Guys, I know this story is a marathon bordering on a triathlon, but I am honestly grateful that so many of you are sticking with it and with me. Thank you so much for your support, wonderful feedback, and love you're sending my way. It means the world to me. I can't thank you enough.

Now that things cooled down in Germany I feel confident enough to force you, my wonderful reviewers, into another cyber-group hug. Thank you: Gaialy [yes, Moira approves, feels a little like a cold day in hell, I know. Thank you.], orthankg1 [I think a universe where Slade doesn't hate Oliver is a universe missing a worthy enemy. Sorry. But, you know, we still have our hands full with Malcolm Merlyn, so…. ;) ], belairdesi [Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed the Moira-part!], thekiller00 [I'm delighted you liked Felicity and Moira's interaction. And you'll see that your musings will be answered soon. Thank you.], BlueJean452 [thanks!], SassyGirlReader [You read the last chapter during a concert? That's kind of awesome. Thank you; I take it as the biggest compliment!], ChiefPam [I'm excited that you noticed the little change in Thea and Roy's fight. I'll get back to that later. Thank you.], supercode [I agree: the QC-offices would be the worst environment to really work in. And we'll see more of Roy soon, I promise. Thank you!], livingthefictionallife [Thank you!], CealSR [Such a coincidence that you watched that episode. Glad you enjoyed this chapter despite that. Thank you.], yazaru116 [I'm glad you like my fic—despite the heat from hell. Bedankt!], FaberryBRA [:) ], schrooten5 [You make me blush. Thank you!], OnkelJo [I'm so glad you like the chapter. Thank you for being such a faithful reader and reviewer. Du bist 'n Hammer. Danke!] bellapaige88 [Have a nice vacation! Thank you for sharing your thoughts], Jen [I love every single one of your reviews. They are so insightful and special. Thank you!], 11-Dino [Hey, welcome back. Good to know that you're still around. Ich hab' gesehen, du hast beim Tumblr-Reblog-Marathon alles gegeben. Alle Daumen hoch dafür!], and our guest [thanks for letting me know the prologue didn't work for you due to lacking realism.]

Albiona was wonderful enough to fix my grammar and improve this chapter. She'll forever be my unicorn of awesome.

And now let's move plot to finally bring this story to the home-stretch. Love, Jules

April 3rd, 2013

Wind was tearing at him, catching in his hood and nearly pulling it back. He fell toward the earth, gravity digging its claws into him, dragging him down mercilessly until he was suddenly jerked back upward. His parachute opened with a distinct 'clack' taken away by the wind. His decent toward the ground was slowed but still steady and it only took ten seconds for his feet to touch down on. He had hit his mark perfectly, landing exactly where he wanted to be: on top of Merlyn Global's headquarters.

With trained skill he got rid of the parachute. More than cloth and strings, it was state of the art A.R.G.U.S.-technology that he had never given back after freeing Felicity from that cell in Bludhaven. Pressing one button was enough to make the parachute fold itself with a forceful "swoosh" into a handy square he reattached to his back.

Keeping his head low and his feet bent, The Hood walked toward the housing storing the motor of the elevator. Due to the blueprints Felicity made him study, he knew exactly what to do, where to apply pressure. He worked methodically and quietly; only seconds later the panel rested against the housing. Felicity had been right: it was a tight fit. Diggle had also been right: it was the safest access point.

Bringing his hand to his chest, he activated the communication system. "I'm in position. Do it."

The faint sound of typing sounded through the connection, ending with a click that was a little more forceful, Felicity hitting the enter button followed by an "It's done."

He didn't need the vocal confirmation. He could see the results: darkness rolled through the city. The steady glow that had illuminated the streets stretching out far below him vanished. The logo spelling out 'Merlyn Global' went out, leaving Oliver in sudden darkness, the moon and stars well-covered by clouds.

Without hesitation, Oliver snapped two light sticks and tucked them underneath the strap of his quiver. He was already moving when he whispered, "I'm going in."

"Leave the line open."

Felicity's voice was calm as it hit his ears and he was thankful for that. He was aware that it was her version of asking him to be careful. He knew she had a bad feeling about what he was about to do, and he appreciated that she didn't make this any harder for him than it already was.

