A/N: Hello m'dears… I hope the week has been a good one to you!

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S/N: I just want to thank all the guests who've left their comments. Thank you very much, they are definitely appreciated! Also, thanks to Neo for helping with editing and getting this chapter into shape! :)

The elevator let Sienna off on the top floor of Queen Consolidated. She stalked toward the office at the end of the hallway. Bracing herself for a contentious exchange, she opened the door to the office and stepped inside. She found Slade standing at the huge bay windows, his arms folded behind him while he gazed out upon the city he was demolishing with his hatred of one man.

He slowly turned his head to look at her. Like the light of a thousand candles suddenly springing to life, his surprise shone upon his face. It chased away the hard and unforgiving mask that so frequently shadowed his face whenever his thoughts were fixated upon Oliver. The past few days had taught her much about this man. He was a man of deep passions; one who loved just as fiercely as he hated.

"Sienna?" he rumbled before shifting around to face her. "What are you doing here?"

She shut the office door behind her before slowly crossing to him. "I'm here to stop this," she told him quietly. "I'm here to stop you."

Amusement trembled upon his lips. "And just how do you propose to stop me, love?"

She sniffed. Once. "Marta said that I should utilize my powers of feminine persuasion in order to make you see your way to reason." She stopped when she stood in front of him and angled her head back in order to look him in the eye. "And I admit that while I was driving over here that I gave seducing you some serious consideration."

She watched that dark eye become just a bit unfocused. It was going to be fun, she thought, to blindside him with statements like that for the next forty or fifty years. "I also admit that there is some serious merit to the idea of me seducing you. Merit," she added in a husky tone, "and interest."

Words were themselves a type of power, capable of luring even a damned man into the gossamer web of desire. Slade skimmed his fingers along her jaw.

"And am I to assume that something has changed your mind about moving forward with your plan?"

"Well, I haven't said I have completely abandoned the idea of seducing you."

"Oh?" his tone was like crushed velvet. It skittered along her senses, electrifying them. Sienna found herself the one who was very nearly seduced then and when his fingers slid to the back of her neck, she tilted her head, wetting her lips in anticipation of his kiss. "And what is stopping you, love?"

That question was enough to pour ice water over her tingling nerves. It reminded her of the reason for why she was there in the first place.

"I saw the devastation that your masked baboons are laying to the city," she said contemptuously. She saw his eyebrows inch up at her tone, but made no move to apologize for it. She hated what he was doing almost as much as she loved him. "I heard the screams of the people who have been caught in the middle of your grudge match with Oliver Queen. And as I watched hell getting unleashed upon thousands of innocent people, I decided that I was not going to reward you for so willfully and blatantly lying to me."

"Sienna..." he warned in a low growl but Sienna spoke right over him.

"You should have told me about what your plans for the city of Starling were, Slade. You should have been honest with me. I deserved that."

She knew by the shadow that crept over his face that he did not like being chastised. Least of all by her. It couldn't be helped. Promises, as Sienna had learned, were things that carried special meaning with him. They were not vows he made without thinking, nor were they something he took lightly. When this man made you a promise? It was like a guarantee. That was why she knew there had to be a reason for why he'd broken his promises to her.

Sienna held her breath as she waited for him to say something that would explain why he'd not told her of his plans for the city. She hoped -prayed- that his answer was going to be one that was going to prove that the man she loved wasn't the monster Oliver kept proclaiming him to be. When he didn't say a word for a number of impregnable moments, her nerves kicked in and played hell with her confidence. Had she misjudged this man? she found herself wondering. Was her love for him making her blind to the truth, as Oliver suggested? She rubbed suddenly damp palms upon her skirt, feeling her heart slow and her throat tighten. The answer he gave wasn't the one she wanted to hear.

No, he didn't pull her into his arms and kiss her softly before saying in that honeyed tone that always turned her into mush, I didn't tell you about this because it's really a scare tactic meant to push Oliver into confronting me.

Nor did he say something like, Burn the city to the ground? No, love, I would never do that.

He didn't tell her, I am terrified of this dark thing living inside of me and ordering me to commit these atrocities.

And he didn't admit he did these things because he was, Afraid the monster will hurt you if I do not give it what it wants.

What Slade did say was a paltry (and in her mind, insulting), "It was not something that I felt you needed to know."

"I want you to stop this." Her voice echoed with that same compulsion it had held when she'd addressed the goons outside the front doors. "I want you to leave the people of this city alone."

"Love," his voice dropped an octave. "You promised that you would stay out of my fight with Oliver Queen."

"And you promised you would never lie to me," she shot right back. "Same as you promised that nobody innocent was going to get hurt! And you broke both of those promises, Slade."

