"This isn't even an estate, Red," Lizzy said, by way of greeting, when he opened the door. "For all intents, it's a separate country, five miles from D.C. Whoever you're borrowing from should put in a gas station on the grounds."

She was a bundled figure in the dark, fresh from her marathon debriefing, stepping in to shed her layers. He drank in the sight of her for a moment, bruised but alive, before closing the door. Her words were a nice offer of normalcy, and for that beat, as he came round behind to tug the coat off her shoulders, he took it.

"Another day I'll give you a tour. I admit they're showy, but they have redeeming features."

Her coat in his hands, they looked at each other for a long, wordless moment, in the oak-paneled, high-ceilinged grace of the foyer. Forty hours and fifteen hundred miles from the last set of walls they'd ever expected to see. After days flushed with false health, her face had now taken on the slightly pale, matter-of-fact look of a person too tired for anything but truth.

Well. Here we are.

Lizzy pulled it together first and cut the Gordian knot admirably, saying, "Look, can I just –" and then stretching up on tiptoes in her boots, bringing her face near his. Red dipped his head without thinking to come the rest of the way, the easiest thing in the world, and gathered her in against him, her coat still dangling from one hand. One long kiss, then two shorter ones, exactly like a drink of cold water; reassurance without specificity.

Forty hours ago, he'd dropped a man to the ground and crushed his trachea with a forearm, bringing his weight to bear while the fanatic gagged and scrabbled beneath him. It had taken nearly a minute, while Lizzy brought the next one down for him; Quantico didn't teach many kill moves. But it had kept the noise to a minimum and gotten them out with unbloodied stolen vestments. If she thought a kiss might help them with those memories, it was a far healthier idea than opium.

They pulled back, of one mind for that moment, and stood forehead to forehead, leaning on each other.

His lip quirked. "Better?"

She nodded against him, and let out a long breath. Ever practical, she used the position to steady herself against him as she kicked her boots off. "Yeah. You?"

"Yeah." He sighed. "Hungry?"

Lizzy pulled back enough to see his face. "What's the least complicated food you have in this country?"

Deadpan, Red answered, "Dried biscuits." She shuddered and narrowed her eyes, and he allowed himself a smile. "Too soon?"

He released her and stepped back, hung the coat on the rack, and padded toward the sleek steel and marble brightness of the kitchen. There was half a chicken kiev in the fridge. "How," he called back over his shoulder, "was debriefing?"

It was an awkward alliance which had finally found them after another day of dodging cultists on the island, one formed with only the hope of recovering remains and evidence. Dembe had located them, and the Bureau had cobbled transport together. On the way back, grinding along in a borrowed Jayhawk chopper cadged off the Coast Guard, with Homeland Security sitting on either side of him, Red had thoroughly wished it were the other way around.

Lizzy followed, shedding her gloves and hat on the counter, pulling her scarf loose. "Kid gloves for me. The ends justified a lot of means. You?"

He shook his head from inside the fridge, fishing out the catering box and starting it in the microwave. Lizzy's patience for food preparation didn't extend to reheating by oven.

"For once, your task force's cartoonish lack of internal discipline fails to amuse me. There should at least have been one of those firm lectures Harold hands out in place of richly deserved suspensions." In his own debriefing by Homeland in the Box – perfectly courteous and voluntary, so long as he kept talking – it had been clear he was suspected of inciting Agent Keen into her week of going rogue.

Lizzy made a rude noise behind him; he turned and felt the ghost of a smile tug at his lips. "Perhaps if I made it clear I never gave you any intel, and disavowed your actions."

He filled a glass from the tap and handed it to her. She closed the distance in a couple of steps and took it, her other hand at her side, looking steadily at him. "All of them?"

Well, there it was. Three words, but they covered the distance from challenging to vulnerable, admirably.

Red turned back to the counter, his back to her. He bowed his head, and his eyes traced the gray veins in the snowy Calacatta marble. The possible responses branched out before him, some towards a fight, some towards a far worse silence, a precious dangerous few towards a repeat performance of that night. With space and leisure this time, and oh, there were a few things he was confident now they'd both like, if there were only a chance to try. He shook his head and put a firm stop to that line of thought.

