Content warning: torture
Arlov had moved her while she was unconscious.
Ronnie was sitting when she woke up the second time, which was quite a welcome change from being hung by the rafters. A few weak attempts at movement told her that her hands had been cuffed behind her back, her feet tied to the legs of the chair. Even so, she'd had worse accommodations.
The stall had become hot and humid, which indicated that night had turned to day at some point during her blackout.
Rolling her shoulder experimentally, she felt crusts of dried blood crack and peel painfully, and a fresh new stream of blood begin to flow from the incision down her front. So, she hadn't been unconscious for long.
Lifting her head took a focused effort that she hadn't been expecting, and it took a few tries to get herself sitting upright. When she did, her vision swam and a dull pounding hammered between her eyes for a few moments before fading into the background. A cursory—though blurry—glance around her prison stall informed her that she was alone. "Arlov." The word squeaked up her dry throat. She coughed and tried again. "Arlov."
The Russian oil baron appeared in the doorway, his thinning blond hair freshly gelled. "You're awake."
The hooded glare he got in return only made his smile brighter.
Stepping into the dusty, muggy stall, he opened the lid of a water bottle, and Ronnie heard the seal crack—at least it would be clean water. Arlov put the bottle to her lips and poured some into her mouth with no regard for the amount of it that spilled down her shirt. His eyes were harsh and cold as he watched her drink, and he pulled the bottle away before she was done.
She didn't care. "What are we doing, Arlov? You're pissed at me for stealing your painting? That's too bad. It's definitely not worth your time though, particularly since you stole it first—a theft which got an American killed—so what's the point of kidnapping a state agent?"
"This isn't about the painting." Arlov put the water bottle on the floor and moved back to lean comfortably against one wall. "But imagine my surprise when little Ronnie Masters appeared on my doorstep, all grown up." He crossed his arms tightly over his chest. "I tried to have your bodyguard join us, but, unfortunately, he was tied up with some FBI business."
Ronnie watched his expression turn snide. "You really think I need my own bodyguard?"
He spread his hands to indicate her situation. "You were easy enough to kidnap from your parking lot."
She sniffed. "That's a cheap victory. You caught me wounded."
Arlov shrugged. "I'm the one who wounded you, so my point still stands."
"So, you're upset that I lied to you? That's kind of petty. I still don't get it." Ronnie tested the tightness of her restraints and was dismayed to find that she had very little freedom of movement. She didn't see herself being able to break out on her own.
Arlov rolled his eyes in irritation. "You always were slow, weren't you?" He rubbed a hand tiredly over his face. "Carla may have spent her time playing mind games with you, but that's not how I deal with my people who turn their backs on me. I have very little patience for cops who know more than they should."
That didn't make sense. His people? She wasn't his people, she was Carla's people. Why did he care if Carla had been playing mind games with her?
He saw the confusion on Ronnie's face. Leaning in smugly, Arlov gave a sharp laugh. "Carla may be too prideful to admit it, but I own your mother. And by extension, I own you. She had her chance to make you see your mistakes and come home, but she made a bleeding mess of it all that I have to clean up."
Ranger Kyle had been part of that mess, hadn't he? Arlov considered him a cleaned up mess by blowing him to smithereens. Who else would he murder to settle the score?
"You think I'll go back to that life?" Ronnie scoffed. "I genuinely don't care who called the shots—I got out. I'm staying out."
"I was going to have you killed, because I knew you'd say that." Arlov admitted. "But once I saw you show up and spin your lies about branching off from Carla, I knew that you still had potential. You still have the experience and the practice, even if your instincts are a bit rusty. But first you pay—no one leaves without consequences. And nobody becomes a cop and works against me without punishment."
Well, crap.
the MENTALIST
Nobody looked like they'd slept. Especially Rigsby, who'd gotten his head walloped by Grace's fake boyfriend. The entire team appeared worse for wear, but not one of them could be convinced to clock out.
Even Jane, whose sight had finally recovered, was able to abandon his walking stick to stand before the window, stirring his tea, pondering the disappearance of their missing teammate.
