A/N: Again, just to warn you that this chapter features more torture scenes that some people might find upsetting.
Sitting bound to the chair he bit on his bottom lip so hard that it began to bleed, feeling the warm fluid trickling down his chin he refused to give the other man an inch. He wasn't sure where his sudden stubborn streak had come from but something inside told him to face whatever was coming head on, he had spent far too much of his life running away. Now was the time to stand up and be counted.
He could feel the pain in his left hand throb in time with his heartbeat and screwed his eyes shut in an effort to block out the agony coursing through his broken fingers. Suddenly he blew air forcefully from his cheeks as Gianni squeezed the damaged hand tightly.
"Is it hurting yet, Detective Kelly?" he asked in a leering voice. "I've only done three fingers, you want me to continue?"
He was rewarded for his continued silence with another digit being forcefully broken, he breathed heavily through the pain as he felt the perspiration bead on his forehead.
"You know, I gotta hand it to you, you've got some balls for a cop. You've only gotta look at most before they start squealing like a pig." His captor laughed to himself at his inadvertent joke. "I'm thinking maybe we should try something else. What do you think?"
He kept his eyes focused on Gianni as the younger man walked across the room and bent down to pick something out of a black holdall lying on the ground. Horatio gulped deeply as he eyed the hunting knife as it was brought towards him but maintained his stony silence, he would not give Gianni the satisfaction of hearing him scream.
His captor admired the knife, turning it over in his hand as he watched the light reflect off of its polished surface. "You know, I've always wondered whether pigs bleed blue. You wanna find out?"
"Calleigh, I've got Fuentes in the interrogation room. You ready?"
"Sure, Frank. Give me a couple of minutes and I'll be right there," she responded, buying herself a few moments to get her scattered thoughts in order.
Taking a deep breath she strode into the room, her heels clicking on the floor as she walked. "Juan Fuentes?" she asked as she sat at the table and pulled the case file toward her, watching as Frank pulled the blinds down and locked the door.
"You asking, baby?" he leered as he leant across the table before Frank pushed him firmly back into his chair.
Refusing to rise to the bait she ignored his taunt as she pulled a number of crime scene photos from the explosion outside the department the day before. "Does this look familiar to you, Mr Fuentes?"
The bulky Hispanic man picked the pictures up and looked through them one by one, smiling appreciatively as he did so. "Whoever did this has got some skills, anyone get killed?" he asked smugly.
A hand shot out and grabbed him by the t-shirt, pulling him halfway across the table. "You killed two officers, Fuentes. You know what you're gonna get for that, the chair!"
Calleigh laid a hand on Frank's arm and motioned for him to let their suspect go which he did with enough force to send Fuentes stumbling off of his chair.
"Hey, that's police brutality!" he cried as he tried to pull himself back into a seated position as he adjusted the white wife-beater vest he was wearing.
"You're gonna get a lot worse than that if you don't tell us what we want to know, pal. You're in a building full of cops, you've just killed two of their own, no one's gonna come running when they hear you screaming like a little girl."
"We know you built the bomb, Juan. We want to know who you built it for."
He eyed Calleigh up appreciatively, "That's not me, and you can't prove it."
"The fingerprint we found on the fragments says we can. You have two options; talk or face the rest of your sorry life on death row."
Fuentes stared at the pair of them, "If I talk to you I'm as good as dead anyway." He ran a beefy hand through his short-cropped black hair as he considered his options, knowing he had few, if any, cards left to play. Finally he spoke, "I didn't know they were gonna use it on the cops. They asked for a bomb and I built it."
Calleigh leaned over the table, closer to her suspect. "Who asked you to build it, who paid you to make it?"
Fuentes shifted uncomfortably in his chair as he glanced around the interrogation room, suddenly nervous that someone might be listening in to their conversation.
"I'm going to ask you once more, Juan. Who paid you to make it?"
He rubbed his face and smoothed out his goatee, exhaling a long breath, "Some Guido's from out of town, never seen them before." He knew that they had him where they wanted him but it didn't mean he had to make it easy for them.