In the same spirit, he didn't press the button his hand was already hovering over to cut communications. Instead, he simply climbed into the housing, twisting to fit through the small hole. The green glow of the light sticks surrounded him as he moved carefully, squeezing himself past the winding motor. He had to crawl and duck, to balance and tear open another panel, then he poked his head through a hole. Only darkness greeted him, but he knew the elevator shaft gaped thirty stories below him.

He tugged one glow stick free from the strap of his quiver and let it drop. It fell, a green beacon descending into the blackness, until it hit a surface with a faint thud. The light marked his destination, six floors below. He rooted a hook in the panel next to his head. Attaching a handle to the cable, he let himself fall. Adrenaline flooded his senses, speeding up his heartbeat and creating a positive rush he wouldn't let himself be distracted by. Clinging to his concentration, he shot downward, the walls racing past him, but almost instantly he pressed a button and his decent slowed.

Once again he landed soundlessly, this time on top of the elevator positioned on the twenty-fourth floor. His destination lay one floor above him, separated by a second elevator shaft. He aimed a rope-arrow at a metal bar above the gap, let the rope pull him up, swung across the gaping hole, and stood on a tiny ledge with his nose practically pressed against the metal doors of the elevator. Using all of his strength, he tore the doors open and stepped onto the plush carpet of the executive floor.

Darkness surrounded him. All the lights in the windowless hall were out, which told him that Diggle's trip to the main emergency generator had gone unnoticed. Deactivating it had been necessary to make sure the surveillance system was offline, to avoid security tapes of The Hood breaking into Merlyn Global. He walked with purpose down the hall, around the corner, and toward the door leading to his destination. It wasn't locked and he slipped into the room.

Cold welcomed him, a steady buzzing created by the technology filling the room. Felicity had been right: the mainframe had a separate, second emergency power generator so everything in here was still on. "I'm in," he informed her.

She answered immediately. "Seven minutes." He could hear how tense she was just in the way she said those two words. She sent an unspoken 'hurry' his way that he felt was entirely uncalled for: if he had seven minutes left until the emergency generator started its controlled shutdown of the mainframe due to the continued power loss, he had only needed three minutes to get from the roof to the server room. That was a pretty flawless performance that didn't justify her attitude—even if it wasn't exactly a negative one.

But since he intended to keep up this flawless performance and snapping at your wife during an important mission was the exact opposite of that, he ignored her statement and checked his surroundings. Carefully, he let his eyes travel over the server cabinets which were filled with hard disks – or something – and lots of blinking lights. He had seen Firestorm's mainframe, but this was much bigger, much more impressive—not that he'd tell Felicity. Finding the access port Felicity had described to him in huge – entirely unnecessary – detail, he moved toward it to plug the security fob in.

A light blinking red indicated that the fob was working. He stared at it, willing the light to switch to green and signal that the search was finished, that necessary information was copied to the fob and that a backdoor was installed, giving Felicity access to the system. Pressing his lips together, he stood there. Being reduced to waiting tore at him and made him feel strangely vulnerable. He exhaled noisily. This was taking too long.

"It's only been a minute," Felicity said. "I told you, it could take five minutes, three's the minimum." A few seconds of silence followed before her voice reached his ears again. "I'm sure there are petabytes of data that need to be scanned. If it's anything like Queen Consolidated's system, it's huge. Even though, I'm sure QC's mainframe is even bigger since it has more employees, more subsidiaries. It's more international—" He could practically see her shake her head at herself. "Wow, that sounds a lot like a weird form of penis-comparison but I didn't mean actual, measurable size. When it comes to computers size really doesn't matter. Data-wise, the smallest thing can be huge, like powerful…. Why haven't you snapped at me yet? Keep me from going down that metal track. Even though, we both know that at the end there's an ego-boost waiting for you, so you're probably not stopping me on purpose. Which is why I'll stop myself. In three. Two. One."

He could hear her take a deep breath. Amusement stirred within him, but he couldn't let that come to the surface. He had to focus and couldn't give in to the distraction that was Felicity and her mouth running away from her, making him think about things that weren't helpful in this situation. Especially, since he knew that her ramble was a sign of her nervousness, of that fact that the tension filling her more and more was close to breaking free. He needed her head in the game, he needed her to focus, just like he needed to focus himself.