Slade's entire body went as tight as the string on a bow. Anger suffused his face, crackled in his eye. It was clear he did not like being reminded about the promises he'd broken. That was just too damn bad.

"You promised you'd never allow me to get hurt again, Slade." Tears brimmed. "But that's what you are doing. By hurting these people, you are hurting me. Why, Slade? Is this how Shado would want you to avenge her death? Killing Moira Queen, Laurel Lance, Oliver, the people of Starling?" She paused, drew in a breath. "Are a million lives what she'd really want you to do in honor of her memory?"

"Sienna…" he began but Sienna shook her head.

"When is it going to be enough, Slade?"

"When I say it is enough."

Sienna gave him a look that was soft with what Slade imagined to be pity. His teeth gnashed and his fists clenched at his sides.

"Why don't you just kill Oliver Queen and get it over with?" There was no sentiment in the question, no censure or underlying hint of condemnation. Because the question was asked in a toneless voice, he responded in kind.

"Oliver Queen cannot die until he has suffered as I have suffered."

Sienna scoffed. "Oh, believe me; Oliver Queen has suffered just as much as you have." She curled her fingers into his shirt and stood on her tip toes. "He's been suffering ever since some jack ass sabotaged the boat he and his father were on and stranded him on some godforsaken island in the middle of the North China Sea."

Something feral burned in his eye, and his face was no longer human. "He's suffered nothing."

"Right." Her voice dripped citric acid. "He wasn't just some stupid and spoiled rich kid who fate decided to kick in the balls before dumping him on an island where mercs, a psycho doctor hellbent on finding a cure for his wife's mental disease, one expertly trained A.S.I.S agent and a poisonous serum were all waiting to make a man outta him."

Slade sneered. "Your conversation with the kid..."

"Didn't tell me any of that," she spat. "You told me that! You! In all those tiny nibblets of information that you'd let slip whenever you'd let your guard down!"

"You..." he growled, but her tossing her arms up into the air while issuing a stream of virulent curses stopped whatever he might have said in midstream. Slade felt his lips trembling with mirth. Ah, but his dove had certainly developed some of his rather unsavory language skills. His momentary touch of humor fled though as he watched her spin away and begin to pace in small, tight circles. She was agitated; there was no doubt about it. Slade presumed she was just as much afraid and annoyed as she was agitated.

"You have remained silent about my war with Oliver Queen," he drawled. "Until now."

Restless, Sienna moved to the window and gazed out upon the conquered city. "I remained silent because I'd convinced myself that it wasn't my war."

"And now it is?"

She glanced back at him. "It became my war the second you asked me to marry you, Slade."

"This has nothing to do with you, love."

"It has everything to do with me, you horse's ass!"

"No," he denied in a soft voice. "It doesn't."

Exasperated now, she snapped, "Oh, I swear that you and Oliver are two of the hardest headed and arrogantly stupidest men I have ever met." She rounded on him when he scoffed.

"Don't you even try to deny it!" she growled at him. "You are more alike than either of you want to admit."

"Watch it, love."

This time it was Sienna who sneered.

"Or what, Slade? You'll spank me?" She gave him a look that dared him to try. "I swear that if either of you would set aside your anger and hatred for five minutes that you'd find out just how much alike the two of you are."

"And that," he told her. "Will never happen."

"Exactly!" She resumed her pacing in front of his desk. "You both are so set on destroying each other that you haven't stopped to consider that it's not each other that you should be fighting. But then, neither of you has ever stopped to ask the one damned question you should have been asking about that island all along!"

"And what question is that, love?"

"Why!" She shouted it at him just as she'd shouted it at Oliver Queen that afternoon. Only this time her voice carried more than just a hint of feminine exasperation. There was also the sizzle of more virulent emotions mixed in with that frustration. Slade had not known Sienna had this much temper in her. It burned like lava in the depths of her eyes, stung the very air around them. The Fire Maiden he'd been waiting to see (that he'd been subtly working to awaken for the last year) step into her own had finally broken out of her ice prison.

And she was in full battle mode.

The only problem was that she was pitting herself against him. The animal within him shifted into hunter mode; he had the scent of his prey and was fixated upon capturing her. Inwardly, his grin was the essence of predatory; outwardly, his expression said absolutely nothing at all.

"Why?" he queried as he shifted closer to her. "Why, what, love?"

"Why was it that island that the Mirakuru was buried upon? Why was Yao Fei sent to that island as punishment? Why was the Gambit set to sink near that island? Why did Fyers allow you to live for so long on the island? Why did Ivo pick Shado as the one he'd shoot? Why, goddamn it, why!" She stabbed her finger against his chest. If she noticed he'd managed to invade her private space, it did not show. In fact nothing showed on her flawless face but for the tidal wave of thoughts and emotions coursing through her at that moment.