But the least her openness deserved was the same. "For the past ten years, there have been six memories I've used to…remind me of my purposes, or keep me from losing my way. Occasionally, to resist interrogation." He turned back to her, unsure what the mix of long habits of control and the conscious choice to be open now showed on his face. "I believe there are now seven."

Lizzy gave him a brief, heart-lightening smile, warming him in the blue-gray chop of her eyes. "Respect." She half-lifted her glass of water in salute. "That was very smooth."

Red laughed a bit, and then coughed as his sore lungs resented it, but he could feel what seemed to creep in under the words. If he was right, well, having worked diligently to include dissipation among the jewels in his reputation, he couldn't fault her. She might have long ago stopped doubting his platonic devotion, but she had moved herself into different waters now, and wasn't sure of what would happen if they mixed. He might have reassured her on that count – Lizzy, I was happily married, the last time I chose freely who to be - but decided against it, as both presumptuous and irrelevant.

Remembering, he fished in his pocket. He pulled out a pill in a blister seal and handed it over. Lizzy took it in her free hand, puzzled for a moment, and then not puzzled.

"I wasn't sure of your timing, whether there was any risk. If there is, I believe you have…" - he checked his watch – "another twenty hours to decide whether to take it. Sooner is always more certain."

He lost track of what flashed across her face: surprise, recognition, contemplation. Then something like amusement: after everything, wouldn't that be exactly how I'd wind up starting a family? Aloud, she finally said, "You'd think that would have occurred to me." She held them a moment longer, glanced at the water glass in her other hand, then filed them away in her pocket.

Red had killed four men in front of her the day before with his hands, counting the one that really owed more to his legs. He and she both knew it was that or themselves, and he regretted those deaths less than most; he had no patience for those who channeled the universal angst and restlessness of youth into violence organized by dogma, as if they were the first in history to think of it. But he'd never had to kill that way under her eyes before. Now, in the kitchen, as much as he wished she'd take care of things right away, part of him would be grateful to her forever for not downing the pill in front of him that moment, with visible, unhesitating relief.

Having successfully ruined the moment, he pulled out the chicken Kiev, fished a fork from the drawer, and handed it over. "Eat. Fresh, it was a revelation. Reheated, it will halfway repair the mood." She took it with a fresh smile, ghosts banished momentarily by hunger, and they retreated to the dining room.

Lizzy had never become comfortable in the opulence of the places he encamped and did business in; she tended to pick out a single human-scaled room in each to spend her time in. But tonight, digging in, she clearly felt the outsized teak table, chandelier and even frieze moldings were welcome to do their worst.

In her hearty attack on the chicken he saw, couldn't unsee, the way she'd moved that night in the cell. Not during but after, stretching herself out in matter-of-fact momentary happiness, despite everything, as they came down.

He sat across from her as she wolfed it down. Then, he caught himself, out of habit, rising again to pour them both a glass of wine – it was almost tragic to see the chicken go without it – but it didn't seem the thing to add to the mix just then.

Somewhere, Dembe was recovering control over the last-resort accounts the death protocols had left open in case of the impossible. Less than half of a percent of his prior holdings. Enough to live well, far longer than he was likely to live; not enough to move the world the way he'd planned. It was disorienting, heartbreaking, and oddly light, all at once.

Lizzy wasn't too absorbed in the food to read his mind, with her intermittent uncanny penetration. "What did your protocols do? Will you be all right?"

He looked back at her and nodded. "As will you. There's more than enough to continue your detail."

The look she gave him spoke eloquent volumes about her opinion of security details, his priorities in general, and the change of subject. He raised his hands in half-surrender. "There's always another way. Most of my assets were never financial. I'll need to shift some of my time around, though. The Task Force has enough intel now to work with for a while anyway."

She thought about that for a few moments, the rest of the Blacklist that his death protocols had released to Cooper in one go, while she mopped up the last bits of stuffing with the remaining shreds of breading. He saw the wheels turning, was briefly irritated with himself for saying even what he had, and then recognized that as ridiculous. The obvious truths weren't his to control; she would have figured it out, or he'd have had to tell her, shortly anyway.