Cho stood next to him, leaning against the window frame with one arm crossed over his chest and the other hand rubbing repeatedly over his bottom lip.
They'd stormed Arlov's mansion already, but all signs pointed to him not having been there since the last time the CBI had visited.
The waiting game had begun. Waiting for the attorney general to get them permission to go after Arlov personally, waiting for the identification of the fake boyfriend, waiting for any word from Arlov.
"I know you're worried." Jane intoned quietly. "We'll get her back."
"We're all worried." Cho snapped.
Grace leaned into her hand, her eyes trailing to Rigsby. She blamed herself for his most recent head injury, and for Ronnie's abduction. She was the one who had let the boyfriend into the building, she was the one who had allowed herself to be distracted and put her team in danger.
She felt useless and at fault. Ronnie had left her cell phone and her purse, so there was nothing to for her to track. She'd already traced all of the street cameras that had caught glimpses of the vehicle that Ronnie had been thrown into, but even that had turned into a dead end after the van disappeared into a parking garage.
Jane turned to face Cho, laying his tea spoon down in his saucer. "Arlov has more connection with Ronnie than just the incident with the Moro, right?" He'd helped come up with the plan to deceive the man by having Ronnie pretend to want to rekindle old business relationships, but he had no concept of the context of their personal history.
Cho nodded soberly. "Arlov and Carla were tied up together. Carla would rent Ronnie out for Arlov to use as a bodyguard or an escort, depending on what he needed. She said that sometimes his men would...take advantage."
Jane's hand swiped across his eyes as though he could hide from the darkness of the girl's past. "How awful." he turned to stare out the window again, taking a sip of his tea. "So, Arlov sees her as a tool, yes? She was a bodyguard, an escort, a lure, and now we've presented her to him as a decoy, capable of deceit and misdirection."
Cho's jaw clenched. "It was your plan that showed him what she's capable of."
"I know you're upset, Cho, but neither of us quite knows what Ronnie's capable of. She wanted to work that mission and she did far better than you gave her credit for." Jane's eyebrows raised disapprovingly. "You're too hard on her, you know?"
Brimming with anger, Cho faced the window and seethed at his own reflection.
"I don't mean in your partnership." Jane nudged him in the arm with his cup and saucer. "I mean when you're jealous."
Cho saw his own face blank out in surprise, mind flashing back to the night that Ronnie retrieved the fake Moro from Arlov. He'd criticized her, he'd insulted her, he'd withheld his faith in her abilities.
The night she'd been taken by Ranger Kyle, he'd spent the day insulting her until she felt alienated from him.
All of that for what—jealousy?
No. "You don't know what you're talking about." Cho didn't feel jealous over Ronnie. She irritated him—she scared him. She jumped into danger and soaked up any positive attention thrown her way, she walked into traps without regard for her own safety and she was highly susceptible to people being kind to her. He wasn't jealous, he was frustrated.
"You should trust her." Jane said simply. "Even now. Especially now. Ronnie has faced far worse than this, and she is going to hold on until we find her."
Finally, Cho could agree with him.
"This email just came in from the attorney general's office and the governor's office twenty minutes ago." Lisbon announced from behind them, holding a sheet of paper in her hands. "Pay attention. At exactly 11:05 a.m. today, at 35.04 north and 116.49 west, you'll see an arrogant and greedy person punished with death and you will know I am serious. Signed Joe Q. Public."
Jane's eyebrows raised. "Interesting." His eyes flashed to Cho, who hadn't looked away from the window even once.
"It's probably nothing." Lisbon refuted.
"So why can't the local police handle it?" Rigsby wondered. "We're busy. We can't just pick up a new case while Ronnie's still out there."
At long last, Cho met Lisbon's eyes, and the two senior agents shared a moment of solidarity. The hard set of his mouth told her he wouldn't be splitting his attention from Ronnie's disappearance—the tired slump of her shoulders told him she wouldn't force him to.
Cho turned back to the window.
