OK. OK.

Focus on your breathing, Liz. Just focus on your breathing. Red's gotten himself out of worse messes than this. He'll do it this time, too. It'll be OK. You're gonna be OK.

Liz took a slow, deep breath and let it out through her nose as discreetly as possible. If the atmosphere in the conference room grew any more strained, she thought she might very well actually pass out. Even though Red put on a visibly convincing front of being completely comfortable and confident, she could feel the undercurrent of his unease flowing below her own anxiety. She tried her hardest not to betray his true mood to the rest of the people in the room lest it be used against them.

While there was a significant portion of her that did believe Red's assertion that they had the upper hand in these negotiations, she couldn't help worrying it wouldn't matter. It was more than a little terrifying, to be at the mercy of the very justice system she had sworn to uphold not so long ago. She wasn't about to leave Red's side for anything, but she also didn't want to spend the rest of her life in a glass box or a prison cell in another black site in the middle of nowhere. Which was a real possibility if things didn't go their way.

Cooper moved his pen down the list of items on the legal pad of paper in front of him on the table. "Your eventual freedom from that box is contingent on your full cooperation. We're going to need you to prove you can work with us in good faith. That you're not going to up and disappear on us again.

"First, I expect you to share everything you know about Tom Keen and the circumstances that led Elizabeth to shoot him. His disappearance triggered a manhunt. We need to know how much you knew and when you knew it. After that, you'll have to provide us with actionable intel on at least half a dozen Blacklisters over the next few months," he said, "and on Elizabeth's part, any in-depth profiles we deem necessary to facilitate bringing them to justice."

"And we'll happily do all of that. Just as soon as we get back from visiting Elizabeth's father, wherever you have him stashed. My people will have us there and back before bed check."

Ressler leaned in. "Hang on… You want to what?"

"You have to give a little to get a little, Donald. Give us an incentive to cooperate with you."

"The incentive is not being locked up in a deep, dark hole in the ground."

"Oh, sure. It's always the criminal informants who have been traumatized by the FBI in petty, unnecessary ways that give the best information. And of course the ones who have absolutely nothing in the world left to lose would never dream of putting agents in danger with faulty intel, especially not the very same agents they might hold grudges against."

"Are you threatening me?"

"Not at all; I'm giving you a much needed lessen in human nature, one I'm surprised you haven't learned yet. If you break a person's spirit, they'll have less motivation to give it their all to help you later on."

Red and Ressler stared each other down across the conference table. Cooper sighed and rolled his eyes.

"Tracking chips. For both of you. After you speak with your father, you come right back here. No funny business—no detours, no attempts to vanish into the wind, no delays, nothing."

"Elizabeth gets the same immunity agreement I have, before we set one foot outside these walls. We don't need anyone accusing her of attempting to escape custody the second our backs are turned," Red said.

Cooper looked unimpressed; Ressler looked disgruntled, which Liz was sure was becoming his default facial expression. He pushed himself up out of his chair and started pacing, while Red completely ignored him and kept his attention on Cooper.

"Come on, Harold. If you're willing to offer that agreement to someone like me, surely someone whose only crimes are killing a spy and going to ground afterwards is a bona fide angel in comparison."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Then I'll see if I can manage to remember the names of any Blacklisters. I'm afraid my memory isn't quite what it used to be, you know."

Cooper pursed his lips and, after a long moment, tossed his pen down on the table. "Fine. She gets the same agreement."

"Wonderful!" Red said, and clapped his hands once before rubbing them together. "Now, what do you say we get this show on the road?"

Cooper reached out a hand to catch Ressler's attention and Ressler stopped dead in his tracks.

"Escort them down to medical," Cooper said; Ressler looked over at Red and Liz before meeting his eyes again and nodding, silently.

Liz rolled her shoulder and gingerly prodded at the fresh wound beneath her bandage and shirt. Her local anesthetic was beginning to wear off, but she was so relieved to be rid of her handcuffs that she didn't mind the discomfort very much. Walking through these familiar halls held at least the appearance of normality now that she wasn't restrained anymore. She wondered if Red felt the same type of relief back when he first turned himself in. She'd been too caught up in her own mishmash of confusion and denial at the time to really notice.

It was Red's turn now with the medics, but the procedure wouldn't take very long if her own was anything to go by, which it would be as long as he didn't pick any fights with Ressler.

Liz didn't want to waste any of the limited time she'd have outside of The Box; besides stretching her legs, she needed to see if she could do a little negotiating of her own. And she knew just the person to turn to.

