Chapter 9

Pain.

Excruciating pain that radiates through every bone in his body, a deep ache he feels in his soul. This kind of pain could sever a soul-bond. It's worse than anything he's ever experienced. Then again...why is he still alive now?

Shouldn't he be dead already?

...

Darkness.

Darkness so black he's not sure his eyes are even open at first. Oliver wonders if he's gone blind. Did they do something to him while he was asleep?

He fades back into unconsciousness before he has the time to investigate. It's too much.

...

Cold.

There's something wet.

But the pain that screams through Oliver's body pulls him back into unconsciousness a moment later.

...

"I'm seeing nine heat signatures. There are three gathered in the center of the building, which I'm guessing is probably where Oliver will be." Felicity slides over to another screen. "According to city blueprints, there's three levels. We can rule out the third floor. It's a loft."

She scrolls through the blueprints. "The second floor has a whole bunch of stuff, so that's a good spot to check. And the basement, which is probably the best place to look. If I was torturing someone, I would keep them in the basement. Speaking of which: this whole satellite-imaging thing is beautiful! Where can I get one? Can I get one?"

"Does Blondie always talk this much?"

Felicity purses her lips at the rough voice on the other side of the comms. She's not crazy about any of the members of Lyla's team, but at least Floyd Lawton seems to be good at his job, which Felicity really needs right now.

"Can it, Deadshot. That blonde could erase you from the face of the Earth," Lyla responds with a hint of amusement from her spot beside Felicity.

Felicity taps her fingertips against the desk as they banter. She's profoundly lost without Oliver's voice over the comms. It intensifies the aches throughout her body. It's completely cliché and overdone, but Felicity didn't even realize how much she missed hearing Oliver's voice.

"Ha! No offense to your computer whiz, Harbinger, but I don't leave a trace for her to erase. I haven't in years."

Felicity snorts and pulls up another window. "Maybe that's true, Lawton, especially with A.R.G.U.S. covering your footsteps. But your money, I found that." She gleefully scrolled through the accounts. "Three off-shore accounts. Impressive. Waller must not know about these yet, huh?"

The comms are a mess of laughter, teasing and sputtering as Felicity closes down the window and slides back to her satellite views and searches for Malcolm Merlyn.

"How did you find those accounts?"

"If it's online, I can find it," Felicity announces proudly, recalling a similar conversation with Oliver. "But don't worry, I won't touch it. All the money will still go to your daughter in event of your untimely demise."

"Don't talk about my daughter," Lawton growls.

"You have a kid, Lawton?" The comms are now suspiciously silent with the new information.

"Shut it, Shrapnel."

"Focus, boys. It's time to get back to work." Lyla leans into the satellite image as she speaks, eyes darting to locate their team of five.

"Which brings us to another question: Why isn't Harbinger here?"

Felicity can't identify the speaker, but the bawdy responses fill the comms, followed by a high pitched:

"Yeah. Now it's even more of a boys club."

Lyla rolls her eyes. "Don't worry, Harley. I'm just on maternity leave, and I'm in the van a couple blocks over guarding Blondie. I'll be back and shouting orders at you in no time."

"You're pregnant?!" The three voices speaking in tandem range from excitement to boredom.

"Is that why Daddy Diggle's so tense?" Harley offers in a baby voice.

"Guys, we have a job to do here," John's stern voice interrupts.

"Someone's a little touchy."

"There are four guards patrolling the perimeter," Lyla announces. The voices on the other end of the comms shut up immediately, focused on the fight ahead. "Two more a little off-center, and then two grouped in the center. What can you guys see?"

"Two on the roof," Lawton reports. "No windows so we can't get a visual on the inside."

Lyla takes control of the mouse to zoom in on the live feed. "Okay. With that information, I can say that the four on perimeter duty are rotating around the inside of the building. Deadshot, can you take out the two on the roof."

"With pleasure."

"Okay, so Freelancer and Deadshot, enter from the roof. Harley, Shrapnel, and Tigerclaw, make a hole and bust in that way. Make as much noise as you want."

"Deadly force?"

