make a mistake.
She was tearing through the ice around him, her breath painting the darkness with white clouds of heat. She soon cleared enough ice to pull him out and straddled his hips, tearing open his combat suit. She removed her jacket and shirt and lay down on him. He lived for this moment, for the burning heat of her body against his. Life began to flow back into him.
She peered up into his eyes "You're going to be okay. I've got you."
His still half-frozen hand came up slowly to gently tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear, letting his fingers get lost in her hair.
"Can you walk?" She asked him. "It's not safe here."
"Just five more minutes," he pleaded.
He wrapped his other arm around her, anticipating some unknown threat when a great crash shook the ground next to them.
Something took hold of her and pulled. Steve held on to her with all of his strength.
"No..." he grunted at the massive dark shadow trying to tear her from him.
With one final, massive effort, whatever it was ripped her out of Steve's grip.
"Steve!" She yelled as she disappeared into the darkness.
Steve shot up on the couch, throwing the blanket off him as he worked to calm himself.
Nat was there, placing a cup of steaming coffee in front of him on the coffee table. Jane had been missing for a week and he'd just fallen asleep for the first time in days, though it was only for a couple of minutes.
They'd been to the location in Sudan, but there was nothing there other than rocks and dust. Shuri thought that the kidnappers had encrypted the true location to lead them astray, that she could still try and hack out the answer, but she and Nat had worked for days without success.
They'd all been doing legwork in the neighbourhood, asking as many people as they could if they saw or heard anything that night, but nothing. They reviewed the surveillance footage of the streets around the block but found that it had been tampered with and played loops of empty footage over the time that Jane went missing.
"They had help," Steve said bitterly to Sam, Nat, and Okoye as they finished watching the last recording.
"I hope you're not seriously suggesting that one of our people had anything to do with this?" Breathed Okoye.
"I know you don't think it's a thing, but it sure looks that way." Muttered Sam.
Okoye glared at him, offended that he would even think such a thing. "All of our people who have been in contact with Jane I trust with my life." She shot back.
"Would you trust them all with hers?" Natasha asked with a twitch of her eyebrow.
Steve looked from her to Okoye. He had a deep frown on his face with his arms crossed across his chest.
"I can not deny that the tampering evident here would have required help from someone who knows our systems, but until such a person is identified, I will have a very hard time believing it." Said Okoye.
Steve and Nat had been to the detention centre almost every day with T'Challa to interrogate Hendrik, but he didn't know anything more than he'd already told them.
The trail had gone cold.
It was the Saturday afternoon a week after Nakia's party when Shuri had a breakthrough. She double and triple checked herself, aware of how tired she was before she bolted out of the lab with very valuable information.
"What do you mean?" asked Steve, "she's been in Wakanda all along?"
"Yes!" answered Shuri. "I've been able to triangulate to a three-mile radius."
Steve felt a mix of adrenaline and hope flood his body. "Let's go!"