Lisbon shrugged at Rigsby. "Some fool let the governor read the damn thing. He talks to the A.G., the A.G. talks to Minelli, and Minelli tells me we have to handle it personally. Rigsby, you're the fastest driver. If we leave now and push it, we can be there by 11:05."
"Where is it?" Jane wondered.
"Mojave Desert. Middle of nowhere. Quarter of a mile off the highway. Rigsby, Jane, we're going. Cho and Van Pelt, stay here and keep digging for Ronnie. This is probably nothing. We'll be back soon."
the MENTALIST
Ronnie's feet tapped restlessly on the hay-covered floor. It felt like hours that she'd been sitting there. "Shouldn't your kid be back by now?"
Arlov was pacing. Bouncing his cellphone in his palm, striding from one end of the stall to the other, the frustration on his face grew more with every passing moment. At her question, he rolled his eyes to the ceiling. "Perhaps you shouldn't be so anxious for his return. He is bringing your boyfriend back as a leverage device, don't you remember?"
Scoffing at the notion, the girl tied to the chair focused on scooting hay around with her toe. "Cho's a squirrelly fella. Maybe it's taking so long because it's so hard to catch him."
The Russian gangster was not impressed. "You seem fairly unconcerned for someone in captivity."
"I've been in your captivity before. It wasn't all that." Ronnie returned simply, and rubbed her leg against the chair to scratch an itch.
Arlov smirked. "That was before you had anything to lose. You're not quite the nihilist you used to be. It's a lot easier to torture someone after you've discovered how to hurt them."
"Punishing me for abandoning your cause isn't torture. It's a tantrum. I'm not leaving the CBI for you." Ronnie set her heels against the chair legs to test how sturdy they were. Gradually applying pressure, she wiggled in her seat to see if the chair would sway or not.
It didn't.
"Leave the CBI?" Arlov stopped pacing and stared at her. "You're not leaving the CBI. You made your choice. You're a cop now." He flashed her a triumphant smile. "So thoughtful of you to make yourself even more useful."
"I'm not gonna be your mole."
"Yes you will."
"Or what? You'll torture Cho? Believe me, that will make me anything but compliant."
"Cho will be dead before I let you go back to work, Ronnie. You need some kind of significant stressor just in case anyone notices your behavioral changes once you start working for me again." Arlov turned to lean against the wall. "Cho won't be surviving this one."
the MENTALIST
"ID on the body came back." Van Pelt twirled her desk chair around to speak to Cho, an ill tinge to her face. "It's Vanya Arlov. Shiralai Arlov's son."
Cho got up from his desk to lean over hers and view the autopsy report. "So he sent his son in here to distract us while he grabbed Masters?"
She tried to work past the guilt gnawing on her stomach. "No, it was more involved than that. He got Rigsby out out the way; he got Jane out of the way; he waited until you and Lisbon were gone; he used me to get into the building; he wanted something."
"If we know it's Arlov, then we know it's about Ronnie." Cho went back to the window. "He started by strapping Ranger Kyle to a bomb."
"If he's connected to Carla, then he would have known that she'd hired him to threaten Ronnie." Van Pelt reasoned. "So he's trying to get into Ronnie's head by reminding her of times she was vulnerable?"
"He has her and he's not leveraging her, which means he's holding her, either to kill her or torture her."
"If he's trying to torture her, then he's going to go after the people close to her." Van Pelt realized. "Maybe he was looking for you."
It made enough sense. "Stands to reason he would think Agent Pike is close to her. We should call his office in Houston and let him know he may be a target."
Van Pelt already had the phone in hand. "I'll call him now."
"I'll send the abduction footage to the state department." Cho returned to his desk and slammed away at his keyboard.
the MENTALIST
The next time Arlov came to visit her, he stormed into the stall and shoved her, chair and all, backwards as hard as she could. She hit the ground on her back, pain spiking up her spine. "What the hell."
Arlov pulled himself back for a moment, and then seemed to think better of his restraint and came at her again, driving the toe of his boot into her ribs once—twice—and then a final time as she jerked away coughing and gasping.
