Clara Lille

Clara knows she should have seen it coming. She had every intention of leaving one last bouquet on Lena's grave and then going to one of her safehouses to lay low until things calmed down and she could get her message to Aiden. After that, either he would agree to talk to her - or he wouldn't, and she would make her way out of Chicago to start over somewhere else.

The only reason she hadn't immediately left the city was that she had to hope that maybe, maybe, he would at least agree to talk to her, to let her apologize. She knows she doesn't deserve for him to accept the apology, and she's not expecting him to, but she just wants to try.

She's distracted thinking about Aiden and about Lena - and she doesn't see it coming when she feels an abrupt sting in the side of her neck. The flowers fall from her hand as she slaps her other hand to the side of her neck, knocking away the dart. She fumbles for her gun - but there are footsteps approaching, and her vision is going blurry, and even when she does pull the gun free, it falls from fingers already going numb as hands grab hers, pulling them behind her back and sliding metal cuffs around her wrists.

Darkness creeps in on the edges of her vision, and she just has time to pull away from the fingers that pinch her jaw. "Oh, he's gonna love us, getting you all wrapped up like a present for him," a blurry figure says - and then everything goes dark.

--

When she comes back to some sort of consciousness, she's aware enough to know she's seated in a chair. It's not comfortable: something is holding her wrists behind her back, something pinning her ankles in place, something tight around her face and in her mouth that she would really like removed, if she could ask someone to do it. The room she's in is quiet and dark, and there's a bench of tools to the side that should maybe be frightening if she could remember what any of them were for. Some part of her brain knows she should be afraid, but she just feels detached from herself.

Drugged that deep part of her brain whispers - but, well, that's fine. She's fine, right? Everything is fine.

It's dark when she steps into the room. She can hear breathing, muffled though it is, and she turns on the light, smiling to herself behind her mask. The man in the chair is facing her, ropes around his ankles securing him to the chair, his hands pulled behind him. There's a bag over his head - she knows he was unconscious when they brought him here, but considering who they're dealing with, it seemed better to err on the side of caution.

Without his ever present coat, he seems smaller, somehow, and she moves past him to the table where the coat lays draped next to his phone and wallet. She sets her backpack down and picks up the phone, making sure it's turned off; they wouldn't want someone tracking him, after all, or him manage to record all this somehow. Then, she picks up the wallet, flipping it open to his license. Again, she smiles, glad for the confirmation that they do have the right person.

It wouldn't be the first time someone got it wrong, after all.

She feels like it's kind of a miracle that they got it right this time. He's been so very hard to track down despite all the noise and trouble he's been making for them - but then, tonight, they had set him up - and he had walked right into their little trap.

Or right by it, anyway, considering they had grabbed him from the back of a truck.

She sets the wallet aside and moves back in front of him, reaching out to pull the bag off his head. She's not worried about him seeing her, considering the mask she favors, or the baggy, black, nondescript clothing she's wearing to cover up her figure and myriad of tattoos.

And besides. She wants to see his face as they go through this.