Lizzy dropped her fork. "You're going to be outed."

His expression went reflexively into neutral. She picked up steam.

"Another few hundred high-value criminals brought down, or anyway targeted, but this time all within a few months - forget the task force; they'll create a full division – all using information you were privy to. No one could not connect that many dots. All those roads lead to you." She pushed her plate aside.

Red took a breath. His habit was to project calm and control; any number of delightful non sequiturs were at the ready. But Lizzy knew how to brush those off like dust now in turn, even if she usually humored him enough not to. And he was tired, and he couldn't remember what the point was anyway.

He made a quick mental note to delay starting the underground rumors about his survival by a couple of days. That way, when they hit fever pitch in a week, he'd be back in peak form for a proper cheerfully sinister return.

"'An extra four years', someone told me recently," he said finally. "Every day from now on is our bonus round now."

She waved that aside even quicker than expected, and dug for her phone. "I'll call Cooper. He won't have passed any of your intel on till he's reviewed it. He can't be finished. We can space them out. Use the same order you were planning on."

Red half-stood, reached across that massive table and caught her wrist. Might as well cover the rest at this point. "Lizzy. Harold Cooper may have ended his career today by letting me leave the Post Office once Homeland was gone. Let him be."

She looked at him impatiently, uncomprehending, reaching for the phone with her other hand. Then it hit her.

"Your immunity deal. It's worthless now." Essentially true; it was valid on paper, but the incentive for any agency to honor instead of disappearing him was gone. She stood slowly, her eyes wrecked. "Holy hell, Red. What are you still doing here? Where's your jet?"

"Standing by." It came out oddly thick; even this small plan for the evening was falling apart. He'd hoped this could wait at least till she finished eating.

She abandoned her plate and paced a little half-circle round the room. "Wait. Wait. The List was your little curated masterpiece, all the people you wanted to take down the most. It was never everything you had. You could draw up Volume Two overnight and make the same deal again."

It was silly, but despite everything, he couldn't help enjoying the views. The gears turning as she talked through it, and her well-loved form as she circled the room. He wanted to let her go on, to watch and memorize a few moments more, but it seemed selfish. "There are a few more prizes I'm willing to sell out. But I need them for other buyers. For some specific favors."

Lizzy paced herself out of the dining room altogether and wandered into the lower-ceilinged den. It was no doubt the room she would have adopted here if he were staying longer, in deliberate ignorance of the value of the silk Isfahan rug under her socks. He followed her into the jewel-colored stained-glass lamplight.

"You're going to have a half-dozen government agencies and the most truly evil players in your underworld after you, all at the same time."

He grinned. "Just those, and you're worried? I'm insulted. Once, in Juba -"

She looked at him in exasperation. "I wouldn't be if you were making the smallest effort to get a head start."

Red couldn't let that pass. He raised an eyebrow, reclining back on the buttery leather of the couch. "You'd have been pleased if I'd said goodbye from a burner phone, a mile above an unspecified ocean?"

He had her there, and from the way her lip quirked, she knew it. "All right. Furious. But not worried."

He laughed, the ache inside his chest familiar now. Now that he thought of it, he should do more or less that – untraceable goodbye calls, but flavored with contempt – to Homeland and the couple of agencies with overseas bureaus that had showed up to his debriefing. It would make it personal, get them interested enough in his trail to show up quickly later if he needed to create a diversion.

But something she'd said a moment before was still catching at him. "'Most truly evil?' Have you decided you've deduced the organizing principle of the List?" He stretched out his arm over the seatback while she prowled the middle of the room. "Because that's not it."

Then he realized he'd misjudged; there was a flicker on her face of something else, a pain rawer and somehow other than even the fear for his safety.

"Lizzy. What is it?"

She looked at him for a long moment, hands at her sides, more uncertain than angry. Right or wrong, Lizzy was rarely uncertain. Finally she said, "It can wait. What do you need now?"