And then he knelt near her face and watched her wheeze miserably. "Your friends killed my son."
Ronnie could barely focus her eyes enough to see him. "Maybe you shouldn't have sent him into an office full of cops and told him to kidnap one of them."
He rewarded her bluntness with a back fist to the face. "I'll be retrieving Agent Cho myself. But first, I'm gonna find your limits. I thought I wouldn't be able to break you physically because of how much Carla put you through, but now — I consider it a personal challenge."
And he did. He spent days learning her limits, finding her buttons, exercising the elasticity of her sanity, stretching it as far as he could to see if he could make her snap. The clinical fascination that he had with documenting her reactions, measuring her tolerance, weighing her ability to hold onto her will, was downright psychotic.
He started with discomfort. Every day she was yanked out of her chair and strung up by the rafters, left to hang from a single chain and a pair of handcuffs for hours until the throbbing in her shoulder felt like gunshots and the strain in her back felt like she was being torn apart.
And then, when she thought she couldn't hang any more, he'd bring pain into the equation. His scale of progression was almost scientific. The first tool of torture he introduced was electricity. The tasing was low-level at first, isolated to her abdomen, away from her brain and heart.
He didn't want to give her a heart attack, after all.
The electricity pulsed through her body painfully, in gradually longer increments, with gradually increased voltage until it went from a standard police taser to something that she thought might snap her in half. Arlov watched her react, writing notes in a little red notebook as her reflexive muscle jerking turned to writhing and howling in pain. Being electrocuted didn't feel like licking a nine volt battery, it felt like being whipped with steel wire.
When Arlov had satisfied his curiosity with electric shock, he moved on to heat.
The teasing turned into burning. He started with a lighter, holding it over the skin of her stomach until little leathery red marks covered her belly. He watched with a wicked smile the way her hissing and grunting turned to gasping cries of pain—but never cries for mercy.
She'd felt worse. She'd always felt worse.
He had to congratulate Carla. The woman had created a machine. The sheer volume of scars that had already been scattered across her body surprised him. He'd found bullet scars and shrapnel scars, knife scars and burn scars—everything he'd thought of she'd already taken voluntarily for her mother.
Surviving those kinds of things created a precedence in one's state of mind—'if I could survive it once, I can survive it again.'
It certainly made his job that much harder.
Ronnie Masters didn't break. She cried and screamed and fought, but she didn't break.
Never once did he look into her eyes and see that subdued little girl who would rather follow orders than continue to be starved and beaten for her attitude.
The more he burned away at her skin, until those little leathery marks turned into rubbery, bubbling blisters, he began to wonder if that little girl was gone forever.
What if he killed her before he broke her? What if she just kept holding on to get to the other side of it until he killed her and there was no other side of it? What if that bitter, hateful ice in her eyes never thawed, and the pain he inflicted on her only hardened her more?
When the lighter turned into a torch and the blisters became burned, cauterized nerves, Arlov watched the ice in her eyes turn to burning hatred, he put down the torch.
She wasn't begging for him to stop.
She hated him. She despised him for what he was doing to her. Her eyes stared into his soul with a rage that burrowed into his mind and took residence there. He saw it when he closed his eyes, he saw it when he went to bed. She looked upon him with a murderous rage and he knew that if he ever released her, she would be out for his blood.
So he put down the torch and he picked up a knife.
the MENTALIST
Cho stormed into the bullpen on the third day, throwing his jacket down on his desk. The muscles in his jaw bunched with frustration, his shoulders tightly clenched. They'd been chasing down false leads without rest, without sleep, without reprieve.
He fell into his chair and propped his elbows up on the desk, rubbing his hands through his hair.
"We'll find her, Cho." Jane assured him from his couch, his own eyes emphasized by heavy bags and dark circles. "She's out there somewhere. We'll find her."
Cho's hands crashed down on her desktop, making the entire structure shudder and knocking over his pencil cup.
Nearby, Van Pelt jumped at the sound.