Felicity nods at Lyla's questioning glance, but she pushes back from her desk anyway. With a deep breath, Felicity channels the cool, collected woman who shot a man earlier in order to get Oliver's location. Internally, she's a mess. She can still feel the recoil of the gun, and it seems to reverberate with Oliver's pain echoing in her body. Anton's body seems to be painted on her eyelids every time they flutter closed. She wants to move around the van, to play with the computers some more, to exorcise her demons away, but the black tactical van is much smaller than the Foundry. So Felicity's forced to remain impassive as Lyla outlines their plan.

"Yes. We don't know the skill level of our opponents, but we have a reliable source that says they're formidable."

"Define reliable."

"Leader of the Bratva," Felicity adds for Lawton.

"Shit. Couldn't be easy, could it?" Shrapnel mutters darkly.

"Suicide Squad," Lawton adds grimly. "What did you expect?"

"Enough talking, boys. Get into position."

...

"Ugh." Oliver groans back to life, once again surprised to see he survived this long.

He can't say he sees the point to Malcolm keeping him alive, as grim as that prospect might be. Obviously, Oliver knows something from his father. He wouldn't be going after people on the list without some sort of knowledge. So what is it that Malcolm thinks he knows?

Admittedly, Oliver knows next to nothing. He hadn't even known the list was Malcolm's.

Oliver bites back a scream of agony as he shifts himself into a sitting position.

The good news: he's no longer tied to a chair.

The bad news: The room he's in is pitch black.

It's a different room than earlier: the rough stone at his back feels curved and his hands reaching out to the sides confirm the curve of the wall until the pain forces his arms down again. That and the space feels small. The air is stagnant, damp, constricted. Not just because it's dark. If everything curves like the stones at Oliver's back, the enclosure can't be more than five feet across.

It's probably taller than it is around. Without a any light to see by, Oliver can't be sure, but he's willing to bet this is a pit: tall enough that he can't climb out and no door on his level. He needs to move, to investigate the space, but even the slightest movement jars his collarbone, which they didn't bother to treat this time around.

"Shit." The realization is too strong to keep inside. This – whatever this turns out to be – is Malcolm's last gambit. If Oliver holds out, he's dead. He's never going to see his family ever again. He won't get a chance to say goodbye.

What will Malcolm tell his mother? Will he tell her anything at all?

No. If Oliver's going to make it through this alive, he's going to have to get himself out of here. He refuses to sit around and wait for death, regardless of his injuries. A couple minutes of blinding pain, where he may or may not have passed out for a moment, Oliver discerns two breaks in his collarbone, neither of which have broken the skin. By some stroke of luck, he doesn't seem to have to set any bones either, a blessing he hadn't dared to hope for.

The next step is to slowly rise to his feet.

His new best friend is the wall. He braces his hand on the wall until his feet can safely take his weight and he straightens to his full height. Six foot two and his head doesn't brush any sort of ceiling. A tentative hand reaching up until the point of protesting pain fails to find any barrier either.

The stone around him is a mixture of smooth and rough, like bricks that have been down there too long. He runs his hand along it, but the wall is seamless, offering nothing in the way of handholds to climb out. Given the state of his collarbone, Oliver's not sure he could climb out anyway.

Oliver's search shifts back to the walls. He staggers along the curved edge of the room, running his hand over the walls in a desperate search for a door. The movement pulls at the patched knife wounds on his legs, only sheer determination and control keep the groans of pain inside.

He loses track of where he started – not that he really had a landmark in the pitch-black enclosure – but it's clear after fifteen minutes that the room is a circle. Oliver's been dropped into a pit.

The stone is rough against Oliver's bare back as he slides down the wall to sit again. Isolation and starvation it is. They probably won't give him enough time to get a decent sleep either. It'll be a slow and painful death.

Oliver tilts back until his head meets the wall. His eyes cast around the blackness above him for a hit of light, something to showcase the top of this container, whatever it might be.

But there's nothing.

Only darkness.

...

"We're going to get him back, Felicity. I promise."

