Olivia's POV
The sun filtered through the glass ceiling of the greenhouse, soft and warm, but I could barely feel it. Sebastian and I stood near the vines, his fingers brushing against mine in a rhythm only we understood. We hadn't spoken much—we didn't need to. His presence next to me was enough. The world had felt unsteady without him. Two weeks apart wasn't supposed to feel like a lifetime, but it did.
And then, like gravity had pulled us, we leaned in at the same time. His lips were rough against mine again, chapped and urgent. My hands found the edges of his jacket, his arms came around me like a shield, and for the first time in days, I felt like I could breathe.
But just as the moment started to deepen, a loud, unmistakable throat-clearing broke through the silence.
We jerked apart, spinning toward the door.
Eve stood there with a smirk that barely masked the moisture in her eyes. "Finally," she teased, striding in. "You two were starting to make me feel single and irrelevant."
Vince followed close behind, arms crossed, expression unreadable but with a trace of amusement tugging at his lips.
Eve didn't wait—she practically launched herself at Sebastian. "You look like shit," she said bluntly, her arms locking around his shoulders.
Sebastian let out a hoarse chuckle, his body relaxing into hers. "Nice to see you too," he muttered, rolling his eyes. But then he hugged her tightly, his chin resting atop her head. "Missed you, Eve."
"And don't think I didn't notice those dark circles. You sleeping in a warzone or something?" she asked, pulling back and eyeing him critically.
He snorted. "Feels like it."
As they hugged, I stepped back slightly, looking around the room. My heart thudded with a question I hadn't voiced yet.
"Where's Luke?" I asked, scanning the greenhouse.
Eve's posture shifted subtly. She pulled away from Sebastian, turning toward the ferns, pretending to be distracted by a leaf. But there was something brittle in her movement—too casual.
Vince answered instead. "He didn't come. Said he was busy... had something to finish up. Promised he'd be available if we needed help, but... he's been distant."
I felt it immediately—Eve's reaction wasn't just concern. It was pain. She didn't speak, but I saw the flicker in her eyes. A quiet ache. Something had happened, but she wasn't ready to say it out loud.
I didn't press her.
Instead, we all moved to the long wooden table in the middle of the greenhouse. The scent of herbs and damp soil hung in the air. We sat—four people who had been running for their lives, who had lost and fought and endured—and tried to feel human again.
"So," Vince said, arms braced on the table, voice low. "What's the next move?"
Sebastian pulled out his laptop. "I found something. Lawrence has a personal server, completely off-grid. But I tracked a data packet leak when we intercepted the drone feed two weeks ago. It's how he's hiding classified files—records that don't exist anywhere else."
Eve sat forward. "Can we get in?"
Sebastian gave a small, grim smile. "We already did."
He turned the laptop so we could see the screen. Folder after folder appeared. Names. Dates. Locations.
And pictures.
I pressed a hand to my mouth.
"Project ECHO," Vince said grimly. "Those are the kids."
Dozens of names. Some with photos, some with medical scans. All marked status: missing. A horror show, hidden behind firewalls and encrypted tunnels.
"This isn't just data," Eve whispered, her voice shaking. "This is evidence."
"But that's not all," Sebastian said, scrolling further. "Look at this."
He opened a subfolder. Inside were communication logs, bank transfers, legal documents.
"Lawrence's son—Travis Lawrence. He was arrested two years ago for assaulting a young girl. The report disappeared. Covered up with hush money and favors."
Vince's jaw clenched. "He used government funds to settle it. Look at the transaction trail—he paid the victim's family through a shell company tied to a military grant."
"And here—" Eve pointed. "He falsified academic records to get Travis into a counter-intel program. He's not even qualified. This whole thing is nepotism and corruption. A damn dynasty of rot."
I stared at the screen, the bile rising in my throat. "We leak this. All of it."
"We're going to do more than that," Vince said. "We're going to bring it to the victims' families first. Let them have it. Then we make it public."
