Mary had grown up a hunter but she'd never really been hurt, at least not the way she could guess John had been from the scars that had appeared along with the years (blink and your husband is twenty years older than you, she'd thought half bitter and half awed at the chance to think it at all, blink and there's skin puckering on his side and a line on his calf) not the way she tried not to think about Sam and Dean being hurt. She'd always hunted under her parents' watchful eyes, had been expertly trained by someone who had generations of experience behind them. There had been no trial and error, she'd been given hunts that matched her skill level and, for a hunter, she'd emerged relatively unscathed until the night of her death. That meant broken bones and sprains, pulled muscles, abrasions, and shallow cuts as opposed to guts hanging out, massive blood loss, the loss of a limb, a crippling injury. Still, she'd been confident of her ability to stand up to pain and fear and hopelessness, had thought her former life would inoculate her against panic like the weak strains of a vaccine against disease.
She'd been partially right: she hadn't lost herself in the past few days. She hadn't stopped looking for a way out, hadn't given in or begged, hadn't forgotten her husband or children, her worry for them, just because she was being hurt. But she would never again be so blithely confident, so stupid, as to say 'I'm not hurt' if she couldn't see blood. She'd learned that the anticipation of pain was almost (but not quite) as bad as the moments when Azazel would come back and she'd feel a crushing in her chest or a sawing on her nerves, senseless and terrible, until (for those few moments) she'd forgotten everything but that pain. If, while it was happening, you'd asked her name, the names of her children, in that moment she couldn't have said, everything about herself lost in what was happening in the nerves and other more subtle intricacies of her body. That was far more terrifying than an injury after all, a leg could be severed, a bone broken, but you were still whole, still yourself. The kind of sanitized,bloodless pain Azazel was using was different, it went after your mind and that was what it would eventually break.
Aside from some minor bruises and contusions she wasn't outwardly injured. She'd done most of the damage to her hands herself actually, yanking the bed apart to make a weapon, hacking at the walls with the springs from the mattress. It hadn't done any good of course, Azazel had knocked aside the slat she'd wielded like a club and the walls had stood up ably to the springs. Still, she knew if she hadn't at least tried, if she didn't keep trying, she would give in after all.
So when the ax-blows on the wall began she dragged herself to her feet, pushing off against the wall opposite to where the strikes were coming from and steadied herself. Have to face it standing, she thought, curling her hands into fists. Then, slowly, it occurred to her that Azazel had no reason to hack at the walls (unless he was playing a game wanting her to think she was being rescued only to pull the rug out from under her, but if that was it, it wasn't as if there was anything she could do about it anyway...) and that she could hear noises of exertion as the wood began to crumble in front of her.
She took a careful step forward and, making her voice steady out of sheer force of will, called out “Who's there?”