The Starling Saviour

Chapter 46

'Oh no,' I stared at the screen, aghast. 'Thea has no idea.'

'I doubt Mr Merlyn does either,' Leyla told me knowingly. 'I did my research on the Queens and the Merlyns, and trust me, Mr Merlyn is none the wiser.'

'Then this would destroy him,' I grinned wickedly.

'Maybe it would tip him over the edge, but this alone is not enough,' Leyla agreed with me to a certain extent. 'We need to undermine him using different parts of this file, and Miss Queen being his daughter will be the final push.'

'Well, it would help if we knew what Merlyn's 'big plans' are,' I remarked. 'And I'm sure they won't be on this file if he's planning them just now.'

'Wait a second,' Leyla took the laptop from me and jumped back to the list of files we had first been presented with. 'There's a Tempest file.'

She opened it and we both looked through it quickly, but all it told us was what we already knew. A footnote was present at the bottom of the document, which I went on to read.

'Tempest are in the middle of planning a city-wide scheme,' I read Isaac's words aloud. 'But I was unable to find out what this was.'

'So even your friend had no clue,' Leyla added, looking defeated. 'How unhelpful.'

'Whatever it is though, Isaac knew it was big,' I pointed out. 'And that was a good three years ago, I'm guessing. It's not just Merlyn who's behind it, it seems; all of Tempest are.'

'So we still have hardly any leverage over Mr Merlyn,' Leyla said in a frustrated tone.

'We have a pretty big piece of information over him,' I reminded my sister. 'Thea?'

'Yes, but we can't use that to break him,' Leyla shook her head, looking at the names of the files. 'Aria, what's... Nanda Parbat?'

'That sounds familiar,' I felt a strange feeling of deja vu. 'Open it.'

It contained a hefty document, all about Merlyn's time in the League of Assassins. I remembered how Simon, a member of the League, had posed as head of forensics at the SCPD before the island, and had nearly killed me in an attempt to get back at Merlyn for 'betraying the League'.

'This is everything about Merlyn being an assassin,' I vocalised my thoughts to Leyla. 'This is good. Really good.'

It went on to tell us the location of Nanda Parbat, the training each League member went through, and other things such as how their assassins approach a fight and the moves they were taught. What astounded me the most, however, was the fact that Isaac had found all this out.

'We can use this to learn how Merlyn fights,' I suggested. 'We can work out his weaknesses. We can remind him of the past as a way to mess with him; he'll be much easier to fight.'

'He'll be exposed for the monster he is,' Leyla was now the one grinning wickedly. 'Then we can end him. For one last time.'

---

My sister and I worked tirelessly to learn the ways of the League, using Isaac's files to understand how Merlyn won every one of his fights. He had already taught me some of the League's ways before the island, when he had first recruited me, but there was still a lot we needed to learn. Between working at the SCPD and training with Leyla, I had no time to do anything else or see anybody else, and so I told Oliver I was spending all of January with my sister. Obviously, he thought I was talking about Rose, but really, Leyla was the sister I needed at that moment in my life.