"Neither of you bloody morons ever stopped to ask why! And it has been the most important question that you should have been asking yourselves." Her voice dropped down to one that made Slade think of the taste of spiced rum as it slid down his throat. "And which you should have been asking each other as well."

Every word was like an arrow straight to the heart. He wanted to deny what she was throwing at him, to refute it. But he couldn't. Not when that one-word question was worming around inside his head and begging him for answers he just didn't have. Answers he should have, he thought. The why's he'd asked during his time on the island had been much different from those Sienna was asking. Her whys put what happened on Lian Yu into a whole different perspective, he realized with a start. Things he hadn't thought about before, that he hadn't had the time to notice (or taken the time to notice), suddenly became vividly clear.

Why gave away to another question though: who? Who was at the core of it all? Who was the person that told Ivo about the Mirakuru? Who was funding his salvage expedition? There was a shadowy presence he'd not seen before that was lurking behind each and every event that had transpired on the island. Someone was responsible for Oliver Queen ending up on Lian Yu. Someone had been manipulating the strings all along, calling all the shots and making every one of the decisions made.

The question plaguing him now was: who was it?

He was about to question Sienna about that when he felt familiar fingers trail along the back of his neck, prickling his flesh. "You need to kill her," Shado whispered in his ear. "She's causing you to lose sight of our objective."

"No." Locked away behind the walls of his heart, the dragon that is his fear coiled and squirmed and hissed. It snapped at the monster awake and hungry within him, because it is this thing nestled deep inside that can take his dove away from him. "I will not."

"You will not what, Slade?" he heard Sienna asking him. But Slade wasn't paying her any attention. No, his gaze was riveted upon the dark haired woman standing behind her. Those eyes burned into his, telling him what they wanted him to do. What he could not bring himself to do. Slade had never dreamed that he could be in this much pain. Physical pain he could handle; he'd always been tough. At five-years-old he'd had his broken leg set without making so much as a sound. Nothing had prepared him for this, though. He wanted to rip open his chest with his bare hands and claw out his heart.

"Why are you asking this of me?" The question started as a low moan but grew to a howl he could no longer lock behind his teeth. "What has she done?"

"She is interfering in our plans," Shado replied. "She is trying to stop you from fulfilling your promise to me. Now, kill her."

"I will not hurt her." His tone was so severe that the serpent inside him coiled instinctively. "And neither will you."

"Slade?" When he didn't reply Sienna placed her free hand upon his chest, asked; "Is Shado telling you to hurt me?"

"Yes."

"And are you going to hurt me?"

"Never," he rasped. Even as he said it, though, Slade knew he was not being completely truthful. He was losing the battle against the beast. Even now he could feel it slithering out of the caverns of his heart. Shado's laugh was a cold sound that chewed on his strength. He bore down, hammering the darkness back with a strength of will he did not know he had. "I promise you, love," he gritted. "I will never hurt you."

Shado's dark eyes sparkled with something that he dared not define. "The Chinese say that if you are going to kill a snake, kill it once and for all."

Sienna never saw it coming. One second he was looking away from her, his face a mask of hard angles and planes—determination incarnate. The next his fingers were latching onto hers and he was yanking her against him, hard enough to knock the wind out of her. "Sienna," he said. "You need to leave."

"No…"

He trapped her within his gaze. "This is not up for debate."

When she went to slap her free hand against his chest, Slade caught it in his and pinned both behind her back.

"Release me, Slade. Now!" her voice sang with her order. When he merely tightened his hold on her, she bared her teeth at him. He gave her a look that told her what would happen if she dared try to bite him.

"I will release you just as soon as you promise that you will return to the penthouse and wait there for me."

"No." She said it coldly, adamantly, confidently. If it wasn't that Slade wanted-needed to get her as far away from him as he could, he might have smiled. His dove was turning into quite the warrior queen. "I'm not leaving you, Slade. If this is the path that you are set to follow, then I'm walking it with you. Come what may."

Slade shook her, once, hard. "Listen to me! Listen! It is not safe for you to remain here with me. Do you understand me? It is not safe for you!"

"And I told you that I'm not leaving." She yanked her arms free and slammed both of her palms against his chest. "I'm not leaving, do you hear me? I'm not!"

"You will either go back to the penthouse willingly," he said in an ominous voice. "Or you can be returned there unwillingly. The choice is yours, love. And if I was you," he shifted, leaning closer to her, simultaneously protective and threatening, "I'd choose to go willingly."

"Who the hell do you think you are?" she hissed at him. "Ordering me around as if I am another one of your lackey's? I won't stand for this, Slade! I won't! You hear me?"