Liz had never considered them particularly close—she'd spent so much of her time before she ran worried about people finding out Red was her soulmate that she didn't allow herself a chance to really bond with anyone—but when Aram saw her walking freely across the Post Office, he rushed over to her and hugged her with something that felt a lot like relief.

"Agent Keen, it's so good to see you."

Liz winced at the sound of her old title. It was futile, she thought, to keep reminding him she wasn't an agent anymore, at least for the time being. They didn't know each other well enough for him to feel it was respectful to call her by only her first name yet.

"You saw me this morning, Aram. And yesterday."

"Yeah, but that was different. Now you're not…"

"Locked up?"

"Well, yeah. I'm really glad you're OK. And not kidnapped or anything. Or worse."

"I'm sorry I made you worry. Mr. Reddington and I both are."

"It's all right. I understand. Well, not really, but I'm sure I don't know the whole story."

"You got that right," she said, laughing awkwardly. Aram joined in, and for a few moments, it felt like nothing had changed, that she had fallen back into her old life minus one fake husband. If not for the dull ache at her incision, she might have been able to hold on to that illusion.

Aram smiled at her. "You look good."

"You're sweet, but I'm sure I don't. I slept on a metal cot last night."

"No, you do. You've got… you've got a… a glow or something."

"A glow?"

"Yeah," he said, offering her another shy smile. "What's it like?"

"What's what like?"

"To have found your soulmate. I used to dream about it when I was a kid. I still do sometimes, when my apartment feels especially empty at the end of a long day at work," he said. "I kinda gave up hope, you know? Since it's taken this long, I don't know if I'll ever…"

"I'm sure you will, Aram," she said, reaching out and giving his forearm a gentle, encouraging squeeze. "Think about it—Red has almost two decades on you and he only met me a few months ago."

"I don't know whether that's reassuring or depressing," he said with a small frown. He looked at Liz expectantly for a while before she realized he was still waiting for her answer.

"You really want to hear this? OK, well… I'm not gonna lie and tell you meeting your soulmate makes everything easy. It sure as hell doesn't. My life has been way more complicated since I met Red than it ever was before. Before I met him, my life was just… normal. Or I thought it was, at least. That… well. You know how that turned out.

"But the truth of the matter is, I hadn't given my soulmate any real thought in a long time before I met Red. Now that I have, I haven't been able to stop. He's always with me, and if it ever feels like he's not, I start to panic. If I can't feel him, all I can think about is the possibility that I never will again, that something's happened to him and that's just… I don't know how to deal with that. It's unlike anything I've ever experienced."

"Would you go back? If you could chose, would you undo it?"

"No," she answered, automatically.

"How come, do you think? If it's so complicated now—"

"It's hard to explain. Meeting him fulfilled a… a need I never really realized was there. Unless you could erase my memory of what being this… understood… feels like, I could never go back. I mean, really—go back to living a lie with a spy who insinuated himself into my life for reasons I still don't fully comprehend? God, no. Tom might've killed me eventually. He certainly had it in him."

Aram swallowed hard and furrowed his brow. "Have you found out anything more about that?"

"About Tom?"

"About why he was in your life. Do you know if it was just a coincidence or if there was something he needed to get from you specifically?"

"I don't know. We haven't even figured out who he worked for. He seemed afraid of whoever it was, but he didn't really explain why. I didn't… give him a chance to. I couldn't. He… He would've manipulated the situation if I gave him any leeway."

"You don't have to justify what you did to him with me, Agent Keen. I believe you did whatever you had to do for your own safety."

"Thank you, Aram. For being the only person here who hasn't judged me for all of this," Liz said, and it was true. Even before she ran away with Red, she never felt any kind of suspicion from Aram. He was always ready and willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

She bit her lip, and dropped her voice to just above a whisper. "Can you… do me a favor? I wouldn't ask this of you if I had any other choice, but there's no one else I trust to have my back here."

"What do you need?"

"When I speak to my father… I'd like our conversation to stay private. There are things I need to share with him, things I don't trust the FBI not to use against me or Mr. Reddington. Personal things," she said. She raised her eyebrows and looked at him pointedly. "Family things."

Aram looked puzzled for a few moments before a switch flipped and his eyes flicked down to her stomach and back again.

"But your file says—"

"I know what my file says, I filled that part out myself on the medical history section of my employment application. At the time, I filled it out truthfully to the best of my knowledge, but… Look. Nobody knows much about the science behind this soulmate stuff. Let's just say things apparently work differently if you have the right people involved."

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh, you're telling me. I know I won't be able to keep it a secret forever, I just… I need to buy some time. And I think a little privacy when I tell my father he's gonna be a grandfather really isn't too much to ask."

"No, no, you're right, of course. I'll do everything I can."