The greenhouse smelled like mint and soil and something else—like nerves and tension that couldn't be swept out. By noon, the soft hum of the ventilation fans was drowned beneath the low murmur of voices outside. One by one, they had started to arrive. Parents, siblings, grandparents. People who had been told to give up. People who had been lied to.
We couldn't go out—Eve, Sebastian, and I were still wanted. Faces on a BOLO list. But Vince had arranged everything. He vetted each guest, explained the location was secure, and guided them in through the side entrance. Most of them didn't even know each other before today. Now, they sat in chairs among the ferns and flowering vines, bound by grief and fury.
I sat next to Evelyn, our laptops open on the long wooden table. Sebastian stood beside me, his arms folded tightly across his chest, like he was holding himself together.
The first person to speak was a woman named Teresa Moreno. Her daughter, Liana, had disappeared from a youth shelter outside Phoenix five years ago.
"I begged them," Teresa said, her voice shaking. "I begged them to look harder. They told me she probably ran away. But I knew my girl. She was shy. Scared of strangers. She never would've left on her own."
Evelyn gently turned her screen toward her. "This is the medical scan taken three days after she was moved under Project ECHO custody. That's her ID number, encrypted and hidden in a sub-server no one was meant to find."
Teresa's hands trembled as she reached out to touch the screen. "Oh my God..." she whispered. "Her hair was longer then. She had that scar on her eyebrow."
Her eyes filled, and then she broke. The sound of her sob cracked through the greenhouse. Sebastian quietly pulled over a tissue box. No one said anything. We let her cry.
One by one, the others spoke. A teenage boy with his foster parents—the boy's twin had vanished from a state-run rehab center three years prior. An older man whose grandson disappeared during a routine medical checkup at a military base. A single father who'd been investigated for "domestic instability" just days before his daughter's name was erased from every public database.
We showed them the proof. The records. The lists. The logs from Lawrence's personal server. Photos with metadata. Test results. Voice files.
Some families collapsed into tears. Some whispered curses under their breath. One man punched the wall, scraping his knuckles raw, until Eve grabbed his wrist and said gently, "Don't let them take more from you than they already have."
There were gasps. Anguished silence. And questions.
"Where are they now?" someone asked.
"Are they alive?"
"What did they do to them?"
"Why would they—why would the government take children?"
Sebastian's jaw clenched. "Because no one thought you'd fight back. Because the people in charge saw these kids as disposable. Collateral for some twisted experiment."
"And Lawrence?" another woman asked, her hands curled around a necklace with a tiny heart-shaped charm. "He was behind this?"
Evelyn nodded. "Yes. He buried the records. Hid the deaths. Moved funding around to keep it off the books. He's been doing it for years."
"And he's still out there?" she whispered. "Untouched?"
"For now," I said. My voice was hoarse, and I didn't care. "But not for long."
They deserved more. More than just the truth. More than a slideshow of hidden horrors.
"I know this won't bring them back," I continued. "But you deserve justice. You deserve to be seen. We're going to make sure the whole world knows what was done to you."
A murmur passed through the group—like a thread of strength pulled taut between each person.
"Class-action lawsuits are already in motion," Vince said from the corner, stepping forward now. "We're working with two independent legal teams. Once we go public with your permission, this becomes a nationwide scandal. And General Lawrence won't be able to hide behind his rank anymore."
"And his son?" someone asked. "That bastard who hurt that girl—Travis Lawrence?"
Sebastian opened another file and clicked into an evidence trail. "Covered up with military funds. Records falsified. He assaulted a minor and got promoted after it. We're leaking that, too."
They watched the screens with a mixture of horror and gratitude. Many of them had been gaslit for years. Told they were paranoid. That their grief had warped their memories.
Now they had proof. Now they had each other.
"I don't know how to thank you," Teresa said quietly, wiping her eyes. "But you brought her back to me. In a way."
"You shouldn't have had to wait this long," I said, my throat tight. "No one should."
"I want to help," said the teenage boy's foster mother. "I want to be part of whatever happens next. If we can burn that man's career to the ground, I'll light the match myself."
