"I don't care who Thor is," Felicity said, her voice low and tight.
Jack smiled and ran his hand along her shoulder. "You've gotten feistier since the last time I saw you. Lucky I've got fast reflexes—imagine if that slap had actually landed. Would've been awkward for both of us." He tilted her chin up. "Still stinging?"
"What do you think?" She huffed through her nose.
Three years. Three years without a word, and he's standing here grinning like he left for groceries.
Jack's smile widened. He scooped her up in one motion, her shoes dangling off her feet, and turned to Laurie. "Looks like you've got the other room tonight."
Laurie nodded without expression and turned on her heel toward the hallway. The door clicked shut behind her.
Fine. Expected.
"She's..." Felicity started, glancing at the closed door. "Your new girlfriend?"
"New girlfriend?" Jack pulled back to look at her, eyebrows raised as though she'd said something absurd. "When exactly did we break up?"
That stopped her cold. The question sat between them like a coin spinning on its edge. He wasn't ending things. He hadn't planned to end things. The realization spread through her chest before she could decide what to do with it.
"Where were you?" The words came fast now, tumbling. "You just vanished. Do you have any idea what happened after you left? I—"
Jack chuckled, and the sound cut through her momentum. "I know. I know what happened. You, Laurel, and Catwoman put together the Birds of Prey. Helena probably tracked you down looking for me, and when she didn't get answers, she became the Huntress and spent the next few years making your lives miserable." He shifted her weight in his arms. "I know all of it."
"Then what the hell is going on between you and Helena?" The name alone summoned a year's worth of exhaustion, bruises, and close calls.
"I'll tell you everything. It's actually a pretty good story." He carried her through the doorway into the bedroom. The sheets smelled like hotel starch and something faintly cedar—his jacket, maybe, draped over the desk chair.
He set her on the bed and sat beside her, and then he talked.
He started with going out to pick up Laurel Lance and running into the Legends. At first Felicity's expression was pure skepticism—time travel sounded like bad sci-fi—but the story kept pivoting. Paradise Island. Olympus. Ares and Zeus, gods walking the earth as casually as pedestrians. Then it lurched into Cold War territory: the Soviet Union, nuclear physics, Firestorm. Science again, or something adjacent to it. And finally S.T.A.R. Labs and Barry Allen—the Flash—which explained Central City.
"That's the short version," Jack said, one arm draped around her shoulders, his thumb tracing idle circles on her upper arm. "Leaving wasn't planned. It was an accident, and once I was in it, things kept happening. I wasn't in a rush to get back because I knew you were handling everything. And showing up too early would've changed the timeline."
The anger had cooled somewhere around the Olympus section. She'd walked into this room ready to fight, but the story was too ridiculous to be a lie, and he didn't seem to—he genuinely didn't seem to think he'd done anything that warranted a breakup. That counted for something, even if she wasn't ready to say how much.
"Those women," she said instead, keeping her voice level. "How do you explain them?"
"Them?" Jack laughed. "Sara Lance—she's part of the Legends. Laurel's younger sister. At this point in the timeline, Laurel probably doesn't even know Sara's alive yet, but that's a whole separate thing." He waved it away. "Sara told me it's my quirk. That I can't fall asleep unless I'm holding a woman."
Felicity cut him off before he could elaborate. "Are you coming back to Starling City with me?"
Can't sleep without holding a woman. Right. What a convenient condition. She didn't believe it for a second. But he'd explained. He hadn't deflected or gotten defensive. He'd offered the information freely, and whether the explanation was satisfying or not, the willingness to give it meant something.
It meant he still cared what she thought.
If she pushed harder—interrogated every name, every night—she'd crack whatever fragile thing they were rebuilding. She knew that much about herself.
"Not yet," Jack said. "Starling and Central City are only six hundred miles apart. Easy trip. I promise—whenever you miss me, call. By the time you hang up and step into the shower, I'll already be in your bed."
"That fast?" Felicity's eyes widened behind her glasses. "Can you... show me?"
"Gladly."
Red lightning cracked through the room—a sharp, ozone-laced snap that made the lampshade rattle. Felicity blinked, still waiting for whatever demonstration he had in mind, and then looked down.
Her clothes were gone. Every stitch. Folded neatly on the desk chair beside his jacket, her bra coiled on top like punctuation.
She looked at Jack. He was naked too, already leaning in, and before the question formed on her lips his mouth was on hers.
He kissed her deep and unhurried, one hand cradling the back of her skull, fingers threaded into her hair. His other hand settled on her waist and pulled her flush against him. She tasted spearmint and warmth, and her palms found his chest—solid, hot skin under her fingers, his heartbeat steady where hers was hammering.
She kissed him back, and the last three years compressed into the space between their bodies.
