It took him a little over twenty minutes to reach the modest six-story flat in the south of the suburbs. He wore the helmet, partly because he didn't want to be flagged over by any overzealous cops, but also because for once, it gave him a sense of protection rather than constriction. His poor skull felt soft and fragile, and if he somehow did happen to crash and land head-down, at least his brains would stay on the inside.

He parked the Motorcycle against a bike stand, where it dwarfed two normal bikes, secured it and walked up the steps to the flat entrance. And there it was, complete with a name tag: N. Coxx, number 49. Gotta hand it to Reddington. He is thorough. Just when he wanted to press the button next to her name, a commuter opened the front door, enabling Ressler to enter the flat before the door swung closed.

Oh yeah, great security here. But he noticed a camera in the hallway.

Nicky's apartment was on the second floor, and with one look at the stairs, he took the elevator. As it went up, the shift in gravity made his head swim, and even when the doors pinged open and he opened the door to the gallery, the feeling didn't subside. He made his wavering way to her door and pressed the bell, leaning his forehead against the door while waiting for Lizzie to open the door.

After Ressler called, Lizzie glanced at her alarm clock and sighed. Six o'clock. She'd gone to bed at one, disturbed by the police report Cooper had forwarded to her. What was it with Ressler and getting up at ungodly hours? He needed sleep? Well, so did she! But by the time he got here, it would probably be time to get up, so there was no point in postponing the inevitable.

Grumbling quietly, she took a quick shower and put on a pair of sweats and a sweater she'd found in the closet—her size, too—and turned on the coffee machine. She'd just poured herself a mug when the bell rang, and she spent a few seconds trying to figure out how to operate the speaker/com.

"Hello? Aaron?"

No reply.

Hm. Maybe he went straight up. She peered through the peephole and saw absolutely nothing. Or maybe this is a setup and there are three armed goons on my doorstep. She put down her coffee and got her gun from the top drawer of her bedside table. The chains and bolts on the door made no sound as she unlocked them. Taking a deep breath, she yanked open the door—and almost shot Ressler in the chest as he tumbled inside.

"Jesus!" She grabbed his shoulders and caught most of his weight, but he was already pushing away from her. "Are you ok?"

"Yeah, fine, I was leaning against…Why are you pointing your gun at me?"

She shoved the weapon into the kangaroo pocket of her sweater. "You didn't answer the intercom. I thought…Holy crap, what happened to your neck!"

Ressler smiled faintly. He was awfully, awfully pale. "Shuo tried to kill me." The smile pulled a trifle wider on one side before fading altogether. "He did not succeed." He swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing beneath the band aid. "He came pretty close, though."

"Come in." She closed the door, bolted it and ushered him into the living room and into a chair. "What happened? Jesus, you look like hell. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Something stronger?"

He shook his head, grimaced. "Painkillers, if you have them. My head is killing me."

She changed her direction from the kitchen to the bathroom, located a bottle of Tylenol and took out two. "Did he hit you?"

"He hit the wall with me."

"Was that before or after he tried to strangle you?"

"After, I think. He tried to stab me later. Things got a bit hazy after that. Thanks." He gratefully washed the pills down with a glass of water and then just sat there, dumb with exhaustion.

Lizzie sat down on the salon table in front of him. "Ressler." His head veered up and he grimaced again. "Maybe you have a concussion."

"Maybe. I don't think so, though. Besides, I don't have time to have a concussion; I need to meet Boscoe at the club at eight."

"Hm."

"What?" he asked tiredly.

"Well, only that you've been here for three days and so far people have tried to kill you twice."

"Hardly. A swat with a vacuum cleaner hose doesn't count."

"Yeah, about that, is your arm bothering you still, because you seem to be favouring it."

Ressler scowled at her. It accentuated the circles below his eyes and the lines on his forehead and next to his mouth and made him look haggard and old, far older than he actually was.

"I'm not quitting now. I can't."