He laughed once, in surprise more than amusement; she also rarely waited to speak her mind. "I need you not to be burdened with the details of a fugitive's itinerary." The look on her face had him reconsidering the advisability of wine, but he forged ahead. "There's no danger right now. What I need is for you to come and sit, and tell me how things went today. Or how Hudson whimpered in delight when you came for him. Or what you had for lunch."

The last half of that almost surprised him; under the light words, it had taken a hard turn towards the maudlin.

Lizzy had caught it too. "Jesus, Red. Or maybe give you another epitaph? What's happening here?"

He twitched. "I liked the one you gave me already. The original quote, you know -"

"- That was wishes talking. No. It was hope."

Whatever had flashed out from her for a moment before was clearly lifting its head again, but he was still lost. "What?"

Lizzy hugged her arms to her chest, looking inward. Watching her face in the shadows of her dark hair falling forward of it, he was reminded of a boat in a cross sea, tumbled between two perpendicular sets of waves. He was increasingly certain that he was in on only one of two conversations taking place here tonight.

That was a shame; he'd been braced for the one about what had happened between them, at once dreading and hoping to speak of it.

She did come and sit then, with a foot of space between them. But only, apparently, to redirect her energy from standing to whatever was going on in her head. Finally, with a sort of deliberate simplicity, coming back to the concrete, she said, "How long will you stay?"

He supposed he should match it. "Just tonight."

Lizzy swallowed, easily readable at that moment: misery.

They had spent too many years circling each other warily, each trying not to reveal how much the other could affect them; they had worked too hard to move past it to go back there now.

"Come with me, Lizzy. For a week or so; I don't mean leave your life here. And I don't mean because of what happened. But it doesn't have to be like this. You could use, we could both use, time to get our feet back under us. It could be easier to do it side by side. After that…there's world enough, and time, as Elliot would say. It will be all right."

He was aware he was nearly babbling by the end. Almost nonsensical, not for lack of meaning, but for excess. It would have been a much simpler suggestion before two days ago, and he meant it simply still, but there was no taking that night back.

As he'd hoped, some of the tension went out of her as he spoke, whatever part had been the old fear that he could in fact leave without a backward glance. It was at once touching, selfishly gratifying, and a bitter reminder that he had played his public role all too well, if she could still believe that enough for it to show.

But for all that, Red could only half hope she'd agree. The offer hadn't been impulsive; he'd planned to make it tonight regardless of her state of mind, if only to give her the power of refusal. Among a suite of bad options, it was less unhealthy than disappearing completely just now, and selfishly, he was finding himself even hungrier for her company than usual. But a week back on the lam together, both their defenses in ruins, her facing an apparent choice between him and the FBI with the playing field tilted toward him in every possible way – it wasn't a formula for a free decision, or one she could live for years with.

A few months ago he would have suggested it without qualms, secure she knew her final place and it was the Bureau. But the past few days and tonight's conversation were creating doubt, despite his efforts to dismiss it as presumptuous. And that possibility, though almost painfully sweet to think of – he had intended to earn her trust, but never her loyalty – was as dangerous as any of the cold-eyed snipers he'd come to turn aside from her. He had seen good people torn between attachment and conscience; it was one of the few tools of persuasion he had never been cold enough to use.

If it came to that in the next week, he'd have to send her back, or at least leave her. She'd call him arrogant and inscrutable again, and their last memory for a while would be shouting at each other in an empty mansion on another continent.

Red became aware Lizzy was gazing at him, eyes narrowed, clearly wishing she had another airtight prison cell on hand to loosen his mouth again. He wasn't, he realized, thinking as quickly as usual. Perhaps Dembe should handle their tactics for the new few days; it would fit with delaying the rumors of his survival anyway. Unless the real problem was that he didn't think as quickly as he used to any more.

But then, it was her turn to answer.

"Ok," she said finally. "I mean, maybe. But there's another conversation we need to have first. I need."

Red gave up once and for all on the idea of getting through the evening unlubricated. He rose and poured them each a glass of white from the wet bar. It was a 2013 Château Smith-Haut-Lafitte, and as always, Lizzy started in with a goal-oriented indifference that half amused and half pained him.

