AN: So this is technically what would have been the next chapters to my other fic titled 'Save Tonight'. I ended up making this one a stand-alone because it turns out to be much much longer than I expected. While it's not strictly necessary for you guys to read the prequel to catch the drift, it may help set the plate.

Important premise if you haven't read 'Save Tonight': this is my take on what could have happened if Sam and Jules hadn't gotten the Chief's approval to stay on the same Team. Sam takes the job overseas his father offered. This one is set months after he's gone.

I apologize for what I'm about to put our favourite sexy sniper chick through but I'm a sucker for Jules whump and I haven't written one myself yet – and I'm in a terrible mood to give her hell right now.

Despite the whump, quite a lot of Jam, especially in the later chapters – and in the first ones as in Jules reflecting on it.

Side note: I know strictly nothing about the military. I made some research but I might have gotten a million things wrong. Please bear with me.

Alright you guys ready? Cause you're in for a bumpy ride!

Reviews are love! (:

Jules tentatively opened one of her eyes but the sudden light filling her vision forced her to shut them tight again, already too much to handle for her confused mind. She felt like she was having the worst hangover, the same pounding headache, the same dizziness and the same desire to go back to sleep. Except she wasn't in her bed.

Again, she attempted to open her eyes, this time forcing herself to adjust to the brightness of the room. She couldn't tell what time it was or even where she was. What she did know was that the strain in her shoulders and her general discomfort told her something wasn't right.

She let out a long breath through her nose, trying to focus. Blinking a few times, she finally managed to get a first glimpse at her surroundings. It turned out the brightness wasn't that harsh after all, mostly dimmed and coming from the ceiling, shedding soft light in a rather large but nearly empty room with cement floors. The only other thing around her was a small folding table in the right corner, with what looked like a closed laptop on top of it. Unpainted drywall covered most of the walls but some of them were devoid of anything, leaving the beams naked, like an unfinished renovation.

Forcing her mind back to the last memory she had, it all came back to her. The bomb alert call, the team spreading out to clear the building, Spike going in the building with Babycakes, she and the witness in the command truck. And then, immense pain in her skull. She'd been knocked out from behind.

Breathing out again, this time more out of frustration, she tried moving only to find her arms were trapped above her and going nowhere. The sting around her wrists kicked in and she ventured a look up to see cuffs and chains were keeping her attached to a beam on the ceiling.

Shit.

While she refused to let panic settle in, she couldn't help but to pull at her restraints with strength – at least as much as she could muster at the moment – as if willing them to be flawed and set her free. Her heartbeat picked up a notch and she had to remind herself to breathe slowly. Freaking out would do her no good. Looking down at herself, she noticed she had been stripped off her tact vest and everything remotely useful, leaving her with her usual black tee, her grey pants and combat boots.

Footsteps made her gaze snap back ahead of her. Her eyes now open and adjusted to the light, Jules recognized the witness' tall and bulky figure walking towards her, his short hair brushed back, his hands resting in his pockets so casually it irritated her. A sly smile on his scruffy face greeted her, much different than the nervous frown he had when they had gotten on scene and he had told them about the box with a ticking noise that he found in the office building. No doubt in her mind now that it had all been a ploy.

He simply stared right at her and didn't speak. She was the one to break the silence. "Fredrick, what are you doing?" Even to her, her voice didn't sound the same. It was tired and lazy, as if aligning two words was an effort in itself. She must have suffered a blow to the head more severe than she first thought. The man chuckled softly and started pacing around, hands still in his pocket. Jules closed her eyes for a moment as a thought crossed her mind. "Fredrick isn't your name, is it?" she asked, realisation that she'd been played from the start dawning on her.

"No, it's not." An amused tone laced his words as he stopped pacing and looked straight at her again, his smile still curling his lips upward. While his voice was the same as it had been in the command truck, it sounded much colder. "Dorian Flynn."

The fact that he was straight out giving her his full name didn't make her feel any better. Somehow, it meant he didn't mind her having that knowledge, which didn't give her any kind of hope that he'd let her out easily – or at all. "Well, Dorian, care to tell me why I'm here?" Her voice was surprisingly calm and levelled. She might have been in a bad situation, she needed to remind herself he was now the subject and while she was the captive, she still needed to treat him as she would any other.