"I'm not saying that you should. But you won't be any good to anyone dead."

He snorted. "I'm just tired."

"That doesn't surprise me."

He gave an exasperated huff. "What do you want from me, Keen? I can't give up. You know the stakes on this one. Besides, with Shuo gone, I have a much better chance of becoming Boscoe's associate of choice and gaining access to the shipment. Which reminds me, I have the name of the boat and the number of the container." He pulled a slip of paper out of his jeans pocket and handed it to her. "I don't know about Bani and Claus, but Solomon's got no chance to get this job, and it wouldn't surprise me if Bani pulled out any day now. This whole thing is way too big for him and he's injured pretty badly." He knuckled his forehead, eyes closed. "Did you find out anything about them?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. I've got their files on my laptop." She sighed. "Might as well delete Shuo's."

That caught his attention. "You found something on him?"

"Quite a lot actually."

"Update me on it." He squeezed his eyes closed more tightly. "After I've slept for a couple of hours."

"Where did he attack you? At the motel?"

"Yes."

"And you killed him?"

"Yes. Sliced open his neck with his own little knife." His face twisted. "God, what a mess."

He went a little paler still, and Lizzie wondered if Nicky had any buckets around in case he was going to throw up, but he recovered and said, "Kind of hard to relax in that room, now."

"I can imagine," she nodded. My presence, however, seems to be incredibly relaxing. Ressler was zoning out again, eyes closed and his head drooping. He was falling asleep right in front of her. She touched his shoulder and he jerked awake again. No matter what he said, Shuo's attack and subsequent death must have spooked him pretty badly. "Come on, you'd better get into bed before you fall asleep in this chair."

Ressler followed her to the bedroom, sat down on the bed and looked like he was simply going to topple over unconscious, but she said, "Shoes, Don." and he obediently took them off. The laces weren't done up anyway. When he bent at the waist to place them side by side next to the bed he groaned and pushed his fingers against his forehead again.

"That bad eh?" she asked sympathetically. "Do you want me to take a look at your head?" Even from here she could see some swelling, and the reddish-black of dried blood as well. It wasn't spectacular but it did look painful.

"No. I'm fine. Kaplan looked at it and treated it on the spot."

"Kaplan? Mister Kaplan?"

"Yeah."

"Do you think she's a doctor?" she asked doubtfully. It wouldn't surprise her, actually.

"I think she might've been a coroner, once." He shrugged out of his jacket but lacked the energy to take off his jeans, and crawled under the comforter almost fully clothed. Lizzie wondered, briefly, if he had noticed the cover had a pattern of nyan cats. Probably not; he was too busy burrowing. At least he kept to one side of the queen-sized bed. She hoped he wouldn't bleed on the pillow. "Reddington sent her to clean up," he continued, but his voice was deepening and trailing off. "Strange woman; she seemed to…to look forward to cleaning…it all up. She's good, though. No one would…ever..." He halted mid-sentence, mouth still half open to complete it, fast asleep.

"Huh," Lizzie said, impressed and slightly worried. "I'm going to wake you up in two hours, just so you know, and if you take too long focussing, I'm gonna call your 'dad' and tell him his 'son' is out for the count for a couple of days."

Ressler did not reply.

Sighing, Lizzie picked up her phone and sent a message to the person who, according to her contact list, was her employer.

Dear John, my BF was in an accident and came over to my place. Suspect head trauma and want to keep eyes on him this morning. I'll work from home. Yours Nicky.

Dear god, this role-playing stuff was getting on her nerves. Was anyone really going to make the effort to look into Nicky bloody Coxx and try to steal her phone, or rather, steal Elizabeth Keen's phone and find out she wasn't Nicky?

It was not yet seven am, but Cooper sent back a message within five minutes: All right. Let me know if you need anything.

Great. Now my bed is taken, it's only seven, I worked 'till one yesterday, and I technically don't have to start until nine today. She looked at Ressler, lying belly-down as if someone had thrown him there and he had just landed that way. Then she looked at the mug of coffee, tepid now, in the hallway.