Ignoring everything she had said, he asked, "Are you getting anything?"

"Not yet."

He waited, but she left it at that, sounding more in charge again. She had composed herself in the time it took to take three breaths. A strange sense of pride filled him. She is an extraordinary woman.

The soft humming of the working computers surrounded him while he listened carefully for any unwanted sounds coming from the hall. His eyes were glued to the security fob. Every part of him willed the green light to appear—but the red blinking continued.

"How long?"

"Four minutes."

He had told her to count down, to give him the time left until the mainframe shut down. That meant he had been waiting here for three minutes. It felt longer to him. Like a statue he stood frozen into place, following the behavioral pattern that had been drilled into him: when on assignment there's no fidgeting, no shuffling around. There's only focusing at the task at hand, staying in charge of the situation, and patience. The latter was an illusion he surrounded himself with, he knew. He wasn't a patient man, he hated watching, listening, waiting, but it was all he could do.

The soft sound hitting his ears told him Felicity would say something before she actually did. "The backdoor's installed. I can track the progress now. Hold up."

The familiar clicking of fingers flying over a keyboard calmed him. Even if it was Felicity taking action, one of them was doing something.

"Wow, that's a crazy amount of data," she told him. "I was wrong before: this is a monster of a mainframe, way bigger than QC's." She sounded preoccupied as she talked, and he knew that she was more voicing her thoughts than really addressing him. "And complex. All of this seems excessive. Even for a Future 500 company. There shouldn't be that much data."

She went back to typing silently and he was partly convinced that she had lost herself in her work so much that she had forgotten about him when her urgent voice hit his ears. "Take the fob out. Now."

Not questioning the fact that the thing still hadn't given him the green light or hesitating, he followed her order.

The urgency in Felicity's voice managed to increase. "Get out. Now."

He was already heading back to the door when the constant buzzing of the technology changed. The mainframe was powering down – if he hadn't messed up his silent counting, which he knew he hadn't – two minutes early. Listening carefully, he opened the door. The hall lay in silence, there weren't any footsteps, signaling that somebody was coming his way, no yells, no signs that he had been noticed. And in that second it hit him: he wasn't the one needing to prepare for battle, it was Felicity who was already fighting.

Slipping into the hall, he hurried back toward the elevator. "Major Badass?"

"I'm taking care of him. You get out of there. I'm sure he's alerting security."

She was all business, calm and in charge. Her head was in the game, and he needed it to stay there. She had caught that Chinese hacker before, she could do it again, or escape him, or whatever she was doing. Knowing that this time it was his turn to stay quiet and not become a distraction, he did as she told him.

The metal elevator doors he'd pried open stood waiting for him. He ran toward the gap and jumped, pushing himself off on the edge. Twenty-five floors yawned below as he flew through the air, crossing to the green glow where the light stick rested on top of the elevator.

He landed heavily, for once causing a loud bang to ring though the vertical tunnel stretching out above and below him. Not wasting any time, he picked up the glow stick and jumped up to grab the handle dangling above him. One press of a button later, he was shooting upward again. Climbing through the hole, squeezing past the motor didn't take much time and soon he was back on the roof to reset the panel. The city was still dark. By Felicity's calculations it would take at least thirty minutes to reboot the system supplying power to Starling City's business district, and the whole trip to Merlyn Global had taken exactly twelve minutes. Time to go and meet Diggle at the corner of Ocean and Grant.

He ran to the edge of the rooftop. He jumped, he fell, wind once again tearing at him. He enjoyed the adrenaline uproar for a second, but he knew that was all he could allow himself. With one push of his fingers, the parachute unfolded behind him, jerking him a few meters higher.

It was done. Now he just hoped all of this was worth it.

April 4th, 2013

This was worse than she had feared.

At the same time, it was exactly what they had hoped for: in the depth of data Oliver had brought back on the security fob were some answers to questions that had nagged at them for months. The answers weren't all bad, there were some good news woven in there, but they were thoroughly interlaced with so much bad stuff that Felicity knew that the night ahead would be sleepless. There was absolutely no way she wouldn't stay up with Oliver while he worked through all of the shit she would have to tell him.