He was ready again for her to speak of the night before, or the secrets he'd offered to share when they'd had a life expectancy counted in hours. So of course she rose again, stood over him as if he were back in the Box being interrogated, and said instead, "You're not running from Homeland. You're not running at all. You're trying to finish what you started."

That was an unwelcome new direction. He raised his eyebrows, noncommittal, and said nothing. But the threads that had risen to the surface a few times that night were gathering here; there was more than her usual intensity looking back at him now. This was important to her in a way he didn't yet grasp.

Lizzy seemed to reach a decision. "I need a favor. You'll hate it. But you're flexible. Be a little flexible now, and consider it, all right? You know you like it when people owe you favors."

Red braced himself and nodded.

She seemed to gather herself, like a diver on a board, for something small but irrevocable. She sat back down. "Tell me your endgame."

His heart sank; he folded his arms behind his head to cover for it. "'Flexible'? I like that. Lizzy, you know it doesn't work that way. You can't have thought that…any recent developments changed that."

There was a momentary flicker of amusement in her eyes. "They might have, with a normal human. But I'm not playing that card. I'm going to tell you why you want to tell me."

If he might not see her again for months, at least there could be worse memories to tide him over than Lizzy using his own negotiation tactics against him. "Please do."

She leaned forward, half-twisted toward him, meeting his eyes. "You need an ally here more than ever. We both know you never do anything for just one reason. One reason you came to the FBI four years ago was to access some resources, some pull that even you didn't have. And your pull now – I'm sorry, Red, truly, it must feel like losing your hands – it's smaller than ever. You're as desperate now as you ever get. Not to escape, but to finish something." She paused a moment, watching him; half profiling, half coaxing a stray to take food from her hand.

"I want to see you come out alive. And I want to help you, with your ridiculous, impenetrable purposes. But I also, call me selfish, want to keep a shred of self-respect. Not wonder all my life if I betrayed my country because I couldn't shake the conviction your intentions were good. I can't. I'll quit if I have to. So will you, for once in four goddamn years, be the slightest bit reasonable?"

Red swore, silently, at himself. He could have anticipated the position she was in now; not the specifics of the past week, but the fact that he'd set personal trust and abstract ethics on a collision course in her life. He had avoided that in years past by feeding her titrated, legitimate reasons for distrust on the one hand, and keeping her in the dark about his actions on the other. Keeping her at arm's length that way had first felt noble, and then manipulative and tawdry. At some point, certain he'd never ask her to cross lines for him anyway, he'd just stopped trying.

She was right, of course, about the difference that access to FBI resources would make now – a hell of a lot better than keeping hostile agencies trailing after him in case he needed fireworks. They'd be invaluable. Right before they got her fired and imprisoned. The irony wasn't lost on him; it was only fair that he too should face a choice between two incompatible goods.

"I'm sorry," he said, to both of them. "I don't want you to help, Lizzy. I understand; it's like asking for your soul. Never mind that week's vacation. I want you to focus on your honest work. And stop giving your detail the slip. And let me come and see you later, once in a while, if your conscience can stretch that far."

She ran one hand through her hair. "Then tell me you expect to come out alive from this, without your empire or FBI resources."

That silenced him. Committing never to lie to her had seemed like a noble line to draw, once. He sighed, his stomach roiling.

"Lizzy, if you continue with the Bureau in the areas we've worked in, there's an excellent chance you'll wind up one day in the hands of someone who will ask you what I'm doing. If you know, I can tell you now, you'll try to conceal it. And I'm telling you now, if ever you're back in unfriendly hands that way, I don't want you motivated to conceal anything. You must say whatever it takes to leave alive."

Then something else occurred to him. Could that night in the cell have brought her to this point? From the closeness of their fit, he'd thought it had likely been a while for her before that. That would make two of them, but Lizzy was far too practical to let a loving touch after a long dry spell confuse her like this. Wasn't she?