"Screw it," she said aloud, placed her gun back into the drawer, took off her clothes, put her night shirt on again and joined him.

She woke up one and a half hour later, feeling well-rested and just a little bit guilty for sleeping in. As she sat up, Ressler's entire body jumped and he made a weird palatal sound, like a cat spitting.

"Take it easy," Lizzie said, placing a calming hand on his shoulder before he could sit up on his knees, "it's only me. I've got your back; you're safe."

"Huhh," he huffed, but he relaxed and was asleep again before she had left the bed.

Well, at least he was quickly roused, that was a good sign. Nevertheless, she dressed in sweats again and collected a bowl of yoghurt and muesli and her laptop to work on the bed so she could keep an eye on him or, as it turned out, to keep away the night terrors with her presence. Ressler had a lot of nightmares, as it turned out. Perhaps as many as she did. She'd never noticed that before when she slept with him, just slept with him in the same bed—but then, she rarely dreamed when sharing her bed either. Now he was simply too exhausted to recognize her presence in his sleep, reacting only when she touched him or spoke to him. He'd sleep like the dead for about an hour, breathing so slowly she once actually watched him for several minutes to see if he was still breathing at all, then enter REM sleep and start dreaming. Sometimes the nightmares woke him up after a few minutes; sometimes he remained asleep, eyes moving behind his eyelids, limbs twitching. Usually, saying his name and telling him he was safe was enough to make him settle down, but a few times talking to him carried the conversation into his dream, and holding dream conversations with Ressler was deeply odd indeed. Especially because the first time she thought he was awake, until he started muttering things about needing a bigger mop to wipe away all the blood.

Most of the time, however, Ressler was sleeping and about as responsive as a loaf of bread, and Lizzie worked on her profiles on her laptop, trying to find connections between the men and women Boscoe had been in contact with. She also requested access to the harbourmaster's files, but apparently the easiest way to find out when and where a boat would unload was consult the handwritten notes of the harbourmaster. They did use computer programs to organise everything, but those were usually filled out from an excel sheet.

Early in the afternoon she left Ressler alone for about half an hour to buy some groceries in the little supermarket half a block away. He didn't wake up during her absence, but while she was putting things into the fridge, he came out of the bedroom and shambled to the toilet, eyes half-closed and most certainly no more than half awake.

"Hey," she said, when he came back out thirty seconds later.

He halted, blinking owlishly. "Hey. Were you just out? I thought I heard the door."

"Yeah, that was me. Are you done sleeping?"

He scrubbed at his eyes, and she figured that no, he wasn't. "Why am I wearing all my clothes?"

"I don't know. Because you forgot to take them off? How's your head?"

"Full of steel wool." He gingerly touched the back of his head and winced. "I'm going back to bed, if you don't mind."

"No, be my guest."

She went back to work; on the couch, this time, since Ressler was doing fine on his own. Once in a while she looked in on him—she smiled when she saw that he had taken off his jeans and hung them neatly folded over a chair—but he seemed to be sleeping soundly.

At five, there was a knock at her door. The peep hole showed a young woman with straight brown hair in a pony tail, holding a small red cat on her arm. Curious, Lizzie opened the door.

"Oh wow, you're actually home! Hi," the woman said, clutching the cat to her chest as it tried to jump off her arm. "I don't think we've actually ever met face to face. I'm Jessica, from next door." She used her chin to point one door to the right. "Jess. I was wondering if you could look after Theo for a while. Just the rest of the weekend, really; I'll be back on Monday."

"Uh," Lizzie said. Did Nicky look after the cat more often? She probably did, if the litter and the bowls were any indication. And she also thought she had seen this woman's face among the pictures on her phone. The cat, too, was a dead ringer for the picture her phone started up with. Someone to trust, then, or at least someone Nicky thought of as a friend—the woman, that was; she wasn't sure about the cat. "Sure! He can sleep on my bed."