Felicity glances at the comms to see that they're muted, and she shrugs. The information she's managed to dredge up on Malcolm's shady dealings are damning. To someone who didn't have a copy of Oliver's list, the connections were non-existent, but Felicity had spent the months since her soulmate's return sifting through that information. She knew some of those people better than she knew herself.

She couldn't connect him to everyone, but the complicated web and hierarchy were becoming clear as she continued to look. Some connections were inferred – like Malcolm's connection to a couple major companies in the area. None of the big names were on the list: Malcolm, Robert Queen, Moira. Yet every name in the book connected to a large company in Starling City.

There were no mob contacts, no foreign associates, none that Felicity could unearth.

Except...

Malcolm's extended absence after his wife's death. Felicity wasn't able to fill in any holes there. She knows Malcolm flew out of the country, but once the plane landed, she couldn't find a trace of the billionaire. It's unsurprising that an evil mastermind would know the value of keeping things offline, but Felicity has never found it more frustrating than she does in this instant.

"Felicity?"

She blinks back to reality, and deliberately shrugs. "Whether we get her back or not, Malcolm Merlyn is going to pay for what he's done."

"We're going to find him, and we're going to take Malcolm down. You don't have to do this right now."

Felicity takes a deep breath and nods in understanding. "I get it Lyla, I really do. But I can't burst through doors and shoot people to save him, but this...this is something I can do. This is useful."

"You know, John didn't tell me how you found out about this location."

Lyla's not stupid. She's aware that something happened. Felicity and John were notably tense when they met up with Lyla. It's shocking it took her this long to question Felicity.

"I did what I needed to do," Felicity answers, opening up the comms to cut off any other questions.

A hand smacks the mute button again. "Felicity."

"Lyla, it's nothing to worry about."

Lyla frowns disapprovingly from the sidelines, but doesn't stop Felicity from unmuting the comms. A decision Felicity almost immediately regrets as the sounds of combat fill the small van. She resists the instinctual wince at the sound of violence and focuses on the pain continuing to radiate through her body, suddenly sharper like they've been agitated. But there's no additional pain, which she's thankful for.

She's not sure she could stand more pain without completely breaking down.

Felicity checks back in with the monitors, frowning as the dots don't seem to be moving despite the sounds she's hearing over the comms.

"What's going on in there, Johnny," Lyla demands, seeming to have the same realization Felicity. This is taking way too long. It should be simple. Even with Anatoli's warnings, Felicity was sure it would be a smooth mission.

But now it feels like her organs have been scooped from her chest, turning her into a hollow vessel with nothing left except the vague hope of her soulmate's return.

"Little busy here," John grunts over the system.

"These boys really bounce back. Hey! That's not nice!"

"I want it on the record that Quinn is crazy."

"What's going on?" Lyla repeats.

Several shots sound into the night, not quiet or past, but slow, one shot at a time like each one is precisely picked out.

"These aren't rent-a-cops," Deadshot elaborates, each word precise. "These are trained assassins. If I didn't know better, I'd say League of Assassins."

"League of..." Felicity trails off with a frown. "Seriously? They couldn't come up with a better name?"

"If it is the League, we're in trouble," Lyla mutters. "Are you sure, Deadshot?"

"Three down." Deadshot confirms with another gunshot. "League-trained, but the League wouldn't get involved in something like this. They don't take prisoners."

Felicity grips the arms of her chair harder, her knuckles white, only to be shocked into motion as she scrambles to check the mark on her hip. The arrow stands stark black against her pale skin, but there's something different. Instead of crisp black edges, the lines on the edge were fading into red.

She stares at it, shocked at the change, even if it was barely noticeable. "Something's wrong," she whispers to herself, running her hands over her skin in growing terror. They need to find Oliver. Now.

...

Freezing water sends Oliver moving instinctively from one end of the small room to the other. It works well enough until the searing pain of his broken bones pulls a scream from his throat. He wasn't aware he had that much of a voice left in him. But he was done with cold water after the shit show that was the last four years.

He doesn't know when he nodded off, but Oliver turns to stare up at the hole in the ceiling just as another bucket of frigid water drenches him, this time full in the face. It stuns him and leaves him sputtering as a third bucketful descends.

