John Diggle wasn't exactly a one-man security detail yet, so when Oliver Queen called and asked him to protect both his mother Moira Queen and his sister Thea Queen, genuine worry set in. There was no clean reason for a bodyguard to shadow the CEO of Queen Consolidated and a nineteen-year-old party girl at the same time — no cover story that wouldn't raise questions.
But luck was on his side.
Moira had just gotten a call from the Starling City Police Department. Thea had been picked up for drug use and theft — though "theft" was generous. She'd gotten high, spotted a dress she liked through the window of a closed boutique, and put her fist through the window to get it.
Moira had reached the end of her patience. Every week brought a new incident, a new headline waiting to happen, a new embarrassment dragged across the Queen family name. This time, she wasn't posting bail. Let Thea sit in a holding cell and think about her choices for once.
A police station. Probably the safest place in the city, all things considered.
Diggle exhaled and crossed Thea off his list. One principal to protect instead of two. He'd take it.
---
Police departments in cities with active vigilantes tended to fall into one of two categories: corrupt and useless, or well-meaning and overwhelmed. Starling City's department landed somewhere above both. No crime family had its hooks in the precinct — not the way Gotham's had been run by the mob for decades — and the criminal class here, while dangerous, lacked the theatrical insanity that made Gotham a war zone. Dirty cops existed, sure, same as anywhere, but the public hadn't given up on the badge yet. The Huntress and the Birds of Prey had been tearing through Starling City's underworld for long enough that street crime had genuinely dropped, and the department's reputation had climbed with it.
None of which mattered much to Thea Queen, sitting cross-legged on a metal chair in the holding room with the expression of someone waiting for a bus she didn't particularly want to catch.
Golden hair fell past her shoulders in loose curls — not styled, just slept-on enough to look intentional. She wore a blue blazer over a white button-down, the top two buttons open, a narrow blue tie yanked loose and hanging crooked against her chest. Below that, a dark plaid skirt, thigh-high navy stockings stretched over pale, slim legs crossed at the knee, and black leather oxfords scuffed at the toes. The whole effect was prep-school uniform filtered through deliberate defiance — every piece of clothing chosen to look expensive and then worn like she didn't care if it burned.
She looked like the kind of girl who got sent to the principal's office on purpose.
After Robert Queen's death and Oliver's disappearance, Thea had spiraled. Grief fed into rebellion, and Moira's guilt-soaked permissiveness had given the rebellion room to grow until it became a lifestyle. Drugs. Clubs. Petty trouble escalating toward real trouble. The kind of trajectory that ends in either a wake-up call or a mugshot — and tonight it was the mugshot. Down the line, after Oliver's return set off a chain of events she couldn't have predicted, Thea would join Team Arrow, pick up a bow of her own as the second Red Arrow — later Speedy — and fight alongside her brother. She'd discover that her biological father was Malcolm Merlyn. She'd be manipulated into killing Sara Lance. She'd die and come back through the Lazarus Pit alongside Sara herself.
All of that was still ahead of her. Right now, she was nineteen, coming down from whatever she'd taken, and fully aware that her mother had no intention of bailing her out.
She didn't care. Or more accurately, she was at the stage of rebellion where not caring was the entire identity. Thea watched the officers moving through the bullpen beyond the holding room glass, legs swinging idly off the edge of the chair, already running through options for what to do once they cut her loose.
"Who are you? When did you come in?"
She'd pulled her gaze back inside the room and found someone leaning against the far corner. Young. Maybe Asian? Sharp jaw, dark eyes, the kind of face that belonged on a magazine cover rather than in a police holding cell.
Handsome. Definitely handsome.
"Want to do something exciting?" Jack Kadere looked her over with open appraisal, his voice pitched low, half-invitation and half-dare.
"Exciting?" Thea's eyes — green, bright, the comedown sharpening them rather than dulling them — went wide. Her lips curled upward. "You're not a cop. No cop would use the word 'exciting' around me. They wouldn't dare. They hate exciting." She uncrossed her legs and sat forward. "So I'm not going to ask who you are or how you got in here. I'm only going to ask one thing — what kind of exciting?"
"Kidnapping." Jack's smile turned playful, the kind of grin that promised trouble and enjoyed the promise. "I take you out of this police station. Then I notify your mother and your brother. And then we play cat and mouse."
Thea's brow furrowed.
"Your mother's not coming to get you," Jack said, reading her hesitation and pressing into it. "You know that. And once they process you out, she'll have you locked down at home for weeks. Maybe longer. If you're fine with sitting in your room staring at the ceiling — say the word and I'll walk."
The temptation hit fast. She didn't want to sit in a cell. She didn't want to be grounded. And the word kidnapping, coming from a stranger who'd materialized inside a police station without anyone noticing, carried exactly the kind of reckless energy her blood was wired to chase.
But she wasn't stupid. Thea studied Jack's face. "You're not actually going to kidnap me. Right?"
"If 'taking you wherever you want to go and letting you do whatever you want' counts as kidnapping — then yeah. That's exactly what I'm planning."
"And after?"
"After is after. Doesn't it get boring, thinking three steps ahead all the time?" Jack tilted his head. "I just want to remind your brother Oliver that sticking his nose into other people's business comes with a price tag."
Thea's guard dropped a notch. "You've got a problem with Oliver." Not a question — a recognition. "Yeah, he does love to play boss. Came back from the dead and started giving orders like he never left." She rolled her eyes, the old resentment surfacing easily. "Fine. How are you planning to get me out of here? There are cops everywhere."
Jack smiled.
"Ready?"
"Wait — we're doing this now? Okay, sure, let's go. I genuinely want to see how you're going to walk me past—"
The room vanished.
The fluorescent lights, the metal chair bolted to the floor, the glass partition, the officers on the other side — all of it replaced in the space between one word and the next. Thea was sitting on the same chair, but the chair was now planted in dry grass on a wooded hillside, cool night air against her skin, the city's glow visible below through a break in the trees.
"I—am I still high?" She looked around, mouth open, and pinched her own cheek hard enough to leave a mark. The pain was immediate and real.
Everything had changed except the chair beneath her.
Thea stood, turning a slow circle. The slope, the tree line, the distant shape of a familiar roofline below — recognition crept in. "This is... the hill behind my house. But I was just — how did you — in one blink—"
Her voice tripped over itself.
"Exciting enough?" Jack stood a few feet away, arms folded, looking entirely unbothered.
Thea nodded before she'd consciously decided to. "You have powers. Like — teleportation? Science fiction stuff?"
"Not teleportation. Speed. I moved so fast your brain couldn't register the transition."
"Seriously?" Skepticism flickered across her face, but it was thin — the evidence was standing under her feet.
"Anywhere you want to go?" Jack asked.
Thea's expression shifted. The skepticism burned off, replaced by a grin that belonged on someone about to do something profoundly inadvisable. "That boutique. The one I got arrested for. There's a dress in there — I had my hands on it before the cops showed up. I want it."
"You'd look good in anything." Jack's gaze traveled down her frame and back up, unhurried. "You'd look better in nothing."
Thea's mouth opened — half-protest, half-laugh — but before a sound came out, Jack stepped forward, bent at the knees, and swept her off her feet. One arm hooked beneath her thighs, the other braced across her back. Thea's arms locked around his neck on pure reflex, fingers lacing at his nape, her body pressed flush against his chest.
Fwsshh!
Red lightning erupted around them both, and the hillside was empty. Just the chair, sitting alone in the grass where two people had been a heartbeat ago, and the fading smell of ozone dissolving into the night.