Page 78 of The Wrecked One

Don’t be jealous. I’m not allowed to be anymore. They’re friends. Mason knew her parents, and he cared about her, so . . . That didn’t stop the chills from flying down my body. Didn’t ease the pain in my stomach at the idea one day they’d wind up together again because I walked away. I want her to be happy, even if it can’t be with me. I just wished so much it could be me waking up next to her forever.

“Just hear me out,” Mya said, as if trying to shut down Mason’s unspoken objections. “My dad could’ve secretly had Steve’s face checked for a name, then he decided on a plan of attack,” she shared, still seemingly unaffected by what she was suggesting. I had to believe she was wearing her journalist hat, acting as though this wasn’t her story but someone else’s. “The Collective wouldn’t have known before they reached out to Steve to force his hand that only Gwen was at the safe house. They probably hoped more of us would be there.”

“Then they found out Steve was following you to Canada to find Oliver, and they had a shot to, at least, get him,” Sydney went on, continuing Mya’s line of thinking. “They’d probably been searching for Oliver as well, and although they couldn’t get the rest of us, they had to go ahead and make their move.”

Gray stood, folding his arms over his chest, shaking his head. “I’m having a hard time believing this. Wouldn’t we have come up with something connecting them to The Collective sooner?”

“There are never connections. Not ones you can trace, at least,” I shared my thoughts out loud. “That’s why we wound up in this situation in the first place.”

“We’ve never found anything online about them. Not even a mention of their name,” Jesse noted.

“If you’re not on the internet these days, you basically don’t exist, right?” Jack said as his pregnant wife, Charlotte, joined him on-screen and gave me a little nod of hello. “Hell, we made sure the same held true for Falcon. No digital trace can be found of our team online.”

“There’s more than just a trace of us now,” I reminded them.

Falcon had all been seen together when baited to Thailand for our rescue. The hacker had sent Gwen digital evidence confirming they knew we worked together.

“Well, The Collective has to communicate their plans somehow, just in a way Gwen hasn’t been able to detect over the dark net. Maybe they’re not sending their plans via email, but they’re collaborating somehow,” Sydney said, joining Jesse and Griffin on the couch.

Once upon a time, we’d all be there together. Operating as a team. Now we were split up, and it was my fault. Had I not been caught, they’d never have risked their identities to come for me, and now?—

“They do have great hackers working for them. This mystery person is better than me,” Gwen reminded us, cutting through my thoughts. “Scratch that. They’re kind of on our team, so that person can’t be helping them. I mean, unless they’re playing both sides. Or they’re forced to help them, but then they’d know more about them, and they haven’t given us any-bloody-thing.”

Her dad patted her on the head as if she were five, his way of letting her know not to beat herself up. The man had missed out on twenty-plus years of her life because he hadn’t known Gwen existed. Unlike my dad taking off, Wyatt would’ve been there from day one if given the chance.

“Maybe they use carrier pigeons to send their kill orders,” Jack, the comedian on the team, joked.

“Pigeons,” Mya murmured. Then repeated the word with more conviction while shoving away from the desk. “Holy shit.” She whipped around to face me.

“What is it?” I knew that look. Her beautiful mind was speeding through information. Processing. Solving a puzzle.

The way she stared at me with narrowed eyes and lips partially open, I’d swear she was trying to Jedi-force her way into my head so I’d know what she was thinking. “Pigeons?” I repeated, not following.

. . . Until I did.

Until that light-bulb moment happened, and my thoughts centered on a memory from Thailand. I drew it up in my mind right down to the boat, and the crates, and the freaking birds at the pier on Valentine’s Day where I’d snapped mostly photos of Mya.

“You two plan on filling us in on your telepathic conversation?” Jack asked, easily picking up our vibes. Reading us like we were currently reading each other.

“On February fourteenth . . .” Mya slowly faced the screen, her chest still rising and falling as she worked through the problem in her mind.

Jack filled the silence a beat later. “Also known as Valentine’s Day, yes.”

“An anonymous source sent a tip about an exchange I wouldn’t want to miss. Something connected to my story. A plane brought in some ‘precious’ cargo, and then it was transported down the river by boat. We were even given the heads-up as to which pier it was being brought to and on which boat. So, we waited there, and watched as pigeons were handed off to what looked like a delivery man there for a pickup. We figured it was just a bad tip, and I’d assumed the pigeons were the winners from whatever recent race had happened, because why else would a few pigeons be sold like that?”

“People race pigeons?” Gray asked, as shocked as I remembered being back in the day. “And they pay money to buy the winners?”

Gwen began typing at her second laptop, and a moment later, shared, “Apparently. Some winning birds have sold for over a million.”

“Well, damn.” Jack leaned back in his chair, resting his hands on his chest. “But what does this have to do with, well, anything?”

“My editor was always on my ass about what I was up to, so every day I sent a writeup to her. I shared my dead-end lead about the birds, along with the photos Oliver took.” Mya left out the part that ninety percent of that day’s photos had been of her, and she’d most definitely excluded those when syncing with the company’s server. “What if that’s what put the bullseye on us? What if we saw something we weren’t supposed to? Something related to The Collective. And I basically told them all about it with that email to my editor.”

“You’re not actually suggesting The Collective uses birds to relay their evil plans, are you?” Jack sat upright, shaking his head in surprise. “I was joking.”

“Not in the literal sense, at least not how they were used in the past.” Mya pulled the chair up and sat while squeezing her eyes closed, clearly trying to latch on to a memory or an idea.

“The Collective doesn’t trust the internet, because they know nothing is safe there from hackers.” Gwen sounded as though she was on board with Mya’s line of thinking, but was I? “So, they communicate in a way no one would ever suspect. Even their delivery people dropping off or picking up the cargo would be clueless. They probably hide messages in an old-school USB within the crate. Or use something that can be easily destroyed for good after it’s been read.”

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