That brought the first small, fierce laugh out of Eve. "We've got the gasoline ready."
Vince gave them packets—digital copies of the evidence, instructions on where to file reports, how to contact press outlets if they wanted to go public. Some of them wanted to stay anonymous. Others wanted to scream their story to the world.
We didn't rush them. We just listened.
Eventually, the room quieted. The sun had shifted through the greenhouse glass, painting golden light on the floor. People began to drift out in small groups, hugging one another. Some left flowers by the exit. Some asked for a photo of the document file as if it proved their pain was real.
When the last of them had gone, the silence that settled in was heavy. None of us spoke for a while.
Sebastian finally sank into a chair beside me and rested his elbows on his knees. "It's never enough, is it?"
"No," I said softly. "But it's a start."
Eve leaned against the wall, arms crossed, eyes red. "We've pissed off a lot of dangerous people."
"That's kind of our thing now," I said.
She gave a quiet laugh, but it faded quickly.
Sebastian turned to me then. He reached for my hand under the table. "You did good, Liv."
I squeezed back. "So did you."
We sat in the greenhouse until night fell. The air turned cool. The pain lingered, but so did the resolve.
And we weren't done yet.
The next morning, the world ignited.
Screens buzzed to life with chaos. News anchors looked pale and frantic, reading from teleprompters with barely hidden disbelief. Major networks dropped everything to go live. Online headlines screamed with sharp, unrelenting fury:
"PROJECT ECHO EXPOSED — Thousands of Missing Children Tied to Secret Military Program."
"GENERAL LAWRENCE SHIELDS ABUSE, COVERS FOR SON'S CRIMINAL RECORD."
"FAMILIES DEMAND JUSTICE — CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT TO SHAKE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT."
By 8 a.m., #JusticeForECHO and #ChildrenOfSilence were trending worldwide. Protesters swarmed Capitol Hill. Candlelight vigils sprang up outside military bases and government offices. Parents of missing children stood before cameras, holding photos no one had looked at in years—finally, finally being heard.
Videos from Evelyn's exposé circulated like wildfire. Screenshots of encrypted government files. Redacted medical documents. Voice recordings from terrified children. And photos of General Dorian Lawrence's son, Travis, smiling with blood on his knuckles and a court file conveniently erased.
The lie had finally cracked open.
Third POV
And in an office shrouded in glass and shadows, Jonathan Patterson watched the empire he'd built start to crumble.
He stood motionless at first, a man carved from marble. The massive monitor on his wall cycled between network feeds. MSNBC. CNN. FOX. All of them looping through the same damning words:
"Cover-up."
"Corruption."
"Children."
His jaw clenched tighter with every headline.
Then, he moved.
The crystal glass on his desk shattered against the wall, amber liquor dripping down like blood.
He picked up his encrypted phone and dialed a direct line. No greeting. Just fury.
"You let them get too close," he spat.
On the other end, silence.
"I don't care what it takes," Patterson snarled. "Silence them. I want Lawrence's mess cleaned up. I want those kids forgotten. And I want that girl—Olivia Price—dead or disappeared."
The voice on the other end hesitated. "Sir... the public response—this isn't like before. They're mobilizing. It's spreading too fast."
"Then give them something else to watch." His voice dropped into something colder than hate. "Stage an attack. Manufacture a crisis. Pin it on a foreign threat if you have to. We need panic. Distraction. I don't care how many bodies it takes."
Another pause.
"And bring in Halden. He's compromised."
"Halden's underground. He's not responding to tracking pings. No login activity. His access trail is cold."
"Then dig deeper," Patterson snapped. "He's emotionally vulnerable, and he's brilliant. That makes him dangerous. I want him found, detained, or neutralized. You hear me?"
"Yes, sir."
Patterson ended the call and let the phone drop to the desk. His chest heaved once. Just once. Then the stillness returned.
With precise, deliberate movements, he stepped across the office and approached a locked cabinet hidden behind an innocuous wood panel. A biometric scanner blinked red. He pressed his thumb to it. The lock clicked open with a muted hiss.