She had set the wine glass aside on the end table, mostly full. She was throwing her hands up. "You are trying to protect me from all the wrong things." She rubbed her temples, as if dealing with a particularly hopeless child were giving her a headache. "Okay. I'm not here to argue with you. Especially not on possibly the last night…we'll say the last night for a while. If you won't tell me, you won't, and we can go back to talking through our insecurities about 'recent developments'. Though frankly, I think your travel plans have knocked that out of top billing. But this refrain about it being for my own good…"

"It is, more than ever, for your own good," he retorted, fear giving it more heat than he'd intended. "Listen to yourself. Offering to divert government resources to a murderous criminal's personal agenda. The last thing you need is to get more deeply entangled. Your judgement appears to be compromised enough right now." And then, with uncharacteristic and deliberate crudeness, "I try to give satisfaction, Lizzy, but I'm pretty sure I'm not that good a lay."

To his surprise, after a moment of baffled blankness, Lizzy laughed at him. Or possibly at them both. "Is that what you think this is about?"

Then the laughter sent her into a brief coughing fit of her own, spoiling the effect. But she recovered, cocked her head, looked at him for a long moment, and then started to shake it. "Four years in, and I finally get a glimpse of what it's like to be you talking to me. To someone who's got the facts completely right and the logic completely backwards."

She popped back up off the couch and started pacing again. "Reddington, I'm a profiler on one hand and a sworn federal agent on the other. I've spent the last four years trying to reconcile the man I know with the crime lord CI I'm assigned to handle. Want a progress report?" Her voice took on an almost didactic quality. "Antisocial subjects who are ruthlessly indifferent to most of humanity can have caring relationships within tightly-defined circles. But they rarely take the trouble to fake illustrative executions, prevent civilian casualties in standoffs, and scuttle diamond mine takeovers over working conditions."

She rubbed her eyes, not profiling now, not even looking for his reaction. "I tried for a year once to fit you as a monomaniac. Brilliant means, insane ends, everything twisted to one mad purpose. It's not how you work. Not the tiny parts you let me see. Or the ones you think I don't, your actual damned illegal judge-and-jury executions. They save more lives than my arrests, which by the way is, Red, it's sick. It scares me."

That moral vertigo of realizing what it meant that the law was made by people just like one's self. That there were crimes it did not cover, and types of justice found only in the empty space outside it. Remembering the first time he'd felt all that himself, decades before, he could sympathize.

"So I'm left with two theories. You're exactly that mad, and that much smarter than me; or you're fighting something terrible that no one else can see.

"So you'll excuse me, I hope, if on the night we were both supposed to kick it, I decided it was time to commit to one. Expecting to be tortured to death in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully, you'd say."

Having killed poor Johnson all over again with that mangling of his words, she broke her momentum for a moment and averted her eyes. Impossibly, a little smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. "All right, and possibly, I may also have been wanting to jump you for years. But the point is, that night aside, I know that when you disappear tonight you're going to either burn the world or save it."

She dropped down beside him on the couch, and closer up, he could see her eyes were a bit too shiny. Her voice was steady, but her body, between the caloric and respiratory stresses of the past week, had emptied its reserves.

"So possibly, with all your literary philosophical whatnot, you can understand the position this puts me in. I'm not trying to follow you to the ends of the earth, for God's sake. I'm trying to figure out, on maybe the last chance I'll get, whether I have to stop you or help you. And not to whine when you just lost your kingdom, but it's driving me a little mad. So here I am, in the unbelievable position of asking your opinion about whether I should trust you. Help me, or give me the dignity of saying that you won't for your own reasons. But don't…" And then she ran out of steam, and lifted her hands, helplessly. "Don't do this thing you do."

Red realized that at some point he'd begun nodding, idiotically. His mind was clocking over into the red. Understanding her position now was small comfort; the trouble was how to ever resolve it.

And he didn't like seeing her anywhere near the moral precipice he'd gone over more than thirty years ago. But he was not quite fool enough to think he could keep her from going over herself if she chose. Keeping her alive was one thing, but when one soul was eye-to-eye with the fathomless depths of the moral universe, all another could be was company.

First things first. Her immediate problem was still how to handle him.

Aloud, he said, mechanically, "Arlo Mediche will deplane in thirty minutes from Delta 547 at Dulles. He has a warehouse in Arlington full of an aerosolized neurolytic, and he just received directions on where to use it."