At the moment Oliver was out trying to answer another highly disturbing question: how The Count could have escaped from Starling City's asylum with a new version of Vertigo in his pocket. Oliver himself had deemed The Count completely out of it due to an overdose of his own poison.

Felicity could never approve of a highly lethal and addictive drug flooding the streets, but she had to admit that Oliver being busy with that gave her time to go through the Merlyn-files.

Merlyn-files—Felicity liked the name she had come up with for the collected data. It had a nice ring to it, she thought, made the whole thing sound better than it really was. The files were thick in the figurative sense, meaning a terabyte of assembled information, consisting of documents, pictures, blueprints, saved emails, bank paperwork, and audio and video files. The data mining program Felicity'd coded had stumbled over an archive that could be labeled 'irrefutable evidence leaving no reasonable doubt.' Felicity understood why someone might want to hold on to all those things, store it as leverage or whatever, but at the same time she couldn't help but think that saving all this incriminatory information in the same place was stupidly reckless.

Checking the files made Felicity curse Major Badass even more. Installing the backdoor had tipped him off. Felicity (since dealing with somebody who claimed to be major badass, she seriously wondered if she needed a cool hacker-name, too) had feared that it might. She had taken a chance with it, had known that the changes implemented in the code would be pretty obvious—especially, since it was based on something that her nemesis (maybe, the word was a bit strong, but she had always wanted an arch-enemy and Major Badass was a worthy opponent) had come up with in the first place. She had warned Oliver of the risk that came with it. She had done so, even though she knew that he would tell her to do it. (Of course he had. If he hadn't she might have feared for a sudden snow storm in hell and the devil catching a cold.) But it had seemed only fair to leave the ultimate decision up to him—after all, he was the one inside the skyscraper if all the alarms went off.

Luckily, Felicity had managed to push that back until Oliver had left the building—aka the roof of the building. He hadn't told her about his plan to jump off a thirty stories skyscraper with a parachute. In hindsight, Felicity was glad that she hadn't thought to ask about his escape-route… That wouldn't have mixed well with her resolution not to go all wifly on Oliver when he pulled up his hood. But while Oliver floated to the ground with the help of an overly expensive (stolen) piece of equipment, Felicity didn't have time to worry about that: she had been busy keeping Major Badass in check, shaking him while avoiding all her usual coding tricks and habits. She had to make sure that the other hacker couldn't connect the person he found in Merlyn Global's system to the CEO of Firestorm, Inc.

The first thing Major Failure had done was try to infiltrate the security fob. When that hadn't worked, he had retreated to shutting down the server to make it impossible for them to steal any more data. That had been a smart move. It had also worked. Felicity knew that the Merlyn-files were incomplete. Very crucial information was missing.

Sadly, she couldn't tell Yongtak about this field-test, but their new software had really proven itself. The Chinese hacker had tried to use the backdoor to get to Felicity—and failed, majorly.

By Felicity's calculations that should put her in the lead with two to one.

Besting your nemesis was a really good feeling, Felicity had to admit.

Chances were very good that the missing information would make Oliver even angrier than the one they had gathered.

Felicity just decided that that equaled a draw, keeping her in the lead in the battle of the hackers, when she heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs; Oliver and John were back. She turned with her chair. The way Oliver walked and held his shoulders told Felicity that his trip to the aquarium hadn't gone well. There, a man hopped up on the new Vertigo had first looked at pretty fishes, (the aquarium probably was a really good place to trip—if you were into that sort of thing), only to then wave a gun around and fire at a security camera, leaving Felicity blind.

An angry frown darkening Oliver's handsome face was revealed as he forcefully pulled his hood back. It confirmed Felicity's suspicion: he wasn't happy.

That was probably the worst precondition for their upcoming talk.

She met John's eyes as Oliver forced himself to set his bow down gently on his workbench. "The guy died before we could hit him with the antidote," John offered. "How did things go here?"

Felicity's inner debate about delaying telling Oliver what she found out died. She probably wouldn't have done it anyway because they had this whole honesty-thing working for them, but that didn't change the fact that she dreaded filling him in. At least John's question gave Felicity the chance for an angry glare of her own—even though, the soldier was completely unimpressed with it.