"Really? Great. Do you have enough food?"

She racked her brains. Had she seen cat food anywhere? "Let me check."

Both Jess and the cat followed her inside. "I like what you've done with the place," Jess said. "Isn't it weird that we never met before? I mean, I feel like I know you because of the telephone conversations, but still…Oh!" she interrupted herself, as she caught sight of the big lump in her bed that was Resser, who was still asleep and really should have woken up by now. "I'm sorry, I didn't know you had anyone, hehe, uh, over."

"That's ok." She was very glad she had put on proper clothes before she went to the shop. "That's Aaron. He got into a bit of an accident, so I let him sleep in. Ah. Yes, I still have a couple of tins. And plenty of kibbles." The cat, Theo, wound around her legs, looking hungry. "I'll give him some; he'll feel right at home."

She proceeded to do just that, and the cat sniffed at them with great enthusiasm, then looked up at her with crushing disappointment, made a pawing-and-burying swipe with its front paw and disappeared into the bedroom.

"Uh," Jess said, as the cat unerringly found Ressler's back and made itself comfortable on top of him.

"Nah, let him," Lizzie waved. "It's time he got up anyway. Besides, I said Theo could sleep on my bed; I can hardly take that back now, can I?"

Jess laughed. "You're sure it's no trouble?"

"No, not at all."

"Well, if he's terrible, you have my key, so you can put him back." She made her way back to the door. "He'll like the company, though—even if you're only home in the evening."

"Don't worry about Theo," Lizzie said. "We'll be having a great time together."

Jess repeated that she would be back by Monday and left, expressing once again her joy to finally meet in person and her gratitude she could drop the cat off here. Smiling, Lizzie, closed and locked the door behind her.

The cat was a pretty good alarm clock. When she walked back to the bedroom, Ressler was sitting up in bed and the cat lay stretched out in his lap, purring, belly bared and gently pushing its hind legs against Ressler's wrist as he stroked it. He looked up at her chuckle, smiling his little lopsided smile.

"Did you just buy a cat at the door?" he asked, his voice slightly hoarse.

"No. Apparently, Nicky cat-sits quite regularly. This is Theo, by the way."

"Bit of a slut, isn't he?" He used one hand to rub the cat under the chin and the other to caress its tummy and it rolled back and forth, purring ecstatically.

"Maybe it's a ginger thing."

"Mmm."

Humour still wasn't his strongest point, but at least he was looking more like his own stoic self, although the bruise around his neck was a rather alarming shade of purple and black, now, and the knot on the back of his head was clearly visible beneath his short hair. "How do you feel?"

"Better. Thanks."

"Head's better, too?"

He tried to lift one hand to touch the bruise, but the cat grabbed it and trapped it against its chest and then started kicking the hell out of it. Ressler huffed a laugh. "Ow. Ow, don't do that. Yes, it is. I'm still sore, but the headache is almost gone. Is that clock accurate?"

"Yes," Lizzie said. "And yes, you slept for ten hours. But you still have some time until you need to go and see Boscoe, don't you?" He nodded. "Go and take a shower. Shall I make us some pasta? I didn't really have lunch and you probably expect me to feed you."

"Not really," he said. "I don't mind picking something up when I leave. But if we want to go over your profiles," he managed to say it without sneering, "it'd be better to eat something here." He tilted his head. "You can cook, can you?"

Lizzie bristled. "Why shouldn't I?"

"Because you told me that you couldn't bake an egg, not very long ago."

"I think I can manage pasta," she said coolly. "Perhaps I should experiment."

He grinned. "Mac & Cheese is fine, you know. Believe me, I'm happy anyone's cooking for me."

That more or less took the wind out of her sails, so she only sputtered a little and got him a towel. Then she helped distract Theo so Ressler could get out of bed without getting mauled any further and disappeared into the kitchen while Ressler took his shower. The cat curled up on the bed in typical cat fashion and went to sleep with its head on the pillow.

