Chapter Text
“We never did find a body,” Red said thoughtfully, watching Lizzie make her way into the shittiest of hotel rooms.
“No,” Dembe said. “We didn’t.”
Berlin had been dogging his steps for nigh on a decade. Ten years of pseudonyms, of a new hotel room every night, of bodyguards for his bodyguards, of Tor encryption, and multiple Cayman accounts. He had no intention of throwing caution to the wind by booking a suite under his own name or something similarly outrageous, but when Raymond Reddington let himself fall into bed, he felt a little safer than he had the night before.
Liz stripped off her shirt, feeling a little guilty as she thought about the watcher she’d had arrested earlier that week. Honestly, the accommodations in jail were probably nicer than the rooms in this hellhole. She stripped off the horrifying “duvet,” a plasticine table runner that stuck to the polyester blanket underneath.
She switched on the TV, giving absolutely 0 shits about the poor resolution. Jimmy Fallon’s open, friendly face appeared on the screen, and she muted him almost immediately. The light of the TV was pleasant; the shapes of people made her feel a little less alone.
The shower was the only saving grace of the godforsaken hotel. It was built before low-flow shower heads were a thing and the owners were far too cheap to replace them. The hot water ran out during morning prime time, since the hot water heaters also hadn’t been replaced, but at night, when she returned after a long day of shoveling shit at the FBI and then shoveling some more emotional shit after seeing Tom, a short-lived waterfall of nigh-on scalding water was just about perfect.
Opening the door and releasing a billow of steam into the hellhole, she felt her loneliness acutely. A year ago, Tom would have been waiting for her, tucked into their wonderful bed with mussed hair and glasses perched on the end of his nose. He would have looked up at her as she entered, promise hot in his eyes, stripping off her towel with confident hands. But now she was feeling sorry for herself in a shitty hotel with a little voice in her head that sounded uncomfortably like Raymond Reddington.
Fuck this. She was going to sleep.
“Keen.”
There was a hand on her shoulder, not as kind as it ought to have been.
“Wake up, Keen.”
Liz came to slowly, trusting the familiar voice and hands that woke her. Gruff, kind, safe.
There was a harsh, unrelenting pounding on the door. It rattled ominously and then crashed inward, splintering everywhere.
She was definitely awake now.
“What the fuck?”
A SWAT team surrounded her mussed bed and aimed to kill. Ressler still stood over her, cold and angry, dishwater blonde hair impeccably coiffed. She felt naked and very small, topless and disheveled in front of a roomful of men.
“Ressler?” Her voice was smaller than she would have liked.
“We found Tom,” he said curtly. “He’s told us everything. Put your clothes on. We’re taking you in.”
They watched her as she dressed, refusing to give her even a modicum of privacy.
“Am I being considered a flight risk?” Liz muttered out of one side of her mouth.
Ressler didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at her. He stared into an empty corner, devoid of expression.
She was unceremoniously cuffed and placed in the back of a nondescript SUV. Ressler was not in the front seat.
A yellow DHL van pulled in front of the SUV and abruptly halted their forward progress. A team of professionals swarmed out of the back and had the agents accompanying her incapacitated in embarrassingly short order. The back door popped open and Red stood silhouetted in the early morning sun.
“Good morning Lizzie,” he said jovially, as though they were meeting in one of their usual spots. His hat tilted rakishly over one eye. “Haven’t you popped out of those yet?”
He indicated her handcuffs and she scowled at him. A moment later and the cuffs fell onto the floor-mat.
“I wasn’t actually planning on doing that,” she told him. His expression became unwontedly serious.
“I know you weren’t. But it’s time to go, my dear. The jig is up, as they say.”
“No one says that,” she bit out.
“You should have told me about Tom,” he said gravely. “I would have taken care of everything.”
“And that’s exactly the problem, Red. I couldn’t let you take care of him.”
“Apparently you couldn’t either.”
She had no response for that.
“The deal’s done, Lizzie. We have to leave and we have to leave now. Your career is over. Your marriage is over. There’s nothing left for you here.”
Liz stared at him and the mild expression on his face. Eyes slightly hidden behind the darkened glasses, but not enough to hide from her. She suddenly knew how the FBI had come to find Tom Keen in a dilapidated shipping container.
“Oh God,” she moaned, feeling panic for the first time. “You told them. You fucking told them.”
She started to cry. “I trusted you,” she choked out.
“I trusted you!” he roared back.
She shrank into the seat and gazed at him with betrayal in her eyes. She fastened her seatbelt.
“Close the door, Red. I need to wait for my escort.”
He stared at her for a long moment
“Close the door, Red,” she repeated softly.
He closed the door.
The interrogation wasn’t brutal or anything. She’d had worse. The Stewmaker, for example. The bumps and bruises and explosions and gunshots and stab wounds and biological weapons… those had been worse. But they had all happened with her team by her side and Red as her secret weapon.
She’d been a suspect before, the last time Tom Keen sat in these rooms. She’d felt the isolation of distrust and the impotence of telling the truth and having no one believe her.
But this time… this time. She was guilty. She’d done everything they accused her of and more. She’d engaged in the psychological torture of her former husband, to say nothing of the physical indignities. She’d held him against his will, in violation of local, state, federal, and international laws.
It didn’t matter that he was an assassin. That he had hoodwinked her in the most impossibly intimate way. That he wouldn’t have batted an eye to see her dead.
But she’d locked up a wanted man for her own ends, lied about his death, and pumped him for information. So she was going to lose her badge, her friends, her team, her… whatever Red was… and she was going to go to jail for some undetermined length of time.
When she was released… if she was released… she would have even less of a life than she did at this moment. And wasn’t that a fucking terrifying thought.
The Cage wasn’t as bad as she might have expected. It was cleaner than her hotel room, as she'd suspected, and that made her rethink some of her life choices. If she’d continued down the path she’d been on as a teenager, she might have ended up in jail. Three squares, rec time, Sam buying her shit from the commissary, a pretty prison wife to keep her occupied. It might not have been terrible.
No Tom. No FBI. No Reddington. None of this bone-deep pain and loss and sense of betrayal. Just another stupid kid with a talent for sleight of hand and a bad attitude serving a nickel or a dime. It almost sounded nice.
And once she had that thought, she realized how entirely fucked up and destructive this train of thought was. She derailed it, with prejudice, and refused to let self-pity creep in as she curled into the hard-as-fuck bed and the heavily bleached blanket.
Oddly, she felt better than she had the night before. It was kind of freeing. Everyone knew who she was. What she was capable of.