A/N - Only one more chapter left after this, so you've almost made it!

Over the next few weeks, Elizabeth became stronger and more herself. With Reddington's help she began to rebuild pieces of her old life. He was loathed to leave her for long, especially with her captors still at large, and she was anxious whenever her wasn't around, but she became more accustomed to her own company.

In the evenings, she would tell Reddington whatever she could remember about her confinement. He knew that it would help for her to talk about the traumatic events, help to bleed to poison from her mind, and any information that she could give him would help him locate the Window Cleaner. She refused to talk about the torture methods employed, but Reddington guessed that it must have been deeply unpleasant as he continued to wake in the night to the sounds of her screams.

xxxxx

The taskforce eventually got a solid lead on Nancy Walker, after many months. Reddington continued to be of assistance with planning her eventual capture, even insisting that he brought in some of his security team to bolster the FBI's resources. Cooper wondered if Reddington was offering the help more as a way of ensuring Walker's apprehension, but he wasn't inclined to quibble.

The team gathered outside the warehouse that they had tracked Walker to on a cold, frosty February morning. Reddington had sent a message to say that he would be unable to join them for the op, although he didn't explain why. Cooper sent the various teams of agents, SWAT, and, of course, Reddington's security, to their specified locations around the building, hoping to surround the site and block off any possible escape routes.

Ressler and Navabi were in charge of a small group of field agents tasked with breaching the main entrance. On Cooper's word they broke down the steel door at the front and entered, weapons drawn.

According to their intel, they had expected a lot of heavily-armed resistance, but everything seemed eerily quiet as they entered. Ressler was concerned that they'd been tipped off, but they had to proceed regardless, so they carefully made their way through a series of rooms that looked like unused offices, until they came to a series of rooms that had obviously been used as guard rooms, several of which contained the dead bodies of their occupants. They could hear the other teams clearing rooms in their earpieces as they worked their way towards the centre of the building, reporting a number of other dead guards.

The next door the team came across was heavier than the cheap wooden doors on the offices, with a high-tech keypad operating the lock. The team had to wait several minutes for Aram to arrive with his laptop, and several minutes more for him to bypass the security systems open the door.

"You'd better stay with us Aram," Ressler's voice was hushed and his colleagues nodded their agreement. "I'd say we're about to head into the heart of the operation, so we might need your help with other security measures. Just make sure you stay well back and don't enter any rooms before we tell you to."

The first set of rooms the team encountered looked like a small medical suite, complete with an operating theatre, treatment rooms, and a couple of recovery rooms. The last of these were heavily fortified to stop their inhabitants escaping, although they were pleasant enough and had small, barred windows with lights behind them made to simulate daylight. Their progress through this area was slow as Aram had to hack the keypads on each door for them to clear the rooms. Most of the rooms were empty, but one of the beds contained a heavily-sedated young women recovering from some kind of abdominal surgery. EMTs were called in to help her, whilst the team moved on through the complex.

After another locked door, Aram followed his colleagues into a corridor lined with four heavy, locked doors, similar to the ones to the in the recovery suite, except these had hatches in the bottom large enough for a tray to be pushed through. When he hacked the first door, it swung open and an awful smell emanated from within. The team cleared the room, the smell seemingly coming from the terrible squalor that its previous occupant had been forced to endure.

The other three rooms were very similar to the first; dark, dank, and depressing. Each smelled as bad, except for the final room that Aram unlocked, which had a much stronger aroma. As the team made their way inside, they discovered a terrified boy, who must have only been in his late teens, cowering in a corner. He sat, blinking at the harsh light from the corridor, a panel on the wall, that the agents had found in every room they had entered, was attached to some sort of tube leading to a metal cuff around the boy's arm that Aram recognised as the same as the cuff Elizabeth had been wearing when they had found her.

While the team was finishing processing that corridor, before moving through the door at the far end, something in one of the cells caught Agent Mojtabai's eye. Something had been scratched into the concrete walls. As he got closer he used the torch on his cellphone to make out the markings. In a shaky hand, someone had written a list of names, each name less distinct than the last:

Elizabeth Keen
Harold Cooper
Donald Ressler
Samar Navabi
Aram Mojtabai
Meera Malik
Sam Milhoan
Thomas Keen
Dembe
Raymond Reddington

Aram was glad that the darkness in the cell hid the tear that ran down his face.

xxxxx

The final door in the corridor was no harder to hack than the previous doors, but this one was different as it sat next to a large window into the room.

As Aram worked, he kept glancing into the room. Inside was what appeared to be a chair similar to the sort found at the dentist's, only dentists' chairs rarely had restraints. In one corner he could see a metal chair and table, also with various restraints, as well as another panel on the wall, and a pile of white rags, and he shuddered to think about what might have happened in this room.

The team entered as soon as the door swung open, and the tech analyst followed them nervously. There didn't appear to be any more doors leading out of this room; they had reached the heart of the complex.

It took Aram a moment to realise that the pile of white rags near the metal table was a person. Ressler made his way over, turning the beaten and bloody body over. It took them a little while to realise that this was the corpse of Nancy Walker.

Whatever had happened to Ms Walker couldn't have been pleasant; she had been beaten until she was almost unrecognisable and the awkward angle of her limbs suggested a lot of broken bones. She was also attached to the panel on the wall by a tube in her arm, like the teenager had been, and Samar suggested that maybe whoever had done this to her was trying to recreate whatever had been done to her victims.

"What do you mean 'whoever'?" Ressler's voice was incredulous. "This was obviously Reddington's work."

"Yes, well, can you blame him?"