TRIGGER WARNING FOR INTENSE AND GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF TORTURE, BLOOD, GORE, AND OTHER GENERAL MEDIA.

The clanging sound woke Lu from a deep sleep, ringing inside her head like an old-fashioned alarm clock. She blinked in the dim light, unable to swallow because her throat was so dry. Where was she? The last thing Lu remembered was the check engine light coming on in her car, the sputtering sound as her beat-up old Ford truck died a painful death on the side of the highway... and now she was laying on a barn floor strewn with straw, hands and feet painfully bound with rope. The clanging sound came again and she recognized it as someone striking something metal with a hammer. Her heart began beating in her chest as she heard someone toss the hammer to the ground and approach the closed barn doors. They swung open and Lu blinked as sunlight poured in, momentarily blinding her. Her captor entered.

“No one can hear you here.”

That voice honest to God sounded so familiar. Lu blinked a few times, staring at the captor. Skinny — they were skinny enough that she could maybe overtake them. She didn’t have her gun though, nor her badge — but! Her earpiece, connecting her to the team was still there. They hadn’t found that on her, so it was still live and active. She sat up, finally getting a good solid look at the person — well. No. Persons.

First, a man her friend Alex vaguely resembled. He hadn’t been the one to speak, she could tell. The man beside him had been, and that’s when she recognized the voice — she’d heard that voice while Kaden was on the phone, yelling at Kaden about ‘breaking cover’. She didn’t know who he was, but she recognized she’d heard that voice before. She stared up at the men, and the one resembling Alex began to speak in a heavy Polish accent.

“You know where you are? Do you know who vee are?” Lu just shook her head at that question, eyes closing. She could hear her wire buzzing in her ear. The man with the voice of earlier knelt to her level, grabbing her face and examining her. Seemed he still didn’t know about her active wire connecting her to her team.

“You know Kaden Walsh and Alexander Cromney?” The kneeling man asked, eyes meeting Lu’s. She didn’t answer, which was a mistake. “Well, if you won’t tell us anything, let’s just see how much you can take.”

Lu’s body was moved into a chair, wrists and ankles still completely bound. The Polish man lifted her feet and propped them on something similar to a table, while the man with the voice produced a piece of wood similar in shape to a bat. While they handled moving her, her wire kicked in with familiar voices that were such a relief to hear. It was her team talking in hushed voices, they could hear each other. Lu watched the Polish man finish up moving her feet, setting up a camera they knew the tech analyst back at headquarters would hack into to watch what was happening to Lu. As they waited, they paced around the New Orleans native.

The team, of course, had gotten hacked into the camera, watching anxiously. Aaron was destroying his nail beds the way he was biting his nails, Alex looked as though he was about to throw up from shock and recognition, Kaden seemed to stop breathing. They’d been looking for two unsubs, profiling them as an unlikely duo — and unfortunately, they’d been completely right. Alex stared at his father he saw on the screen, Kaden’s eyes locked on the man he was being a double agent for. A big-time mobster and a leader of a domestic terrorist organization. Those were the two men holding Lu captive in some obscure place, it looked to be a barn. They watched Alex’s father, the Polish man, turn the camera to Lu once they knew that the FBI was watching. Lu was one of the toughest agents that they had, she’d handled so much as an SSA. Though, at what came next, Alex had to throw up in a trashcan.

The bat-like weapon connected to the soles of Lu’s feet, striking her and earning a pained grunt. This was falanga. She wasn’t going to scream — they weren’t going to get that out of her. She’d taken worse than this before — she’d even been stabbed before. And though it was not good, being beaten as a child built her a pain tolerance. They couldn’t break her, not yet — but she could definitely break her captors. Lu breathed heavy, body jerking and her wincing at each strike. Her tongue was even bleeding from how hard she was biting it, but not a peep was coming out from her. The biracial woman’s head now hung, blocking her captor’s view of her face. However, her eyes were up to study her captors without alerting them. Pain seared through her feet like lightning, and the rough rope at her wrists and ankles practically tore her skin. As the hitting of the soles of her feet ceased, crushed glass was quickly pushed into her feet to keep her subdued, blood pouring. She managed to only gasp, and raised her head and breathed heavy as she studied the men.

“Ona znosi tę torturę lepiej, niż się spodziewałam.” She’s taking this torture better than I expected. Lu could guess the gist of the Polish man’s words, she’d picked up some Polish from Alex. She watched him turn and walk to grab something. She noticed how he ever so slightly seemed to limp — a previous injury near his knee. If she could free herself out of her restraints, she could hit him there, thus putting her at an advantage. As the man turned around, she saw a hammer in his hand. It had to be the one she had heard earlier. The other man watched Lu carefully, determined to get some words out of her and distress her team as well.

The team watched Kaden’s leader produce a staple gun. Stomachs were turning, Aaron and David desperately talking to Lu through her wire. The man, however, just set down the tool instead to Lu’s obvious confusion. Nothing seemed to happen, just Lu and her captor’s eyes meeting. Then, the man spoke.