And then, as he saw the look on her face, "I'm not doing that 'thing', Lizzy. I just don't think quite as quickly as I used to."

She closed her eyes. After a moment her chest shook a few times, silently. Laughter again, from some strange well of understanding that could find humor here. "OK. You bought yourself the length of a phone call." She looked back up at him and then, without moving her eyes, speed-dialed Cooper and started to report.

He needed the time not to plan, but to process. For an impossible moment, he let himself think of the words he would have liked to say.

Lizzy, my operation is, was, the third most lucrative business of this century, and it was built on the control of information. Think of what that means. It may be true that the world is bendable, and a class of men can live like gods by folding it to suit their purpose, bleeding the rest, until thousands die silently daily from the loss. But it is also true they cannot do it in the light.

Can you imagine what would happen if someone let light in? Not exposed a crime here or there, but lifted the rock from over all their machines and kingdoms, broke their system altogether, put the fear in them that they could not keep their secrets? It would take them a generation to rebuild. It would be worth a life's work, and worth men's lives, for the tens of thousands it would save.

But it would take a man positioned where all their roads meet to do it. And he would need to first clear out those with the drive or knowledge to rebuild.

Plus maybe a few of, as you called it, the most truly evil.

"No, sir, I was about to say the same," Lizzy was saying. "Frankly, I don't think I'd add much to the analysis right now anyway. I'll keep up during the week and be back the next Monday. Yes sir, in the Post Office, not AWOL on another unmapped island. Thank you, sir." She closed the call and set the phone on the coffee table; her eyes closed for a moment, in weariness this time.

He was left with two thoughts. First, if he told her, after keeping it so many years, safe in only his head, what would that do? Songs and stories accepted love as a justification; consequences didn't. And if he didn't, she'd said almost the literal truth about the position she was in: a person could go mad.

Second, the way her world was shifting here, and with her newfound penchant for rogue lone-wolf investigations, he was no longer certain that here was the safest place for her.

Lizzy had opened her eyes and was watching him, reading who-knew-how-much of that from his face. "It really is," she said softly, "a lot of filth for anyone to wade through. There has to be the worst reason, or the best."

Touched and sorry beyond his facility with words, and acting on a new habit apparently formed days before, he pulled her toward him, forehead to forehead. "I know, sweet girl. Like a quadratic equation. Two perfect solutions, and no way to choose. I'm sorry."

Lizzy, with the enviable freedom of one whose cards are all already on the table, traced her fingers down his face, then the line of his neck. There was a palpable tension in them, fear and love and hope together.

"All of this," she said for both of them, "is so messed up."

He laughed a bit, fingers carding through her hair. "Depends on which has primacy, evidence or logic."

"Lines like that usually work for you?"

"Less often than you may have been led to believe." He came to a decision, and hoped heartily it was for the right reasons. "I don't suppose," he murmured, finding her palm and sweeping one finger over her scar, "that you'd consider a trade? Take over one of my remaining safehouses, consult for the FBI remotely, and promise never again to chase kidnappers who you know have just bought gas masks? Then I'll tell you anything you want to know."

"Tempting," she returned, hands ghosting down his shoulders. "Reverse the order of events, and I'll consider it."

His heart thumped absurdly at that, like a boy's. He was nearly certain she was joking. As he always did when taken aback, he doubled down.

"You're failing to see the possibilities of my way, Lizzy." He caught her hands, laid them flat on the couch, and braceleted her wrists with his fingers. "You could be the reluctant FBI agent pulled into the twilight of my world. I could be the desperate criminal who lures you in for his own mysterious, unspeakable ends." Part teasing, part warning, part offering.

But she dipped her head and kissed him; gentle, unreserved, and a little sad. "More nights together, with a side of absolution for me? Sign me up on my next birthday. But Red…a sin eater even in fantasies, really? I think you need to tell someone as badly as I need to know. Even, I can't believe I'm saying this, even if it's not me. Come back to the human race. At least partway."

His breath caught. Given the ease with which she was dissecting him, part of him was surprised he had to tell her anything. But he laid a hand on her head, silently, and came to another decision.