"I'm done looking through the Merlyn-files."

That sentence got the men's attention. Oliver's posture turned even more rigid. Standing next to his workbench, he turned to her, freezing into position. Felicity wished he would sit down, but she knew him and she knew not to ask him to do so. Every time she had asked him to have an aggravating conversation sitting down, he had shot up within one minute. So, Felicity simply got up from her seat as well.

In response, Oliver's shoulders squared even more. John crossed his arms over his chest. Yes, their respective body languages were perfectly clear. Their states of mind were spelled out in billboard-sized letters, illuminated, and blinking. They were all pretty obvious. As was Oliver's silent demand to tell him what she found and to spare him any lengthy explanations. She knew him and she knew what he needed now: hard facts that could be surrounded by and explained in further detail later.

So, she simply said it. "Malcolm Merlyn bombed the Queen's Gambit."

A telling lot of nothing was Oliver's first reaction. He didn't move, didn't blink, didn't say anything. He simply stood there, returning her gaze. Felicity could practically see the information sink in and start tearing at him. His first instinct was to avoid her eyes. Emotions took over his face, utter despair, pain, desperation, turning his eyes watery, opening his mouth as breath hitched in his throat. He exhaled deliberately and slowly to steady his breathing. But for once that didn't seem to be enough. He brought his fingertips up to his eyebrows, closed his eyes while blowing air out through his nose. Letting his hands fall down, he straightened up, turning into a stiff statue again with his arms hanging by his sides. Felicity saw his thumb connect with his index finger. He looked at her. "Malcolm's responsible."

It was a statement, not a question. Felicity appreciated that he spared himself the breath to ask if she was sure. She was glad that he didn't waste their time like this. He knew she wouldn't have said it if she wasn't sure. He trusted her to give him proven information.

Still, she nodded. "Yes. I found the blueprints of the yacht and the transfer of $250,000 to Guillermo Barrera. Apparently, he's good with bombs. And knives—which is a detail you omitted when you told me about him, by the way—"

Seeing the look on Oliver's face, she forced her tongue to stop moving. By this, she managed to keep from asking him if he agreed with her that it was kind of ironic that Oliver had killed Barrera, the killer who had been hired by Merlyn to kill Oliver with a bomb, when Barrera had been in town to kill Merlyn, who Oliver most definitely regretted saving from the killer who had been hired as a substitute.

That chain of events was as messed up and hard to follow as that whole damn sentence.

Quite a few steps were separating Oliver from Felicity and Diggle. The bodyguard had moved to sit on the edge of Felicity's desk. Felicity saw Oliver's fingers circle each other in a dangerously slow pace and that visual kept her on the other side of the med table, too. Oliver needed space and she gave it to him.

His voice calm and reasonable, John stated, "I guess it's safe to say Robert Queen was the target." He addressed Felicity, resting his gaze on her. It was a tactic they had successfully used before: John and Felicity would just discuss this, reasonably, giving Oliver the time to gather his thoughts and emotions and to join in whenever he was ready.

Slowly she nodded. "Yes, I agree. Oliver wasn't supposed to be on that boat. Robert was the target. But I don't know why. Sadly, there wasn't some long blog entry explaining Merlyn's actions. But there were blueprints of the warehouse Moira stored the wreck in. Merlyn found out about it around the same time Walter did. From what I found, Moira wasn't involved in the bombing."

John nodded, jumping on the one good aspect in all of this. "That's good news."

"It is," Felicity agreed wholeheartedly. "It's a relief."

"Do you know where the wreck is?"

The answer to John's question was yes and no. Felicity kept from sighing. "Merlyn had people move it—and destroy it."

"The wreck's gone?" Oliver asked quietly, but a certain hardness crept into his voice. To Felicity it was a clear sign that the countdown to his explosion had begun.

"Yes." Felicity saw that the hardness had also entered his features.

"The Undertaking," he spoke measuredly. "What did you find out about that?"