The tatters of his clothes are drenched, his whole body enveloped in a chill so in contrast to his heated skin that it causes him to shiver uncontrollably.

"So, Oliver, anything to say?" Malcolm taunts. He doesn't wait for a response before upending another bucket on him.

He remains silent, fighting the next two cold buckets.

"I'll give you a little time to think it over." Malcolm's voice echoes oddly around the well. "I imagine you're not too fond of water at this point."

Oliver doesn't protest, just struggles to keep the shivers at bay as long as possible.

It's still not long until the bone-deep cold he thought he'd left behind seeps in.

...

"Something's not right," Digg murmurs, his doubts perfectly picked up by the sensitive mics of the comms.

Felicity doesn't need to be told that. There are two dots left to be taken out. She sees them right in the center of the satellite feed. They're so close, but John's on to something. This all feels too easy.

Then again, she wasn't the fighting people who had an apparent connection to something called the "League of Assassins."

"Two targets left sweet-cheeks! You know, for assassins, they don't do too well."

The crazy blonde has a point, one she actually agrees with. Felicity shakes her head. She should probably stop referring to Harley Quinn as a crazy person.

"Thanks, Sunshine! I'll take that as a compliment!"

Oops. Hadn't meant to say that out loud. Felicity sighs, massaging the back of her neck to relieve some of the tension from Oliver's transferred pain.

"Let's just find Oliver," she insists. "According to the blueprints, the two dots should be at the end of that hallway on the right."

"Got it," a voice whispers, too quiet to determine who spoke.

Tension is heavy in the air, nearly suffocating in the close atmosphere of the van. On the screen, their five dots move slowly towards the last two unknowns. Her colorful nails dig into her armrest, so hard her joints ache. She rests on the edge of her chair in preparation to move as soon as they get information.

The wait for those dots to reach the end of the hallway feel interminable. They slink along so slowly as to be barely evident from her bird's eye view. She's sure it doesn't take nearly as long as she thinks it is before they're stopping right outside the door.

Crash.

There goes the door.

Bang Bang.

Felicity forgets to breathe as the gunshots echo through the comms.

Lyla reaches out to grasp her hand, saving her from breaking the chair. Although her grip is now threatening to break Lyla's hand.

"I'm sorry, Felicity." Digg doesn't have to finish the statement before she even knows what he's about to say. "He's not here."

She wants to scream, to rage to the universe. This isn't possible. She killed a man for this information. Anatoli wouldn't lie to her, not where Oliver is concerned. Of course, there's no way for her to know for sure. But she believed him. She saw honesty in his eyes. He wouldn't knowingly lie.

But after this, their information runs dry.

This can't be a dead end.

It can't.

With that determination, Felicity stands and throws open the door of the van. There must be a clue here. And they're going to find it. She's going to find it. She refuses to give up on Oliver. She will get him back.

The cool night air seeps into her skin as she strides straight for the hole blasted in the wall of the warehouse. Shrapnel did a good job of opening the side of the building. If they weren't in the Glades, there would have been a police response already. They hadn't exactly been the quietest of people.

"Felicity! You can't go in there!" Lyla shouts, following behind a little more gingerly because of her protruding stomach.

Chunks of debris from the explosion clutter the otherwise empty warehouse as Felicity picks her way inside. With singular focus on the room in the basement, Felicity steps over sprawling bodies, and more disgustingly severed body parts, to get to the stairs.

She pauses a moment before opening the door to the stairs, reconsidering for a moment as she gazes at the red smear that covers the painted metal. A wave of cold radiates from her mark in that instant. Not an echo of pain, but a shiver that shakes her into motion.

She rushes down the stairs, hand curled around the railing like a lifeline.

The cold is invasive. By the time her feet reach the bottom of the stairs, the cold has sapped the warmth from her extremities. The light coming from the open door draws her down the hallway.

A tall, military figure emerges as she nears the end of the hallway.

"You don't want to go in there, sweetheart," a deep voice recommends. Felicity can't make out his face since its cast in shadow, but she brushes past him.

"Don't call me sweetheart," she growls as she steps into the basement.

The bright light blinds her for a moment.