Flynn took a step forward so he was standing right in front of her and ran his index finger on her lips as if to shush her. She tried to move her head to the side to avoid his touch but with the same hand he grabbed her chin and forced her to look up at him. Jules clenched her teeth and stared at him defiantly.

"Only thing you need to know is that I will be asking the questions." On that note, he let go of her and spun around to pace again.

She didn't speak any further and waited for him to ask those said questions. She needed to cooperate, make him believe he was in control, which for the moment, he entirely was. The one thing Julianna Callaghan hated most was to be helpless and for her safety to rely on other people. Sure, among Team One they put their lives in each other's hands on a daily basis but at least it was mutual. Right now, her best shot at getting out of this was her team finding her, and she hated both not being with them and leaving them a man down to figure it all out. If only she'd read the signs, the lies and all the bullshit Flynn had told her back in the command truck, she wouldn't be in this situation.

The man stopped pacing to look at her and smiled again, obviously satisfied to see she understood she was not meant to talk unless she was asked. Oh how much Jules wanted to smack his cocky face. Getting impatient, she tried to adjust her position to soothe the strain on her shoulders and wrists, without satisfying results. He'd made them tight and unless she went on her tiptoes, she didn't have much loose to move around with, almost hanging from the ceiling by her arms.

Flynn looked up at the chains holding her for a quick moment as if enjoying their clinking sound, the telltale sign that she was efficiently restrained. When his eyes settled on her again he was more serious, ready to get down to business. "You're gonna tell me where Sam Braddock is."

"What do you mean, 'she's gone'?"

Ed's voice in the comm was rough, as if challenging their Sergeant on this piece of information he'd just given.

Greg gazed around inside of the command truck, hands on his hips, his lips creating only a thin line that betrayed his emotions. His gut was screaming at him that they'd just been played, and he hated it. "Vest, weapons, communicator, phone. It's all here, Eddie. Jules… She's gone. He took her."

There was silence in the comms for a few seconds, like the whole team froze and waited for him to carry on. But Ed was the one to break the silence. "How can you be sure?" While none of them wanted it to be, if it was true, they needed to start moving fast.

"Blood on the edge of the chair. Keyboard flew to the ground and broke. Looks like she might have been hit from behind unexpectedly." Greg took his cap off and rubbed his head with his other hand before putting it back on. "Spike I need you in here right now."

"On my way boss."

They'd been called on scene for a bomb threat. A witness had seen someone leave a cardboard box by the elevators of an office building in the financial district downtown. The local unis had started evacuating the building but it turned out there were a lot more people in there for them alone to handle. When Team One had gotten there, Spike and Raf had made it straight to the package with Babycakes while Greg, Ed and Leah had helped clear the building and the perimeter, also searching for whoever might have looked out of place, who could have planted that box and was looking at his work from the outside.

Jules had been with the witness in the command truck, trying to get more information out of him, see if he'd seen anything else out of place, if he noticed someone in particular leave the scene, something unusual. Little did they know at the time that he had put it there himself.

The bomb didn't turn out a big one, and it hadn't been too hard to diffuse. No timer, no trigger point. Spike had done it rather easily, in fact far too easily. It had been obvious to the team at that moment that the bomb had only meant to be a scare. Or a distraction…

As Spike moved into the command truck, he paused as he looked around at the scene. To the untrained eye, nothing would seem much out of place. For him who spent a lot of time in this truck, he could see something was awfully wrong.

Greg regarded him as he walked in. "Get me everything you can on that witness. Search his name, check the cameras, run facial recognition... Anything you can get."

Spike simply nodded and took his place on the chair next to the one Jules had been forced to vacate… how long ago? The team had been clearing the building of people and in there for a while to diffuse that bomb. Why hadn't they realized Jules wasn't with them in their ears anymore? With the thickness of the crowd in the area, taking her out probably hadn't been too hard. Especially out of most of her gear, she probably just looked like a woman who had fainted if he carried her in his arms.

Suddenly, Spike felt anger rising inside of him. While he knew Jules could take care of herself as well if not better than all men in this team, the idea of her being manhandled and taken against her will bothered him a lot more than he would let on.

