Chapter Twenty-Eight:
At the head of the table, Oliver consolidated a lot of his power brokers. A small group of Amazons in the form of Diana, Hippolyta, Artemis, and Phillipus joined him. Sara, Laurel, Nyssa, and Talia sat very near him as well as Lady Shiva who always had a place of honor. Katya, representing the Bratva, and Chien, representing the Triad, two organizations which underwent a similar house cleaning process as the League did.
Naturally, despite these very powerful women being here, Oliver stood in front of them.
"Thank you for coming. I want to discuss with you a problem which is giving us a big headache. And that is HIVE."
"Yes," Talia said. "My father, the previous Ra's al Ghul, and Damien Darhk, the leader of HIVE, were associates. Of course, my father ascended to the rank of Ra's al Ghul, and Damien Darhk's attempt to stage a coup left him imprisoned for some time, at least that's the story I heard. Either he escaped or my father took pity, each of them a very bad look upon his legacy."
Giving the devil his due had been painful to Talia, but her father did achieve many great things, right before the creeping madness set in.
"And, Damien Darhk has had quite some time to establish a power base," Oliver said. "We've cut it off."
"But, surely with someone like Darhk, you cut off the head and two more grow back," Diana said.
"It's HIVE in a nutshell," Oliver agreed.
Laurel took in a deep breath and consulted her notes.
"I've been taking a look at several shell corporations, which may be connected to HIVE. Everything is done legally, or about as legally as anything is done in the corporate world. Darhk's most certainly bending the rules, using that to fund his more off of the books activities. And he's a threat to Starling City, even more so than the people on the list we've already been eliminated."
"Have we had a chance to pin down where he is?" Lady Shiva asked.
Shiva had a bit of a personal score to settle with Darhk, as he and her daughter's sperm donor had been associates. The daughter which Shiva had not seen in almost eighteen years and she was almost certain Darhk helped David Cain steal her from a delirious Shiva.
"People unfortunately grow mute when questions are asked about Darhk and then they die under mysterious circumstances," Chien said.
"You have that problem too?" Katya asked. "He's very slick."
Oliver nodded in understanding. Damien Darhk was very slick and that had been a bit of a problem. He could have figured out the walls were closing in on his empire and the League was after him. And he acted very much accordingly.
Still, they got a couple of HIVE strongholds and they hoped to get more. Nothing had been certain though until they went after the man himself.
Damien Darhk was a man who prided himself on control. Control over his empire, control over his life. He hated when things spiraled out of control and deviated from one particular plan. And yet, those plans started to deviate. He had been on his way back from the HIVE base, in the limo with his wife,Ruve.
"This Hood is a problem."
Damien looked his wife in the eye.
"The Hood is just a facade for him. There's a new Ra's al Ghul. My old friend has finally met his eternal maker. Kovar's death. Bird's. The death of several of other associates, and the walls are closing in. He knows who I am, but I don't know a thing about him."
"He must be young," Ruve said. "Unsavvy."
Damien did not like to assume these things about a potential enemy. He had to either be savvy enough to stage a coup or have someone who prepared him to stage a coup. He only knew of one other person who would be bold enough to do that, Lady Shiva, not that her name was to be spoken in Damien's presence.
Not that he was afraid of her, no Damien Darhk was not afraid of her. He had stayed one step ahead of Shiva for eighteen years. Her ex-lover Cain never came back, and he had more of a reason to fear Shiva than he did.
"Perhaps, but you're in danger."
"And I'm also a huge part of this organization. I can handle myself."
"Yes, but our daughter…."
"I agree."
Damien left the limo, with three of his men following. They had been well armed. Former military men, believed to be dead in service, now in Damien's employ. Ghosts many called them, including the other members of upper management, although Damien supposed the term drones.
In the living room, Damien came across his sixteen year old daughter, Nora, who hunched over a textbook. Not one of chemistry or algebra, or whatever they were teaching in high school, but one of the mystic arts. Something which Nora had a natural talent for, unlike Damien, who needed a totem to channel his powers.
Not bitter, just proud of his daughter and her abilities, although no magic in the world could protect her from a man like Ra's al Ghul.
"Nora?"
"Yes, Dad?" Nora asked.
"You need to leave. To the safehouse."
"Now?"
"Yes, now. Get as much as you can pack in five minutes, and we're going. He's closing in on us."
Nora read what he meant as Ra's al Ghul. To Nora, he was a boogeyman, who would break up her happy little family. The teenager rose up, and sighed. Standing beside her, Nora's personal aide and bodyguard, a dark haired girl of Euroasian descent, dressed all in black, with a blade on her body.
"Cassandra, go with her."
The girl, Cassandra, responded with a nod. She had been trained to be Nora's bodyguard, and had been both her companion and surrogate older sister for as long as she could remember. Not much for conversation, although a good listening and someone who Nora would feel safe with, even more so than her own parents, who had been gone for a long time.
Yeah, Nora was not completely ignorant to what they were up to, but she pretended she was, to appease her father. Who had been rather stifling at times.
Still she packed and they were out the door. Nora had been stopped by her father and briefly hugged before being nudged out of the door. Something in his eyes worried Nora.
The second Oliver entered the private booth in the cafe, Chloe had been waiting for him. Oliver set up something on the wall and clicked it on.
"What's that?" Chloe asked.
"It's so no one overhears what we're saying," he told her. "You said this was important and you needed to tell me."
Chloe would have asked about the technology, it must be something developed on the sly by Oliver's company.