"Felicity," Digg warns, blocking her view of the room in an instant.

She glares at him and steps around him to get a look at the basement, only to feel the bile rise in her throat.

She doesn't need a comprehensive on torture to know the metal tub, chair, and electrical equipment are not good news. Neither is the red tinge on the floor like someone tried to mop up blood.

Oliver was here.

Felicity shivers at the imposed cold. She allows herself a moment – just one – to grieve the tortures Oliver must have endured here. It solves some mysteries about what she felt. This cold though...there's nothing here to explain that.

"You don't have to see this, Felicity," John whispers. He moves to guide her from the room with a gentle nudge.

With a deep breath to brace herself, she turns back to Lyla and John's team.

"Were you all always this tall?" Maybe it's just her lack of heels, but suddenly Felicity feels tiny compared to all the warriors in the room. She shakes her head because that's not the issue that needs to be addressed right now.

"Nevermind." Her arms cross over her chest to dispel a shiver. "That's not important. Oliver was here. Now we need to find out where they took him. We haven't had any movement on the video feeds, so there has to be some way to move him without bringing him up to street level. We need to find it."

"Lis," Lyla warns. "You can't be sure Oliver was even the one here. That could be anyone's blood."

"It's his," she asserts, walking around the room as her brain reels with new information. "There has to be something here. We're wasting time. They had to move him through this basement somehow. Otherwise we would have seen them leave."

They exchange looks behind her back, a shared glance of awareness at the situation before they follow her into action. She barely notices John and Lyla's muttered commands to the rest of their team in her search for some sort of secret passage like the kind that would exist in a castle.

Eons pass, and yet it must just be mere minutes – the cold swirling under her skin prolonging time – before she finally hears the cry she's been waiting for:

"I've found something."

...

The frigid water now reaches halfway up his chest. It's more than just the cold causing his shortness of breath. As loathe as Oliver is to admit it, fear - fear of drowning, fear of death and what it will do to his soulmate, fear of not being able to tell her how he feels before it's all over – it's getting to him.

Bucket after bucket of cold water splashes into the pit, ever so slowly filling the room with water. Darkness has consumed him once more and he's not sure how Malcolm managed to get the water to continue to fall, but he's out of the direct spray now.

Sometimes the water falls in a trickle. Others a deluge. At first it was a way to count the passage of time, something to take his mind off the pain. Then it appeared there was no pattern to the fall of the water.

Or maybe Oliver's coming in and out of consciousness. Maybe hypothermia is starting to set in. Maybe his wounds are getting the better of him.

The pain numbs in the cold water, becoming less and less until a jarring movement sends sparks of pain to his brain.

It's only a matter of time before he dies. In his condition, he can't swim. He can't climb the walls.

He's trapped down here at Malcolm's mercy.

And if there's one thing he knows, it's that he won't break, not here, not now. If he's going to drown in frigid water, he's not going to give Malcolm the satisfaction of winning.

The water inches up his neck, and Oliver finally gathers the strength to heave himself up onto his feet. His right leg gives out, sending him crashing against the stone wall.

"Agggggggghhhhhhhhhh," he groans against the stone wall, the skin on his hands scraping against the rough surface. The break in his collarbone shifts slightly with the impact and something akin to a whimper escapes him.

He straightens and leans back against the wall. The water now sits low on his thigh, buying him time, but his head spins and his leg shakes with the effort of keeping him upright.

Another deluge of water splashes on top of Oliver and he loses his tenuous footing and crashes into water that now covers his head. Desperately he fights to the surface against the crippling pain that threatens to drag him into the land of unconsciousness again. He manages to pull himself over the waterline.

Gasps of air burn his lungs and the water isn't stopping. It continues to pour down even as Oliver brokenly struggles to lift himself above the surface.

Then the water lands on him just so and Oliver loses his grip.

Freezing water and waves of pain pull him under.

And all he knows is darkness.

...

The hallway Deadshot found is dark and cold. The only thing needed to complete the creepy atmosphere is suspenseful music. Felicity almost expects it to come blasting out of hidden speakers just to break some of the tension of the moment.