Before Sam had left, he had made Spike promise that he would keep an eye on Jules for him, of course without her ever knowing about it. It wasn't that Sam didn't trust her to be careful and stay safe, he knew her well enough to know that she could deal with pretty much anything. But that was exactly the point. He knew her. Meaning he knew the lengths of what she could do to put her life on the line for others, put up a wall and act strong to hide her deeper emotions and worries. Sam had learned over the years, and especially in the last, to see right through it and with a single gaze, could tell everything that was going on in her mind. With that, he managed to support her, even in the littlest things, when the job got tough or when something got to her. But now that he was away, he had felt the need to pass that job onto someone else because he couldn't do it himself anymore.

And now the demolition expert felt like he had failed his friend. Both of his friends.

"Spike?" Greg questioned at the younger man's hesitation, looking at him sideways.

"On it boss," he replied and pushed those thoughts away to start typing on his keyboard, looking for the answers that would help them find Jules. Where he had failed to protect her before, he could now do the next best thing and find the piece of intel they needed to get her back safely.

It took only a second for him to search the witness' name and when the few 'Fredrick Miller' faces from the Toronto area came up on the screen, none of them looked remotely like the witness Jules had been with. "Gave us a fake name," Spike announced, unsurprised. If this had been a ploy to abduct one of their own all along, giving himself a fake identity would be the easy thing to slow down their search. "I'll get started on facial recognition," he then announced as he scanned the cameras for the best possible image of him. His voice was trying to sound detached but to anyone who knew him, they would sense an edge to it that betrayed his worry.

"Let me know as soon as you get something," Greg instructed, even though it went without saying. On that note, the Sergeant moved out of the command truck to let Spike work and closed the door behind him just as Ed joined his side.

"What do you think?" the Team Leader questioned.

Greg took a long breath and shook his head slightly, trying to think objectively about this and act as if it was just another job. "Could be against the SRU, the man could have taken any of us in that case. Or maybe she discovered something about him that she shouldn't have." However, it seemed like that option was the least plausible. She wouldn't have turned her comm off and such information would have been on the transcript.

Both men looked at each other for a moment, as if neither wanted to voice the option that this might have been personal, that the whole bomb threat had merely been a way to get her. While none of them specifically knew about anyone who would hold a grudge against Jules, they were well aware that it only took a spark to ignite wrath in certain individuals. As law enforcement officers, they'd pissed off more people than they could ever count, the list of possible cases which could have started all this was endless. It wouldn't be the first time family members of subjects they either arrested or were forced to kill were out to get one of them.

"Maybe he needs her to get to someone else," Greg voiced unwillingly, hoping with all his might that he was wrong.

Ed seemed to catch his drift. "You think it might have something to do with Sam." It was a statement more than a question.

"I don't know, Eddie. But it's a possibility we can't overlook. We'll know more when we get his name."

On cue, Spike's voice came through their earpieces. "Boss, I checked the cameras around the truck but none of them are in position to show the door. He took Jules through a blind spot. I have an ID from an earlier camera recording, though. Dorian Flynn. 38. He was in the military until earlier this year. Specials Operations Regiment. Took a retirement package because he'd been on the forces for 20 years."

Greg and Ed shared a look as if suddenly their last hypothesis made all the more sense. "Go on, Spike," the Sergeant pushed. They needed all the information they could get.

"There isn't much else. No criminal record, noting of note during his tours. I have no phone number on file, but I got his address."

"Alright team, let's move!" Ed urged as he darted for one of the SUVs himself, initiating the motion. "Spike, I need you with us." They were a man down and they didn't know what they would end up finding there. Besides, Winnie was there to back them up with intel for anything he couldn't do on the way there. "Raf, Leah," Ed added.

A series of 'copy that's were exchanged in the comms as the entire team converged towards the SUVs. Spike made sure to send the address to all of their PDAs before moving out of the truck and running to one of the vehicles, laptop in hand. He was about to open the back door to take place with Greg and Ed when his hands full caused him to drop his own PDA. Cursing under his breath as it bounced just under the SUV, he crouched down to pick it up, hoping it wasn't broken. He had to put most of what he held on the ground and actually look under the vehicle to finally see the device. Reaching out for it, however, something else caught his attention. His face dropped.

"Guys, hold on."