AN: I don't know why I even try to estimate how many chapters these things are going to have. I rarely manage to get it right. :P There is—probably—only one more after this one, and then a sequel.
"Wait! Wait, Lizzy! You've only known him for a month, but this is me, Lizzy. You gotta understand, I'm your husband, you know me."
"SHUT UP! You can't play the husband card anymore, you lying bastard!" Liz clenched her teeth and leaned closer to Tom. "You," she said, enunciating each word clearly, "are a total stranger to me."
"All right, OK, I get it, OK, just hear me out!"
"What could you possibly say that would make any difference to me right now?"
"I have information, lots of it! I can tell you things that your dad won't tell you, that Reddington won't, things they don't even know about. I know things about you, Lizzy. I can tell you who you are, who your parents are, why it's all such a big secret."
Liz tightened her grip around the gun. "If you know, other people know," she said, pleased her voice didn't waver.
"But they'll never tell you! They can't! They're too afraid, afraid of you, of what you'll do."
She glanced at Red, who watched her impassively. He showed no hint of reaction to Tom's words, nothing to sway her one way or the other. Whatever choice she made about Tom would be her decision and her decision only.
Even if Tom was including him in his mysterious 'they', at this point she trusted Red to help her find answers a hell of a lot more than she trusted Tom. As far as she could tell, Red had never lied to her. Kept her in the dark, sure, which was without a doubt frustrating, but she could certainly understand the logic behind it. Someday, she would get the whole truth from him, she was certain of it. She knew no such thing with Tom.
Tom seized on her momentary hesitation, mistaking it for temptation, for possible leniency yet again.
"You can turn me in, Lizzy, I'll surrender, we can work together, you'll see."
"You just threatened to expose us—"
"I won't! I promise I won't, I won't say a thing! Turn me in, it's fine, I deserve it. Maybe…Maybe I can help, do some good. Maybe they can protect me."
"Who do you need protecting from?"
"My employer. He… When he finds out I botched this, he'll come after me. He'll come after you. There won't be anywhere that's safe—"
"Who is your employer, Tom?" Red asked, cool and calm, speaking for the first time since he handed Liz the gun. Tom ignored him, keeping his attention solely on Liz.
"Please, Lizzy—"
"Stop calling me Lizzy!" She pushed the gun hard against his forehead, bending his neck back at a painful angle.
"All right!" he yelled, loud enough to make her ears ring with the echo of it.
After Tom's outburst, the room fell into an unnatural silence. Tom scrambled, frantic and desperate behind wild eyes, for a new tactic. His eyes narrowed as he looked back and forth between Liz and Red, and a sick feeling settled in Liz's stomach.
"You know they're going to find out, don't you?" he asked. "I don't have to tell them, they'll figure it out on their own. I don't know how you've kept it a secret this long, you couldn't be more obvious if you tried.
"Do you realize what they're going to do once they know? They'll take him away, they'll keep you from him. He's not just some run-of-the-mill bank robber, Liz. They'll bury him. They'll put him in a hole and he'll never see daylight again. You'll never see him again.
"The two of you together, you're dangerous. They're never going to let that stand. I can help you, both of you, you just have to give me a chance to—"
Tom wouldn't get a chance to tell her whatever it was he planned to do; he never even got a chance to finish that one sentence. It was the itch of madness she felt at the prospect of forced separation from Red that pushed Liz over the edge; she pulled the trigger and the itch began to fade as the life drained from Tom's face.
She waited for panic to set in. She waited for regret, for disgust, for shock—nothing came. What she felt was relief, a bone-deep relief that there would be no more confusion, no more second-guessing herself, no more fear or dread, at least where Tom was concerned. It was over.
Liz had taken lives before—in self-defense and in defense of others. In the past, she hadn't felt anything, hadn't let herself feel anything but justified. What she felt now? She was sure it wasn't appropriate, given the situation. Given any situation.
She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath to compose herself. She was afraid to move, because the sudden feeling of freedom coursing through her system urged her to celebrate, to laugh, to smile, and, most of all, to take advantage of her awareness of Red, now that the last obvious obstacle between them had been eliminated.