"Felicity, are you sure you don't want to wait back at the van?" Lyla whispers from their position at the back of the armed group.

She shakes her head before she blinks to regain focus. Her body feels weird, weightless...

The black door at the end of the hallway has all her attention. It serves as her focus. Maybe it's just her imagination, but Felicity feels it pulling her in, drawing her closer through her connection to her soulmate.

"He's close." Her voice sounds fainter than it should. Is the room closing in on her?

Felicity feels eyes on her, but her mind is preoccupied with the strange sensations flooding her body that culminate in a single searing pain.

"Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh."

It burns. And unlike earlier pain, it's centered with pinpoint accuracy on her side. Her skin is white hot, too hot to touch. She wants to claw at it, to tear the offending section of skin from her body like it was a piece of clothing.

She just wants the pain to stop.

It's a thousand times worse than any pain she's felt from the mark before.

"I've got her. The rest of you get in there! Now!"

"You heard her! Move!"

"Lyla," Felicity manages to choke out around her pain, her hand latching onto Lyla's in an iron grasp.

"It's okay, Felicity. It's going to be okay." Lyla's hand brushes Felicity's hair back from her face although they both know her words are empty promises.

She doesn't need to look down at her mark to know what she'll find. It's scarred over. The inky blackness gone in favor of a reddish scar. But it doesn't matter. She won't believe Oliver's dead until she sees it with her own eyes.

With determination she didn't know she had, Felicity pulled herself upright. She barely makes it a step before she falls sideways into a wall. There are gunshots and shouts from the room ahead, a room they didn't have time to scout, but Felicity continues willfully forward, Lyla hovering at her side like a mama bird.

One step after another, the cold wall her crutch.

She staggers into the room to find three guns trained on Malcolm Merlyn. She straightens, the pain a dull ache in the back of her mind as she strides forward with sudden confidence.

"Where is he?" John demands calmly.

Malcolm just laughs. "You're too late." His eyes latch on Felicity as he adds: "But I bet you already know that."

Felicity ignores him. Instead she grabs Digg's gun from his holster and points it at the grinning villain. "Tell us where he is and I'll kill you quickly."

Her mark is gone, which means something unspeakable has happened to Oliver and she's not about to let this nut job walk free. The men around her shift in surprise, but keep their weapons firmly trained on Malcolm.

"You don't have it in you," he sneers.

He might be right. If today had progressed differently, she wouldn't have even had the nerve to pick up the gun. But that wasn't the case. Today she lost her soulmate and killed a man.

Malcolm Merlyn shouldn't be underestimating her.

Bang.

One shot through the foot has him writhing in pain. "Bitch."

She blinks and aims the gun at his other foot. "I may not be proficient in torture, but I'm low on patience and time. Where is Oliver?"

Bang.

"Well, lookie what I found!" The perky blonde cries. "I could use a little help here, boys! I found 'im!"

Digg moves to look over Harley's shoulder and Felicity keeps her eyes trained on the man before her, unable to contemplate what Oliver will look like once they find him, or the jarring reality of his death.

Sensing her reluctance, Merlyn smiles. "We both know you're too late. Looks like your little rescue mission was all for nothing."

Bang.

Those are the last words Malcolm Merlyn will ever speak, but this time Felicity's not the one to pull the trigger. Her head jerks to the side as Deadshot releases two more bullets just to make sure the job is done.

Bang Bang.

Lawton shrugs at her look, but Felicity doesn't regret the decision in the slightest. She probably would have made Malcolm suffer more for what he did to Oliver, but that's the least of her worries now.

No. Her world is falling apart as they pull Oliver's drenched and mangled body from a well in the floor. There's blood and what looks like bone that breaks through his skin. His body is sickly pale, and she doesn't have to look down at her mark to know it's already a scar.

She wants to take a step closer, to take comfort in one last touch, but her body refuses to move.

This can't be happening.

Her world was never supposed to fall apart.

Not like this.

Her body shakes with sobs as she cries his name, insensible to the actions of the team around her and the words flying about. All she knows is supreme sorrow, the kind that leaves you hollow and lost.

Numb.

Her soulmate is dead.

How does she come back from this?