Page 33 of The Echo of Forever
I checked my watch.
“We need to move…” I caught eyes with Violet. “You set?”
She lifted an eyebrow, and I threw my hands up and backed away.
“Pleasure doing business with you, moonlight.”
Finnegan pointed his gun at me for using his nickname for her, and I chuckled.
“The fuck,” Oliver said, reaching for his before I stopped him.
He was just too easy to fuck with, but it wasn’t serious, and Finn wouldn’t pull the trigger.
This version of me is what they knew.
Finnegan tucked his gun with a smirk.
“Remember, I know your secret.”
I frowned.
The fuck did he have to bring that up for?
“Be easy,” I said over my shoulder after tossing the keys to the car we’d driven to him. “Your ride awaits.”
His laughter echoed into the night as we went our separate ways.
“Aw. You made friends,” Oliver cooed as we drove toward our unincorporated community.
There was a team there waiting to break down the crates and distribute them.
“Fuck you.”
He chuckled but didn’t push for more on what happened while I was away. I still hadn’t broken it all the way down to him.
Now wasn’t the time for stories about my movements.
We arrived in record time and made the switch, leaving the weapons with our team and taking the truck waiting for us.
The silence was comfortable as we made our way back to Everwood, until Oliver blurted a question out of nowhere.
“Do you think she’s alive?”
Now that I knew what I did, I had no fucking answer for that.
“Don’t know.”
He hummed.
“The package changed everything,” I said instead. “For me, that was reason enough to do this.”
That fucking package had arrived without warning. A large box containing our mother’s wedding bands, the silver locket our father had given her on their first anniversary, a pair of genuine ruby earrings, and a bunch of other shit I couldn’t imagine her parting with.
Things she wanted to give my future wifepersonally.
“If she is alive,” Oliver said carefully. “Extracting her won’t be simple. The Collective keeps its highest-value assets buried deep.” He paused. “We don’t even know where to start looking.”
This was where the Fairchild information would be crucial, but sharing it now would only complicate our immediate plans.Oliver would want to pivot, to focus solely on finding our mother. We needed to stick to the current strategy, establish our strength, create leverage, and then use it to extract information about her whereabouts.