She didn't want to think of it that way, didn't want to consider the possibility that the only thing that had kept her from jumping into bed with him had been Tom's continued existence. It left her with a bitter taste in her mouth, the thought that she had killed her husband just so she could be with her soulmate.
It wasn't true. She knew it wasn't true. She killed Tom because of what he'd done to her, what he put her through, the havoc he might have caused if she let him live. She hadn't killed her husband—not really. Tom Keen had never truly existed and now the man who used that name was gone for good.
A light tugging on her sleeve shook her out of her reverie.
"Is it all right if I take the gun now?" Red asked, the fabric of her jacket pinched between his fingers. She looked down, surprised to see the gun still in her hand. She passed it to him and he immediately began to disassemble it and place it back in his bag.
Her gaze was drawn to the chair in front of her like a magnet. Rivulets of Tom's blood started to drip onto her carpet, leaving stains much like the ones that had started her down the path of discovery.
"My father…" Liz trailed off. She cleared her throat, swallowed hard around the lump in it. "My adoptive father—"
"Sam," Red offered. She blinked, brought up short; she wasn't sure why she was surprised he knew Sam's name. She certainly shouldn't have been.
"Yeah. Sam always told me my parents were dead."
"They are. As far as I know, they are. I have no reason to believe otherwise."
Liz tore her eyes away from Tom's body to search Red's face. It wasn't like him to volunteer facts about her past so succinctly. She wondered if Tom's death would mark a turning point in that regard, or if this was just a one time moment of openness.
"What do we do now?"
"I'll notify Mr. Kaplan," he said, pulling a burner phone from his bag before standing and leading her away from the living room. "She'll handle the clean up."
"She?"
He shrugged. "Come on. You don't need to see this part," he said, ushering her towards the staircase. "I insisted on watching once against Mr. Kaplan's advice. I never did again."
"I would think you'd be used to things like this by now."
Red gestured for her to precede him upstairs; she felt him close behind as she started climbing. He gripped the handrail tightly, hauling himself up after her, crowding close as if to keep her from turning around and heading back downstairs. "Well, you'd be wrong," he said, his breath stirring her hair as he spoke.
At the top, Liz headed for her bedroom and Red went past her to the window, peered down into the street through the curtain. He poked at the screen on his cell phone and held it to his ear.
"Mr. Kaplan. Yes, like we talked about. Thank you." Laying the phone on the windowsill, he turned back to Liz and quirked a smile. "She'll be here soon." He studied her face for a long moment, the smile dissolving as quickly as it formed. "How are you?"
"I just killed my husband."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"Deflection isn't fun when you're on the receiving end, is it?" She shook her head. "I shouldn't be feeling what I'm feeling right now."
"I don't think there's any right way to feel after—"
"You don't understand." She felt a frisson of… something… flood through her body, something not quite hers, but very similar. The more she focused on it, the more his breathing picked up. "Or maybe you do."
"What are you feeling?" he asked, as if he hadn't already noticed like she had, as if his white-knuckle grip on the windowsill didn't mean he felt the same thing.
"Exhilarated," she said. "Aroused. Alive."
"Perhaps this wasn't the wisest place to wait," he said, and she had a sudden and acute awareness of the bed to her left. She took a deep, cleansing breath and let it out slowly through her lips. The air was fresh up here, no gunpowder, no coppery, metallic tang.
"Do we really not want to do this, or do we only think we shouldn't want to?"
"I've wanted you since that first day at the Post Office, when you walked down those stairs. That doesn't make it a good idea," he said, clearly trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince her.
"Killing Tom probably wasn't a good idea either."
Red pushed off from the windowsill and approached her, steady and deliberate. "I think it's the best idea you've had in a long time," he said, his voice earnest.
"Well, then maybe we deserve a couple questionable ones."
He fell silent for a moment, head tilted slightly to the side as he contemplated what she said. "I'm sure there's a flaw in that logic somewhere but I can't find it in myself to care."