Inside, stacked neatly on thick, metal shelves, were files that didn't exist. Top secret. Eyes only. Most were bound in black or gray. A few in red. Patterson's fingers skimmed past them until he reached the back.
There, alone, was a navy-blue folder with OLIVIA Price stamped across the front.
He pulled it free.
A photograph slid out as he opened it. She was younger in the image, maybe sixteen, eyes sharp and cautious even then. There was a note stapled to the corner: "Unstable. Unpredictable. Highly intelligent. Subject must be monitored—potential asset or liability."
His eyes narrowed.
"You think this makes you a hero?" he murmured to the photograph. "All this fire, all this rebellion? You think people will still love you when the flames burn too hot?"
He flipped through the pages. School records. Psychological evaluations. Surveillance reports. Black-and-white stills from traffic cameras. Old photos of her hugging her mother. One of her sitting in a hospital waiting room, unaware she was being watched.
A final tabbed report labeled: "Incendiary Potential. Subject prone to emotionally driven retaliation. Exploitable weaknesses: SEBASTIAN Patterson"
Patterson read the names out loud, then closed the file with a snap. He tucked it under his arm and returned to his desk, where the news feeds continued to roll.
BREAKING:
"Senator Cole Resigns Following Data Leak. Thousands Demand Full Investigation Into Project ECHO."
"Pentagon Denies Involvement in Missing Children Scandal, Promises Transparency."
"Protestors Breach Military Base Entrance, Demand Accountability."
He scoffed.
"Idiots," he muttered.
He didn't fear transparency—he feared loss of control. There was a difference.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a secure tablet. As it powered up, he typed a command string into a private backdoor—a kill switch buried deep inside the infrastructure of Project ECHO. It was called Protocol Phantom. It was designed for one thing: total erasure.
Data. Footage. Names. Facilities.
He hovered over the red EXECUTE button.
Then paused.
Because he couldn't kill this story—not yet. Not without sacrificing too much. Not without sending the wrong message to the rest of the chain. Panic trickled down like poison. If he moved too fast, the whole damn skeleton would fall out of the closet.
No.
He needed a fall guy first.
And General Lawrence was already bleeding.
Patterson leaned back and exhaled slowly.
"I warned you, Lawrence," he said softly. "You and your disgusting little legacy."
He swiped open a direct channel to Lawrence's private number.
No answer.
He called again.
Still no answer.
Finally, the screen blinked to life. Lawrence's face appeared, gray and disheveled, his eyes sunken with sleeplessness. Patterson could see the chaos behind him—papers scattered, aides whispering into headsets, a security detail hovering by the door.
"Jonathan," Lawrence muttered, voice gravel.
"You look like hell," Patterson said coolly.
"I'm being eaten alive by the press. My son is plastered across every goddamn headline in America. And your agency promised discretion."
"No," Patterson said. "We promised results. You gave me sloppy cover-ups, a rapist for a son, and a paper trail any half-decent hacker could follow."
"You think this is all my fault?" Lawrence growled. "You think I wanted any of this?"
Patterson's eyes glinted. "I think you underestimated a girl and also your son with nothing to lose."
Lawrence's lips twisted into a snarl. "They are only children."
"Thet are a weapon now," Patterson said coldly.
A long silence passed.
Lawrence rubbed his face. "What do you want me to do?"
"Resign. Publicly. Plead ignorance. Claim rogue operatives. Paint yourself as a fool, not a monster. Then vanish. Let me handle the rest."
"And my son?"
"Send him somewhere without extradition."
Lawrence hesitated. Then, quietly, "Done."
The screen went dark.
Patterson sat still for a long moment, then turned back to Olivia's file. He opened the last page, revealing a grainy image from just two nights ago: Olivia and Sebastian in an alley, her hand gripping his tightly.
He stared at it.
He can't be free, he made him a submissive. But since Olivia had come in his life he has become free he has to do something to turn everything around
And somewhere, deep in the system, something began to wake.