"This is not open to discussion or debate," he snarled through clenched teeth. "You are returning to the penthouse and that is final!"

She lifted her head and met his scowl without flinching. "And I have told you no."

He looked down at her, stepped closer, quite a few inches taller than her and more than subtly intimidating.

"Love, I am suggesting that you change your mind. And if I was you," he added before she could toss the blistering retort he saw teeming in her eyes, and hanging upon her lips. "I would change my mind very, very quickly."

He took another step; eyes locked on his, Sienna raised her hands and shoved against his chest.

"Stop it! You're trying to intimidate me into doing what it is you want me to!" She shoved at him again. "And it's not going to work. Not this time! I'm not giving in! Damn it, Slade," her voice broke. "Don't ask this of me! Please, don't ask this of me. I don't want to lose you!"

"You are being melodramatic, love."

Sienna glowered at him. "I'm being pragmatic, you ass." Now she glared. "Every one of the horrible decisions that you have made in the last few weeks, you've made when I have not been at your side."

His hands wanted to tremble. More, they wanted to strike. Deliberately, he placed them, palms down, on her lower back.

"My choices are my own, Sienna."

"Are they? Or are they hers?" Even when he gave her a black look, she continued, "Would you have killed Oliver's mother if I'd been there, Slade? Would you be laying waste to this city if I'd known what it was that you planned?" She shook her head. "I don't think so. I think that you would have kept to your promise about keeping this between you and Oliver."

A muscle ticked in Slade's jaw, was her only clue as to how tight a rein he was keeping over himself at that moment. She was far from done with him, however. Knowing that his illusion of Shado was now calling for him to hurt her was enough to have dread settling like a lead bomb in her belly. Battling the memory of a woman as kind hearted and giving as the real Shado had been was hard enough. Battling this blood thirsty figment that was the Mirakuru's incarnation, though? That could prove to be next to impossible. For this man she'd battle King Kong, John Cena, the Devil himself if she had to. She'd gamble her heart in a game of winner take all. She'd give up her life if that was the price to save him. He was worth that. He was worth everything. She clapped her hand on his chest before he could move around her. He reached up and grabbed her hand in a bone-crushing grip that had her gasping. His grip immediately loosened, his thumb sweeping over her knuckles.

"I would advise you to not push me any farther tonight, Sienna."

"Or you'll what, Slade?" she spoke quietly, reasonably, but there was a note of steel in her words that told him she was not going to bend. Not this time. "You'll kill me?" She heaved a sigh. "If that's what'll take to get you to come back from that edge that you are tottering upon?" She squared her shoulders before looking at him. "Then go ahead. Kill me."

It was a dangerous taunt. She knew it, and he knew it. Deep within him, the monster licked its lips. The serpent-woman began circling around them like a vulture, whispering to him, yes, kill her.

"Quiet," he commanded.

"Kill me," Sienna repeated in a soft, tremulous voice. "Please, kill me."

The words had the effect that she'd hoped they would. They were the very first words she'd spoken to him. Seventeen months had passed since this one-eyed bandit came stealing into her life, rescuing her from that auction house and claiming her heart in the process. But he'd never forgotten those words she'd said to him. The hot, hungry look haunting his face faded, was replaced by one that was so anguished that it shredded her heart and chewed her soul into pieces.

"No! I will not!" His answer was a predator's snarl, over the body of its prey. "I will not kill her! Not for you!" "Do you hear me?" he said. "I will not kill Sienna in order to satisfy my promise to you!"

Sienna knew things were hanging by a thread. Just an inch in either direction would decide who the winner of this game was. She made one last desperate plea to him in hopes it would be enough to pull him back from the edge. "Slade, let's just go. Just leave. The two of us. Together. Now. Before you... before something happens..."

He wasn't listening to her. He wasn't even looking at her. He was looking past her shoulder.

"What is it?" he demanded.

From behind her, calm as can be, in that gravelly tone she hated, Dodo said: "They're here."

Feral joy burned from his eye, and his face was no longer human. "Tell the men to be ready."

"Yes, sir."

The man left, leaving Slade and Sienna alone once more.

"Slade," Sienna begged. "Let's just leave. We can go anywhere you want. Let's just go."

"Not until the kid has known complete and utter despair."

"But at what cost?" she asked. She dug her fingers into his arms. "I'm asking you, don't do this. Please..."

The ground fell out from beneath her, and there was a white flash that blasted her into unconsciousness.

"Sorry, love," Slade murmured apologetically. His fingers were gentle as they swept over the red mark already forming on her jaw. "But I am doing this to protect you. As I promised I always would."

He then lifted her limp body into his arms and turned to exit the office.