She was just adding pasta sauce to the minced meat when Ressler exited the bathroom, dressed in his jeans but with his shirt clutched beneath one arm and the towel pressed against his ribs.

"Do you have any band aids? I hadn't even noticed this, but I must've towelled it open again."

He lifted the towel, and showed a long, shallow, bleeding cut on his side. "And I need some new bandages for my fingers as well."

Lizzie turned down the gas. "Is there anywhere you weren't hurt?"

He rolled his eyes. "It's just a couple of cuts. Just tell me where I can find your medical kit and I'll patch myself up."

Yeah, like that was going to happen. She snorted softly, collected her kit and wondered how she was going to get the slash on his ribs bandaged. In the end, she settled by cutting a piece of gauze into long strips, stuck that to the cut—it truly was barely more than a scratch, but it was still bleeding, and she could understand he didn't want his shirt sticking to it—and secured it in place with a double length of tape. While she was playing nurse, she also bandaged his fingers again. Here, the cuts were much deeper, and the skin surrounding the wounds had turned a disturbing purplish black.

"Shouldn't you have this looked at? What if tendons were severed?"

"I can still move 'em," Ressler said, demonstrating. "Just bind them up nice and tight."

The way those cuts gaped open when he flexed his fingers made her flinch, but she could hardly force him to go see a doctor if he didn't want to. She added a liberal dose of antiseptic cream before she wrapped him up.

"What about your head?"

"It's been knocked about enough," he said, leaning away from her. "It's fine." He did steal another Tylenol from the bottle, but only raised an eyebrow when she stared at him, and she shrugged and put the first aid kit away again. If he wanted to display moronic macho behaviour, that was his choice.

The pasta was ready ten minutes later and she was happy she'd cooked the entire package. Somehow, he managed to inhale the entire pan—minus her own modest portion—while she updated him on the backgrounds of two of Boscoe's Chosen.

"Were you hungry?" she asked innocently, after she'd described Solomon White's rise to drug fame through a career in assault and homicide and prison life; and Bani's, whose real name was Barry Amnala, modest successes in Philadelphia.

"Mm." He licked his spoon clean and stared at her screen, and at the information she'd found on Xian Shuo, the Black Ghost. "So he's from Chicago."

"Yes, and they know him pretty well down there." Lizzie got up, put half a loaf of sliced bread on the table, peanut butter and jam, and handed Ressler a knife, which he accepted absentmindedly. "Or rather, his legend is pretty well known. His sister's more famous, though. The sister's name is Lin Yin, otherwise known as The Needle. She rules zōngpài zhǐ zhēn, the cult of the Needle, the Chinese underground in Chicago. Shuo used to run errands for her—the violent kind. Apparently, he got too violent." She suppressed a smile as Ressler, focusing wholly on the text on the screen, made himself two PB&J sandwiches without spilling a drop, and shoved them into his mouth one half at the time. He reached for the bread again. "There's nothing on Lin Yin in the database. Nothing. We know she exists but we don't even have a picture of her. Until a couple of months ago, we didn't have anything on Shuo either, but apparently he was traced back to a massive homicide. He got sloppy. The Needle and the Black Ghost had a great clash a couple of months ago. Twelve people dead—five civilians, the rest known members of the cult."

"So Shuo wanted either the drugs of the money it would bring him to compete against his sister," Ressler hypothesized, swallowing the first half of his third sandwich. He licked some jam from his thumb. "But how did Boscoe know how to reach him?" He picked up the second half. "I get how he found Bani, Solomon and Claus. They all have some renown. But Shuo literally didn't exist before now."

"Maybe Blofeld thought it might be a good idea to forge a tie between him and the ambitious second in command of an Asian faction."