Subconsciously, Felicity licked her lips in a nervous gesture. This was the other bad part. "There was a folder labeled Undertaking on the fob, but apart from a file with the address of a warehouse, it was empty. I don't think we managed to copy all of it."

"So, we have nothing?" Oliver summed up, the anger clearly growing inside him and adding fuel to the explosive countdown.

"No," Felicity corrected, "we have an address. That's not nothing."

Oliver pressed his lips together while John said, "It's a lead to follow. I'll check it out tomorrow. Neither of you should go near that warehouse."

Felicity nodded. "Yes, that sounds like a plan."

If Oliver agreed he didn't tell them. Instead, he said, "I know you found more. Tell me, Felicity."

She swallowed unnecessarily, her throat dry. "My…" She took a short breath, "kidnapping. Merlyn hired the kidnappers. There's a video of me in the locked room. He sent it to Walter."

His anger snapped into fury. Roaring, Oliver threw the workbench onto its side. The machines, the tools, the metal he used to make his arrowheads, the mug filled with leftovers of long forgotten coffee, and – most importantly – his bow clattered to the floor in a deafening crash that echoed from the bare walls. Shards were sliding over the floor, brown liquid was spilling with a splash, the drill knocked a dent into the concrete floor.

The sudden explosion of noise was followed by silence. Breathing heavily, Oliver stood over the mess he had made and it was obvious that it had done nothing to help him vent his anger. His hands were clenched into fists, his chest was visibly rising and falling, and his muscles were flexed. He was strained like a rubber band, ready to snap.

And then all the fight left him.

The sudden and unexpected deflating was accentuated by a thud as Oliver let himself drop onto the seat behind him, the one that always stood next to the workbench he had tipped over. He sat with his shoulders slumped forward, his chin nearly resting on his chest, his breathing calculated. Seeing him like that spurred Felicity into moving but she only managed to take two steps before Oliver said in an unfamiliarly pleading way, "Please, don't."

The memory of a moment shared in her Firestorm office when she had asked him to keep his distance so that she could regain her composure rooted her to the spot. Still, he met her eyes. The blue in his was paler, lightened by the wetness collecting but not spilling. He cleared his throat, but his voice was weak when he said, "It was all him." He shook his head, quickly, dimly, like he couldn't believe it.

Felicity dug her brain for something, anything, to say to make him feel better, but she came up empty. Because Oliver had just summed up the whole dilemma up perfectly: everything that had happened to him, every horrible torturous day of his life basically came back to Malcolm Merlyn. His best friend's father, a man he knew since childhood, had tried to kill Oliver's father and in turn was responsible for Oliver spending five years in hell, for the time away that had changed Oliver and had made him suffer and live through unspeakable experiences. Finding words to shed a positive light on that felt like a mission impossible.

"Malcolm Merlyn." Oliver spat the name out, made it sound like a curse, like the worst expletive imaginable. His face hardened along with it, his eyes had dried, turned darker with the anger returning to him. The thought that he was really riding an emotional rollercoaster right now (thankfully) got stuck on the way from Felicity's brain to her mouth as Oliver shot up from his seat again.

He took two steps into the mess he had created and this time Felicity knew what to say. "Don't you dare pick up that bow!"

He didn't. Instead, he snapped around to face her. "He's responsible!" Oliver snarled, his voice growing louder. "For EVERYTHING!"

"I know, i—"

"NO, Felicity, you DON'T! It was HIM. This whole time, and I suspected NOTHING! He played me. During dinner at the mansion, at Tommy's. He sat there, small-talking, when he is the ONLY ONE who should be on my list!"

"O—"

"He tried to kill my father. He threatened my mother. He had you kidnapped. Drove Walter to New York!"

"He got you stranded on that island," Felicity offered to complete the list, because that had to be included.

"Yes." Oliver pressed that word out as he stared at her. His eyes were pools of aggression, his whole body was getting battle ready. "His time's up."

"You are in no condition to engage him." John, the bravest man alive if you asked Felicity, stated calmly. "Especially if Merlyn brings the other archer in. You're not in the headspace to confront either of them."