"We haven't found her." Cho snapped. "It's been three days, god knows what he's doing to her, and we haven't found her. He's probably found out by now that Lisbon's killed his son, and he's going to punish her for it."
Lisbon's countenance fell at the words. She couldn't help the regret that fell like a rock in her gut, picturing exactly the scenario that Cho had suggested. Arlov had Ronnie, he'd likely discovered that his son had been killed, and if he was anything like a normal parent he was going through earth shattering grief.
"The guy had a gun to Grace's head, Cho." Rigsby interjected gently. "Lisbon didn't have a choice."
Cho's head turned to stare out the window furiously.
"The state department has cleared us to contact Arlov's people and try to track him down." Lisbon said quietly.
Jane met her eyes and saw the poorly concealed regret hidden there, and when she turned on her heel to go back to her office alone, he got up to follow her.
Cho rose from his desk and snatched up his jacket again.
"Where are you going?" Van Pelt demanded.
"Going to find Arlov."
"His people are in Russia, Cho." Rigsby said. "We have to call them, not visit them."
Cho seemed lost for a minute, standing in the middle of the bullpen with nowhere to go.
Van Pelt turned to her computer. "I'll call them. Lisbon already forwarded the state department credentials." the gentle clacking of her keys filled the silence after, but she sent Rigsby a significant look.
The brutish young agent jumped up from his chair and took Cho by the arm. "Why don't you sit down, pal? Come here. Sit down." He guided the older man back to his desk and let him sit.
Cho sat like a statue.
Rigsby went around and sat in Ronnie's chair to face him, leaning forward cautiously. "Cho, maybe you should go home? Get some sleep?"
His colleague shook his head. "No, I need to keep working."
"She's not with a stranger, you know. They have history. It's possible that she's being held under duress, but that he's trying to, I don't know, talk to her." Rigsby tried, but even he knew that it wasn't likely to be the case. He knew that the history between Arlov and Ronnie meant worse things for her than better.
Cho wasn't fooled or convinced. "She embarrassed him in front of all of his friends and subordinates. Arlov is not the type of man to forgive that."
"Yeah." Rigsby admitted morosely. "But Ronnie's strong. She'll hold on until we find her."
Cho's fists clenched. "We're not finding her. We're running down dead end leads and letting corporate businessmen distract us from getting her back. The more she holds on, the more she has to take."
"What would you rather her do? Give up? Give in?" Rigsby threw his hands up in disbelief. "Grace is gonna get information from Arlov's business. We'll scrub the footage of the parking garage again—"
"We've scrubbed it twenty times." Cho snapped. "He's gone. He disappeared."
Rigsby held his tongue for a moment as the tension between them skyrocketed. Cho was wired, unwilling to take a breath, and Rigsby was only getting frustrated.
"All she ever wanted was to be safe." Cho's voice diminished to a barely more than a whisper. "We arrested her mom, she thought she was safe."
Rigsby's eyes widened at the helpless expression that suddenly flooded his sober friend's face. "She'll be safe, Cho. When this is all over, she'll be safe. And the FBI will help next week when they come to shut down all of Carla's old cases. She'll be safe."
Cho was barely listening. "She isn't safe. She's being held by a Russian mob boss, Rigsby."
"Ronnie is strong, Cho."
He leaned back in his chair, utterly defeated. She was strong. She'd been through hell and back and somehow she still managed to crack jokes and smile at all the sexist pigs who insulted her body. "Yeah," he agreed. She would come back and keep cracking those jokes, and he'd find himself in the spotlight of all of her pestering once more. "She's the strongest woman I know."
Rigsby watched him curiously. "This sorta thing kinda makes you think, though, doesn't it?"
Cho was coming back around to himself. "Huh? About what?" He took a few deep breaths and smoothed down his tousled hair.
Rigsby shrugged nonchalantly. "You know. The important things in life. The important people...in your life?"
Cho blinked, and suddenly his face was back to his ever present blank deadpan. "I guess. I'm going to County to talk to Carla again. I'll call you if I learn anything."