"Hmm." He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. She had no idea where he was leaving all that food. No one would ever call Ressler slender, but he didn't have an ounce of fat and by now he'd devoured about a pound of pasta and four slices of bread, and it just kept disappearing into him as if he didn't even notice he was eating. Well, he did sleep all day, and didn't eat anything…Still, if he kept this up, she'd have to shop for bread again in the morning.

"What?" she asked.

"What if it wasn't Blofeld who attended Shuo on the fact that a massive drug shipment was due to arrive in Baltimore?"

She immediately knew what he was talking about. Reddington. As a matter of fact, that was something she'd considered as well, after her chat with Red yesterday. "He wouldn't."

Ressler snorted. It sounded a bit odd with his mouth full. He swallowed. "Yes he would." He began slathering peanut butter on a fresh slice of bread.

"He wouldn't do anything that would get you killed," Lizzie rephrased. "Red wants Blofeld; he wouldn't compromise the mission by…"

"The fact that he employs them doesn't mean that Reddington controls the people he knows," Ressler interrupted her. The old anger that always seemed part of him whenever he was dealing with Reddington showed in the furrows in his forehead, and he slapped another slice almost aggressively on top of the one on his plate. "If there's one thing I've learned since I joined the Post Office, it's that Reddington ALWAYS has his own agenda. Reddington may not have planned for Shuo to kill me, but he wouldn't shed any tears over my dead body either."

Lizzie wasn't so certain about that. Ever since Anslo Garrick had infiltrated the Post Office, she'd got the feeling that Red had almost started to appreciate Ressler. Kind of like she had, only for different reasons. She knew better than to try to defend Red to Ressler, though, and simply shrugged. To distract him, she said, "If we want to find out where the container is going to be stored when the ship comes in, we'd best chat with the harbourmaster himself. His name is Nicholas Hardy."

"If we talk to him, people will know."

"Alternatively," Lizzie nodded, "we can break into his office and see if we can find something on his computer. Or in his…what is it called? Log book?"

"I know very little about boats," Ressler said, and frowned again, as if that admission reminded him of something unpleasant. "What about Skinny's whereabouts?"

"The cops have been staking out two addresses. I haven't heard from them yet. I'll call you when I hear something."

Ressler nodded. He popped the last bit of his last sandwich into his mouth and read Claus' background, and the profile she'd drawn up for him while he was chewing. "Claus may want to make a deal with me," he said finally. "We get along just fine."

Lizzie shivered. "He's a scary piece of shit. Oh, that reminds me, before you start getting all buddy buddy with Claus… that woman who was raped during your raid? You wondered if they'd swabbed her, right? Well, whoever raped her, also cut off all the first digits of her right hand."

"What?"

"The attacker wore a condom, and he cut off…"

"I heard you." He rubbed his forehead. "Jesus."

"No DNA. The description matches Claus', so we can pick him up on that, but we don't have any hard evidence."

"Fuck." His mouth tightened.

"Yeah. Cooper sent me the report at eleven yesterday evening." She placed a hand on his arm, put it somewhere else when he flinched and she realized she'd laid it on his bruise, and said, "Be careful around him. He may look like a jovial guy, but he's every bit the monster Shuo was."

"He's only a monster to women," Ressler said quietly. "He wouldn't dare stand up to me. Besides, if he so much as looks at me funny, I'm putting a bullet between his teeth." But he almost looked sad, as if he was disappointed the drug dealing thug really turned out to be a drug dealing thug and nothing more.

He shoved his chair back. "I'd better get going. Tell Boscoe that Shuo's out."

"Are you going to tell him you killed him?"

"I don't see why not," Ressler said, voice hard. He got up, blanched and steadied himself with his hands on the table.

"Ressler?"

"I'm fine, just got up too quickly."

Lizzie wanted to tell him to be careful again, or perhaps to not go at all and stay here until he could stand up without feeling dizzy. But she said nothing; if she'd been in his place, she wouldn't have appreciated him telling her to back off either, and after a few seconds he raised his head, found his balance in order, grabbed his jacket and left.