A little spark of hope began to ignite in Calleigh's heart, hoping that this might be their first solid lead in the case. "How did they find you?"
"A friend of a friend, probably." He saw the unimpressed look they were giving him and felt compelled to continue, "It's not like I list my services in the phonebook, I guess a previous client must have given them my number."
Having had enough of sitting back and staying quiet Frank cleared his throat and asked, "How much did they pay you to make the bomb?"
"Twenty G's. Cold, hard cash," he smiled as recollected his unexpected windfall of income and the enjoyment he'd got out of spending some of it.
"You better tell us where we can find the cash, punk."
Fuentes bristled at the burly detective's tone, "What's in it for me if I do?"
"Me not smacking you six ways from Sunday, how does that sound?" Frank pinned him with a steely glare, his cheeks reddening as his blood pressure and anger began to rise.
Fuentes paused as he weighed up his options again, heeding the burly detective's words from earlier. If the cop decided he wanted to give him a beating he knew no one would come running to help him. "I spent a couple of grand on hookers and coke, the rest of it is back at my crib."
"These 'Guido's' that you built the bomb for, did they have names?"
"Look, I had a business arrangement with them, I wasn't dating them. All I needed to know was what they wanted and how much they were gonna pay me for it."
"Could you describe what they looked like?" Calleigh asked.
"I only remember one of them, a lanky guy. Had these hard grey eyes, dude looked like he didn't smile much. Wasn't big on conversation either."
"Anything else?"
"Yeah, he talked with an accent."
"What kind of accent?"
"Real tough New York accent kinda made it hard to understand what the guy was saying half the time."
"How did you contact them?"
"I didn't. They contacted me, they'd text me the times and places to meet them."
"Could you describe the type of vehicle they used?"
"The first time it was a blue SUV, the next time a black Honda. That's all I know, honest."
Calleigh glanced at Frank and nodded before the pair of them rose from their chairs and left the room, leaving Fuentes to stew further before they would take him back to the holding cells. "What do you think?"
"I don't know, Cal. It's still not much to go on, I'll send some guys over to Fuentes place to toss it and see if we can find the money, maybe it'll lead us back to the Malucci's."
"Ok, take Walter too. I want to make sure we don't miss anything."
He had no idea how much time had passed since his captor had begun cutting him with the knife, in an effort to block out the pain he had begun to sing to himself silently, repeating the lyrics to the song he and Lori had their first dance to as a married couple. "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey."
The man torturing obviously knew what he was doing, cutting him deeply but not enough for him to bleed profusely, just enough for the stinging pain to register in his mind. The man had made short shrift of his t-shirt and had begun to cut intricate patterns into his chest and abdomen, he forced himself to keep repeating the words in his head as he felt his blood drip slowly down his chest and pool on his trousers as he sat bound to the metal chair. "You'll never know dear, how much I love you, so please don't take my sunshine away."
His continued silence seemed to increasingly aggravate his captor as he felt his jaw being squeezed once more. "You're starting to piss me off now, Kelly. Maybe I should up the stakes a little." The younger man raised the bloody knife so that it was level with his prisoner's face, "Maybe I should follow what says in the Bible, an eye for an eye. You're a good Catholic boy, what do you think?"
For the first time since his capture a real sense of fear flowed through the redhead as he felt the tip of the knife being pressed under his right eye. Panic overrode his rational thought processes as he did the only thing he could think of, leaning his head back he swung it forwards with as much force as he could muster straight into the face of his captor.
He heard Gianni scream as he stumbled backwards, clutching at his bleeding nose, "You bastard, you're going to pay for that!"
The words sounded like nothing more than a muffled mess as the ringing in his head threatened to overwhelm him and send him cascading towards nothingness. Wave after wave of dizziness washed over him as he grimaced at the lancing pain through his skull. The agony so all-consuming that he failed to hear his captor launch himself at him, the pain from the beating he was receiving was secondary to the throbbing in his head. Unable to withstand it any longer his mind retreated back into the welcoming darkness until slowly everything faded away to black.