The expression crossing Oliver's face showed them that he knew how absolutely right his partner was. But Felicity knew that he was stubborn enough not to care. She crossed the gap that was separating them. "Oliver, John is right, and you know he is." She took his hand in hers. "You can't blindly rush at Merlyn. That won't end well. And you'll only end up tipping him off that we're on to him. We still know nothing about The Undertaking." In the way Oliver's body tightened next to her, she sensed the upcoming objection. Keeping him from voicing it, she let go of his hand and cupped his cheek. "I'm not saying 'don't engage Merlyn.' I'm saying 'don't engage him now.'"

"He… targeted my family, the people I love. I don't care about the fucking Undertaking."

Her hand added gentle pressure to his cheek. "Yes, you do. Because we know whatever The Undertaking is it's bigger than this family. It's important and doing this right matters."

A little of the tension left his body, his hand found her hand that wasn't cupping his cheek. She could practically see him thinking, trying to come up with one reason why he should storm out of the Foundry instantly and kick Malcolm Merlyn's ass.

But he knew as well as Felicity did that there wasn't one. In fact, there were many reasons not to. "I know you hate the man, but he's your best friend's father. You need to do this right. This is not about venting anger or even revenge. This is about so much more."

He closed his eyes for a second, pressing his lips together hard.

In the silence that came with this gesture a sudden beeping sounded from Felicity's computer. Diggle turned toward the screen next to him and jumped up.

"What now?!" was all Felicity could think—and apparently it also left her lips.

"It's the Deadshot alarm. He booked a flight to Starling City. He'll be here next week."

"Of course," Felicity sighed, letting her hand drop from Oliver's face, "the two people on our most wanted list demand attention at the same time. Why didn't Lawton come to town last week? We had free time then."

Not letting go of Felicity's hand, Oliver turned to his partner. The two men looked at each other. There was some silent communication going on. Felicity wondered when that had started but found that she approved. Those two often held each other's life in their hands, protecting each other in the field. Understanding each other perfectly could only be a good thing.

Still, Felicity felt like she needed some actual words to be spoken. "Guys, we can't take on both of them. And don't forget The Count. His drug killed another person tonight."

"You're right." Oliver nodded and glanced at her quickly before placing his attention back to John. "Since we need to gather more information on The Undertaking, and we have one more week 'til Deadshot's arrival, The Count's our priority for now. Lance ordered a toxicology report, maybe that will give us some hints. But we also need to prepare for Lawton. Merlyn'll have to wait until we take him out."

Felicity started at Oliver. Seriously? He managed to surprise her with that one. But she knew how he had come to this decision when he continued, his eyes still on the other man. "I gave you a promise and I intent to keep it."

Thankfulness merged with rising tension on John's face. The collected calm that had surrounded him while Oliver had completely lost it was gone. He cleared his throat before he said, "I'll give the information Felicity found on Deadshot to my A.R.G.U.S-contact. Maybe she can get involved and help us with this. At the same time, we'll work on The Count, take him down. And I'll follow the only lead we have about The Undertaking and check the warehouse."

"Sounds like a plan."

With one forceful nod, John headed toward the stairs, but halted after a few steps. He turned back to Oliver. "Thank you. I promise you that we'll get Merlyn. We'll stop him and we'll make him pay."

"Yes," Oliver nodded. "We'll get Deadshot."

Felicity watched John leave and wondered how she had ended up with two such vengeful men and how she had ended up understanding their respective needs for revenge so perfectly. Hearing the heavy metal door above fall into its frame, Felicity turned to Oliver. "Are you okay?" She heard her own question and couldn't help but feel like it sounded stupid. So she hurried to add, "Apart from finding out that the father of your best friend is pure evil. Basically a diabolical spawn of Satan."

He snorted. "Oh, yeah. Apart from that I'm perfect."

"I'm sorry, Oliver." She took a step toward him, wrapped her arms around him, and rested her cheek against his chest. "I know all of this must come as shock. There's so much to keep track of right now."

His heartbeat was fast under her ear. It sounded like aggravation and Felicity couldn't blame him. His arms closed around her, too, and for a second they stood in silence. Oliver ended it with a whisper. "Before you showed me the wreck, it never occurred to me that anything other than the storm could have brought the Gambit down." The confession barely made it to Felicity's ears. "Thank you."

She smiled against his chest. "Always, Oliver."