She wasn't someone who needed this constantly. She'd gone without for months at a time and barely noticed. But the dam had held for too long, and now that it was breaking, it broke all at once. Her legs wrapped around his hips as he pressed her back into the mattress, the stiff sheets bunching under her spine. His cock was hard against her inner thigh—thick, the heat of it startling—and when she shifted her hips to grind against him, the friction pulled a sharp breath from both of them.
"Mmhh—" She bit down on his lower lip. His hand slid between them, fingers dragging through her slick folds, finding her clit and pressing with a precision that made her hips jerk. Two fingers pushed inside, curling, and she arched off the bed with a sound she didn't recognize as her own.
He entered her in one slow stroke, filling her completely, and Felicity's nails dug half-moons into his shoulders. He pulled back and thrust again, harder, and the bed frame knocked against the wall with a dull thunk.
"Faster," she breathed, the word half-formed, her syntax dissolving. "Please—nnhh—faster."
Jack obliged. His pace climbed until the headboard was keeping a rhythm of its own, each thrust driving a breathless, broken sound from her throat—"ah, ah, ah"—her back bowing, thighs trembling around his waist. The room smelled like sweat and sex and that faint cedar from his jacket. She came hard enough that her vision whited out, fingers twisting in the sheets, and he didn't stop, didn't slow, kept pulling her through it until she was begging in fragments she couldn't piece together afterward.
She didn't remember falling asleep. The last thing she registered was his chest under her cheek, damp and warm, his arm heavy across her back.
---
Sunlight pressed through the window and striped across her bare shoulders. Felicity opened her eyes, squinting at the unfamiliar ceiling, the furniture, the weight of an arm across her waist. Jack, asleep beside her, breathing slow and even, his jaw slack.
For a disoriented second she thought she was dreaming.
Then the soreness registered—her thighs, her hips, the pleasant ache low in her belly—and she sat up fast enough to make her head spin.
"Ah—"
She scrambled out of bed, found her jeans crumpled on the chair, and dug her phone from the back pocket. The screen lit up with a cascade of notifications: texts from Laurel, missed calls from Selina, more texts from Laurel, a voicemail from Selina that was probably just heavy breathing and impatience. All wanting the same thing. Did you find him? What happened?
What happened. Where do I even start with that.
She typed a quick reply—Found him. He's here. Will explain later—and hit send before she could overthink the wording. Behind her, the sheets rustled.
"Morning."
She turned. Jack was sitting up, hair flattened on one side, looking annoyingly rested.
"Morning."
He crossed the room and pulled her against him, chin resting on top of her head. He smelled like sleep and skin and faintly of her. "Shower first. Then I'll take you to see the Aerie."
"Okay." Curiosity flickered through the residual haze. She'd heard him mention the Aerie but never seen it.
She didn't know yet that the tour came with conditions.
The Aerie was worth the trip—gleaming, impossible design, rooms that branched into other rooms like a blueprint drawn by someone who didn't believe in limitations. But the collection room was the ambush. Framed photographs lined one wall, each one a trophy of sorts, and Jack had been waiting for exactly this visit to add to them. Even Diana hadn't escaped his camera, and Felicity—his actual girlfriend, the one who'd tracked him across six hundred miles—stood no chance. She protested, arms crossed, jaw set, radiating the kind of indignation that was ninety percent performance and ten percent genuine embarrassment. Uncooperative right up until she wasn't. Jack pinned the new addition to the wall beside the others and stepped back to admire the composition.
He's impossible. He's actually impossible, and I let him do that, and I can't even be properly mad about it.
Afterward, freshly dressed and still faintly pink across her cheeks, Felicity remembered. "By the way—do you have enemies here? Someone in Central City who doesn't want you around?"
"Why?"
"I only found this place through satellite imaging. But before that, someone tipped me off. Sent me an email saying you were in Central City." She told him about the anonymous message—no sender name, no return address, just the city and enough detail to be credible.
Jack's expression shifted. Not concern, exactly. Interest. The particular kind of interest he reserved for people who thought they were being clever.
The most obvious candidate was Caitlin Snow, but that didn't track. Caitlin was cautious, private, unlikely to reach out to a stranger in Starling City unprompted. Which left one name that fit every criterion—motive, means, and the specific brand of calculated maneuvering that made Jack's jaw tighten by a fraction.
Harrison Wells.
The man whose real name was Eobard Thawne. The Reverse-Flash, wearing a dead man's face, steering Barry Allen's development like a lab experiment. As Barry ran faster and the Speed Force accumulated, Thawne's own speed would be returning—and he was siphoning Barry's reserves on top of it, accelerating his own timeline home. He had every reason to want Jack Kadere distracted. Every reason to want him gone from Central City, or at the very least aimed at something other than S.T.A.R. Labs.
Jack leaned back against the wall of the collection room, arms folded, thumb tapping a slow rhythm against his bicep. The sunlight caught the edge of his smile, and it wasn't warm.