"You've about passed the honeymoon phase," Chloe said. "You're back and your tragic comeback was a story which has been wrung out. People are going to start looking into other things in your life, secrets about your family, skeletons which had been buried for some time."
"Okay?" Oliver asked. "What's this about?"
"Something your mother has been keeping from you."
"My mother told me everything. If this is about Thea…"
"What about Thea?"
"Well, you should have figured out Mom had to pull some strings to get some charges dropped. But, it's not something that we like to discuss and Thea's moved on from that."
Granted, that was not the thing Oliver thought Chloe had found out, but it had been enough to pacify her questioning.
Chloe wisely let the matter drop. No, this was not about Thea.
"No, this isn't about Thea, this is about your other sister."
Here, Oliver remained calm although the news was kind of shocking.
"Other sister?"
"Please don't shoot the messenger," Chloe said. "But, your father, had an affair years ago, and you have a sister, another one. Her name is Emiko."
Chloe slid the documents she uncovered. And she went to a lot of painstaking display to find this all.
"Thank you," Oliver said. "Thank you for telling me this."
"I'm sorry you had to find out this way. I'm not sure if she knows about her father, or you or anything, or…."
"Thank you. I've got to talk to someone."
Well, Oliver was going to get in touch with Barbara and have her do some digging, and then after Barbara double-verified Chloe's information, then Oliver was going to have to talk to this.
Chloe felt extremely bad, but to be honest, it was all on Moira for burying this secret. She had never seen Oliver so shaken in the few times she talked to him. And why wouldn't he be? That was the trust he had in his mother, shaken and potentially shattered.
Moira had gotten a message from Oliver, and not personally, but through an intermediary to come and meet him. She stepped inside of a board room and she caught Oliver's gaze.
"I thought you were done lying to me."
Moira blinked and Oliver was not done.
"It's been enough about the Gambit but this…."
"What are you talking about Oliver?" she asked. "It this is about Malcolm being Thea's father, she's better off not knowing. And he's dead, so there's no danger in keeping this from her."
"No, it's not about that," Oliver said. "Tell me does the name Kazumi Adachi mean anything to you?"
Moira stopped like a deer caught in the headlights.
"An old friend of your father's," Moira said.
"Yes, in the same way Malcolm was a friend of yours," Oliver calmly said back. "You kept this from us, and you kept Emiko from me, when I asked you if there was anything else you needed to know. You lied to me again."
"It was better off you didn't know…."
"And that's my choice to make, not yours. Not anymore."
For a brief wild second, Moira thought her own son would stab her. And if she was anyone else, she would be executed for telling such lies, Moira had no doubt in her mind.
"Robert broke off all contact with them, years ago," Moira said. "Twelve years ago, almost thirteen."
"Because, you told him, right?"
"I didn't want you or Thea to think anything less of him, and I thought that having Emiko involved in either of your lives, wouldn't be the best for anyone," Moira said. "Because, I'm pretty certain your father sleeping with Kazumi Adachi was revenge for an affair I had just a few months ago."
That happened to be about half of the Queen's marriage, at least up until Thea. Revenge affair after revenge affair. They stopped doing that and came to a truce after Thea was born.
"Robert set up everything to take care of her, but it was stopped."
A flare up in Oliver's system indicated the Mirikuru was kicking in. It had been a long time since he lost control.
"You stopped it, didn't you?"
Oliver took a couple of deep breaths and Moira nodded, fearful of what her son might do. His fingers twitching made Moria very nervous and for a second, she feared Oliver would reach out and strangle her.
"I'm sorry you found out this way."
"I should have found out from you," Oliver said. "Damn it, Moira, if you weren't my mother, I would have you killed for treason like this. You looked me in the eye and told me you weren't lying!"
Oliver thundered these last few words. Moira blinked. Oliver had not called her or Robert by their first names since he was at least thirteen or fourteen, and back then, it was to show how little he respected them when they butted heads. That stung most of all in Moira's mind.
"I'm sorry."
Sorry he found out, more likely. The angry voice in Oliver's mind called for blood. He had lost out on getting to know his half-sister because Moira was more concerned with appearances than anything.
"I am too. And now she grew up hating our father, because of something you did. And she likely has passed that down to me and Thea as well."
"You aren't going after her, are you?"
"What I do next is my business. I have to go. I can't even stand being in the same room with you now, Moira."
Again, another use of her first name. Moira struggled to reconcile why Oliver reacted like this and realized that she had in fact broken his trust.
"Isabel didn't tell you either. She knew."
"She's not my mother."
And with that, Oliver slammed the door behind him and left Moria. She knew Oliver would want to try and make things right, even though the entire situation had been toxic.
The sins of the past caught up to them eventually.
"For someone who lost out on knowing her daughter, I understand."
Lady Shiva showing a rare moment of sympathy capped off today's really strange day.
"Regain control, Oliver. You do not want to lose it. HIVE is in your grasp. You don't want your emotions to get the better of you."
Oliver entered the back of the limo.
"I most certainly don't approve of your mother's lies, but we have priorities. You said HIVE is the most important goal."
"Yes, I know," Oliver said.
"We take down HIVE, and then you worry about Emiko."
"I know," Oliver said. "Thank you. I need to take the edge off."
"We'll head back to the hotel," Shiva said. "Flare ups under moments of stress are only natural, and today challenged that."
They would be back with several members of Oliver's group waiting for him to join. Barbara filled Laurel in on Oliver's request, who told the other members of his inner circle.
The Shameless Smut Commences In the Next Chapter.