"Not a trade, then? Maybe a compromise." He pulled back again for a moment to see her. "It's not mine to tell you, Lizzy. If you ever believed I kept a secret for good reason, believe it now. But I'll tell you this, and it's more than I ever intended." He tilted his head and looked her over, fear taking a momentary back seat to pride. "I know you now. Not the remembered child or the imagined young woman, whose only hold on me was duty. But the heart that came back from safety to save a criminal near-stranger, sold a home to fund the care of a wronged child, and used her last night alive to give me the kind of peace she had to offer."

Red laid his palms against the sides of her face. "That heart, if you knew my purpose, I believe would be ahead of me, leading the charge." He willed himself to a small smile. "Can that possibly be enough to stave off madness for a while?"

Lizzy searched his face for a long time. He was not sure he knew anymore how to hold nothing back in it. But he tried, and trusted that she would at least see that.

Finally she let out a long breath. The line of her shoulders softened, just visibly. Without her moving further, he thought he saw something just begin to come unclenched, as if what he'd thought was bone and structure had only ever been a knot.

He wondered, in a peculiar flash of clarity or exhausted nonsense, what other clamped-down sides of her might now begin to show themselves. And, if this tiny crumb he could offer now could do this much, what would come boiling out if she ever had to learn the rest. He wished he'd realized sooner that such a promise from him could be worth this to her.

Meanwhile, Lizzy had pulled it back together. "Possibly, for now. Maybe. Okay. We can worry later about the assault team you're going to want next month in Lithuania."

"There's not going to be an assault team in Lithuania. No wading through filth, Lizzy. That's not why I told you."

"Yes, of course," she said almost absently, waving that aside. "You'll do it all alone because no one else could possibly bear the burden, etcetera. That is completely reasonable. We can talk about all that later this week. On vacation."

He listened with a feeling like one that a man, walking on what he thought was a small secret path, might have watching a train come up it behind him and roar past.

Lizzy had tilted her head. "Reddington," she finished simply, equal parts exasperation and tenderness.

Like an addict, or like a man just out of prison, or simply greedy, he kissed her again, tracing his fingers down her back. He wanted to reverse the years of wrenching confusion. He wanted to watch her keep defending justice under the law, which had its place; and he wanted to hide her in a safehouse far from all of it. He wanted to ask her what she wanted between them now, and in the months they'd be apart; and he wanted to let her recover first enough to think about it sanely. He wanted to use what he'd learned she liked two nights before.

And being no longer twenty years old, he wanted, he admitted with greater honesty, to fall asleep with her on the couch, or the bed, or anywhere really, and do all those other wonderful things in the morning.

Naturally, that was when the periphery sensors lit up, and the television came to autonomous life. It brought up a false-color infrared image of the south gate, where three armored trucks were discharging an improbable number of black-covered toughs in night goggles, hustling offscreen into the grounds.

Lizzy froze, glanced over at him, and then relaxed fractionally when she saw his unconcern. "No danger tonight, you said?" she asked him evenly.

He grinned, though his muscles ached in anticipation of a busy next half-hour. "Yes, love, but I didn't say no visitors."

The view telescoped down into one quarter of the screen. Three other bird's-eye views from other entry points filled the rest of it, with emerging ground-retractable vehicle barriers, tire spikes and, delightfully, tripwires. "And I did mention the grounds had redeeming features. They're twenty minutes from the house on foot. Not to crowd you, but I'm going to ask you to start that week's vacation tonight." He rose and pulled her up to standing.

Lizzy's eyes narrowed, shooting back to her cell phone on the table. "Dammit. Red, the call to Cooper."

He palmed it into his pocket as they swept into the foyer. "Yes; must be a trace on the signal. We'll drop it in the incinerator on our way out. You know, those boys move like CIA. Looks like a bit of off-book, unauthorized interagency collaboration. As a taxpayer, I'm gratified. This way now."

"You just claimed to be a what?" she sputtered, scrambling into her boots.

He laughed, reaching back for her elbow as they moved out into the chill of the garage. His lungs barely hurt at all.

For the first time he could remember, as he started up the engine, he suspected that there was, in fact, both world enough and time.