“You’re a threat to us. Not your team, just you. You’re jeopardizing our organizations.” Words were sharp, straight to the point. “Our two boys were just fine, until they met you. So what is it about you they find so special?” Her head had been hanging again, so the man yanked it back by her dark colored hair. Sweat was pouring down Lu’s forehead and cheeks from the earlier beating to her feet. Plus, the barn was stuffy and sweltering.

Her pride got the best of her, harsh words falling off her tongue. “Okay? If your organizations can fall to one person who doesn’t even have her gun on her and you have to go through this much trouble to capture me . . . what does that say about you?” Her process was starting. Talking and keeping them distracted prevented being killed, and would possibly hold off some more torture. Lu’s whole job was bending people subconsciously, figure them out piece by piece. The comment caught both her captors off guard, invoking some sort of rage in both. All Lu had to do was keep a level head. She looked between the men, the Polish man angrily grabbing and shaking her until his partner yanked him away.

“Gonna kill me now?” Lu asked softly, but it was in a challenging tone. “Or are you going to take your time with me? I bet you’d like that, your kind usually does. Considering the array of tools that are used to poke or stab in this barn, my guess is maybe you’re impotent, at least one of you is. Sometimes serial killers replace sexual penetration with stabbing or things similar. Will stabbing me or torturing me get you off?” Lula was buying herself time. She could take more torture, but she needed to keep them from killing her. “Is that why you went through all this? Typically if you go through all this trouble to capture and torture me, there’s more to this than just me standing in your ways.” Lu uttered, cracking down on their egos now. “You out of your mind? Guess that makes all three of us.” Cue a small laugh, which unnerved her teammates watching and hearing her. A smile twitched at the kidnapped agent’s mouth.

The Polish man swallowed thickly, slowly crossing his arms at the disturbing actions of his captee. Lu immediately caught the change, snarking out a “what’re you, scared of me?”. She was becoming more aggressive in her approach, watching them pick up a tool — a type of poker or a brander. Alex’s father sneered, starting a small fire to heat up the weapon. The Polish man stuck the poker into the fire to get hot, and as he waited, Kaden’s boss delivered a few punches to the agent’s face which finally earned a few whimpers. Blood began to spill down Lula’s nose, lip busted.

“I can take it, I can take it.” She whispered to the camera, breathing getting erratic. She was losing time. Bruises formed over her eye and face, blood pouring as she watching them now bring the red hot branding iron to her. She braced herself, letting out a yell as the white-hot metal touched the flesh of her stomach. Hot and salty tears immediately streaked down her face, she felt asphyxiated from her sheer panic and fear. Her jaw clenched so hard she nearly broke it, pain still searing through her abdomen even as the branding iron was pulled away. All that was left was raised and reddened skin severely burned in the shape of a circle with a dot inside. The smell of her own burning flesh was enough to make bile rise in Lu’s throat, resulting in her throwing up on her clothes. Kaden’s boss only bothered to splash chilled water on the fresh wound, dropping her now filthy shirt.

The agent was shaking by this point, she couldn’t let herself break. Her whole team was watching her, with their tech analyst finally managing to pinpoint a general location. They just had to find this barn, already dispatching help to the general area. Lu looked around, fumbling with her restraints while they were distracted. She messed with the rope, pulling it again as her hands were in front of her. She was willing to dislocate her thumb, shimmying her hands in the rope to loosen it so it’d move from her wrist. Lu reached around her, watching her captors exit briefly to scan the fields around the barn.

This was her chance. She stood despite the throbbing pain of glass in her feet, hopping to the array of tools to free herself. Lu turned a knife with her hand, sawing it against the rope bounding her wrists. Cut rope now fell, freeing her all except her ankles. She snatched the saw, going at her ankle restraints as she heard the whir of sirens and her team, knowing her captors were now alerted and rushing back. She limped over, grabbing a crowbar and cars surrounded the barn and trapped her and her captors in the area.

The men rushed back inside, shocked to see the agent free and armed despite her injuries. The Polish mobster ran to her, met immediately with a crowbar to the face. She heard his skull crack and watched him fall, hearing the FBI pounding on the doors of the barn. That left the other man, Kaden’s secret boss. The bar doors flung open, and gunshots rang. Lu fell to her knees for protection. Hearts thumped as eventually fire ceased, her team rushing in and grabbing the injured agent, Aaron screaming for somebody to call for an ambulance so they could prevent infection. Lu’s adrenaline rush was dying away, she felt sick again and began to vomit once more.

The world began to spin, the pain of injuries too glaringly obvious to the agent now. Her vision blurred as the adrenaline left, no longer saving her from pain.

It knocked her out, and her fate was officially up for grabs as she was rushed in an ambulance. Doctors said she’d survive, but something this traumatic would leave more than physical wounds. The team debated what to do, pondered. A member was kidnapped, almost killed, she was tortured. It felt like a sitting duck situation.

They’d let her decide for herself when she woke up.