47 hours and 43 minutes remaining

"Let me put this simply, Director." Tony's face was unusually serious, his eyes angry. "You're going to give them the weapons, and we're going to get her back. Do you understand me?"

  Fury shifted in his seat, tilting his head slightly to consider him. "This does not concern you, Mr Stark. I suggest you leave the room."

  "Of course." Tony smiled a quick smile with no real meaning behind it. "I'll just be off to hack into your system and make this happen."

  He walked out. As soon as the door was closed, Fury leaned forward to speak into a receiver. "Put up our new defense shields on the computer system. The Stark ones."

  "Yes, sir," replied an agent's disembodied voice.

The room's other occupant had been sitting in the corner. She shook her head slowly with a slight frown. "Do you know what you've just done?"

"What do you have to add, Agent Romanoff?" Fury tilted his head again to look at her. "I get the feeling I'm missing something here. Does Stark have an emotional attachment to Agent Evans?"

Natasha met his eye, raising a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. "You honestly don't know."

  "Don't know what exactly?"

"He's crazy about her. Steve, too. It's been driving the rest of us mad, all their arguments about it, fights, et cetera." Natasha leaned back with a sigh. "Did you factor that into your calculations, Director?"

Fury considered the new information. "We can't do it. Those weapons in the wrong hands..." He paused to let that thought sink in. "We can't risk millions of lives for one."

  "And how will you explain that to Steve? To Tony? To Loki?" she challenged.

  "I was unaware I had to explain anything to any of them, particularly Loki, our prisoner."

  "He's mad about her too. There's something about her that genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropists, old-fashioned supersoldiers and psychotic, evil Asgardian princes just like."

He digested that in silence for a moment. "Romanoff, do you see any other solution to this or are you just countering me because you can? Because I would like to hear it."

Natasha stood up from the chair. "No, Fury, I don't. But good luck having the Avengers function and keeping Loki under control after this." She sauntered away, leaving Fury to make sure Stark was out of the system alone.

*

Her head was split with pain, as if it were constantly being chainsawed. Eyelids fluttered open to reveal beautiful eyes - brown, warm brown like melted chocolate - outlined by extraordinary long, but completely natural, eyelashes. Head was pulled slightly forward as she woke, making a long, high ponytail of brown hair, slightly darker than her eyes, swish slightly in the gloom.

  She had been awoken by the creak of the door, and she watched as two men and a woman walked into the room. She pulled slightly, experimentally, at her restraints - no luck. Olivia was tied tightly to the wall in a sitting position, ankles tied to the floor, wrists chained high above her, making her arms ache.

  A man spoke first, voice sharp with an impossibly slight hint of an Indian accent. "Your name is Olivia Jayne Evans. You are a spy for SHIELD. You are being held hostage for a selections of the weapons made with the power of the Tesseract."

  She blinked. "I have no idea what you're talking about." She allowed fear to creep into her voice - using her very real fear - and anger, too. "I work for Hydra, I swear! I told you at the start, I hate SHIELD!"

  "Lies." This time the woman was speaking. No noticeable accent, except the slightly robotic one common among agents specifically trained to not have one. She was almost certainly ex-SHIELD. "They have heard our terms. We know they know you."

  Olivia leaned her head back so that it hit the wall with the slightest of noises. So the game was up. There was no way the ransom would be paid. She was as good as dead.

She was never going to see Tony, Loki or Steve ever again. The thought was like being shot. They were never going to know who she'd chosen - and she might never know, either.

"They have been given their time limit." Back to the man, his features shrouded in darkness. "But while you're here, we might as well get some information out of you."

The woman again. The other man hadn't spoken a word. "We're going to take you down to the IER."

"The IER?" Olivia asked, trying to remain calm, heart thumping.

"Information Extraction Room. The torture chamber." In the blackness, she thought she could see the ghost of a smile on the Hydra woman's face.