Sebastian's POV
The safe house smelled of mildew and desperation. Through the cracked window, I watched raindrops trace jagged paths down the glass, each one a memory I couldn't wash away. My father sat across from me, bound to a metal chair, his once-imposing frame now diminished in captivity. Jonathan Patterson, the man who had shaped my nightmares since childhood.
"You look just like her," he said, his voice still carrying that edge that made my spine straighten involuntarily. Old habits. "Elizabeth would be disappointed in what you've become."
I felt Olivia's presence behind me, steady and unwavering. Without turning, I knew her eyes were trained on my father, calculating, watchful. Vince's men had secured the perimeter. There was nowhere for Jonathan to run this time.
"Don't speak her name," I said. My voice sounded foreign to my own ears. Steady. Adult. Not the trembling child who once cowered beneath his belt.
Six days earlier
The capture had been clean. Precise. Everything Jonathan had taught me to be. Ironic that I'd use his lessons against him.
"There's movement inside," Vince had whispered through the comms as we surrounded the abandoned research facility where our intel had placed my father. "Three guards, standard rotation."
Olivia squeezed my hand in the darkness. "We end this tonight, Sebastian. Together."
Her touch grounded me, pulling me back from the abyss of memories threatening to swallow me whole. Memories of fists connecting with flesh, of being locked in dark closets for hours, of psychological games designed to "toughen me up." All in service of Project ECHO.
We moved like shadows, neutralizing the guards with non-lethal precision. When I finally found him in the basement laboratory, hunched over data that represented countless ruined lives, he didn't seem surprised.
"I always knew you'd come," he said, not bothering to reach for his weapon. "You were my greatest success, after all."
The rage that surged through me then was blinding. I had him zip-tied and sedated before he could say another word.
"Do you even understand what you've done?" I asked him now, in the safe house, rain still pattering against the windows. "How many lives you've destroyed?"
He smiled, that clinical detachment in his eyes that I'd grown to hate. "I created something revolutionary. Emotional control at the neurological level. Think of the applications—"
"You experimented on children!" Olivia stepped forward, her voice vibrating with controlled fury. Dr. Anika Grey, who we'd captured three days ago, had finally started talking. Project ECHO had used orphaned and neglected children as test subjects. Including Olivia. Including me.
Jonathan's eyes flickered to her. "Ah, Subject 17. Your parents were quite cooperative. For the right price, of course."
I saw Olivia flinch, and something inside me snapped. Before I knew what was happening, I had him by the collar, my father's face inches from mine.
"Those were people," I hissed. "We were people. Not subjects."
He didn't struggle against my grip. Instead, he leaned in closer, his voice a poisonous whisper. "Do you remember the day I first hit you, Sebastian? You were seven. You'd shown empathy for a test subject who was crying. Weakness, I called it." His smile twisted. "And look at you now. Still weak. Still ruled by sentiment."
The memory crashed over me like a wave. I was seven years old again, curled into a ball on the cold laboratory floor, my father standing over me.
"Empathy is a design flaw, Sebastian. I'm going to fix you."
I released him and stepped back, my hand moving to the gun holstered at my side.
"Sebastian." Olivia's voice, calm and centered. "He doesn't control you anymore."
But my father's eyes were locked on the weapon. "Go ahead," he taunted. "Show me I was right about you all along. That you're just like me."
My hand trembled as I drew the gun. Behind me, I heard Olivia intake a sharp breath.
"You made me suffer," I said, voice barely above a whisper. "Every day. Every single day. You'd hit me, then run your tests, measuring how quickly I stopped crying. Tracking how my emotional responses changed over time."
"It was necessary," he replied coldly. "I was making you stronger."
I raised the gun, pointing it at his head. My vision blurred with tears I refused to let fall. "Was it necessary when you tried to erase every human part of me? When you burned my drawings? When you killed my dog to see how I'd react?"
"Sebastian," Olivia said softly from behind me. "This isn't who you are."
My father's eyes narrowed. "She's wrong. This is exactly who you are. Who I made you to be. Pull the trigger. Complete your programming."
For a moment, the room fell away. I was standing at a precipice, looking down into an abyss that had my father's eyes.
Then I lowered the gun.
"No," I said. "I am not your creation anymore."
I turned away, and that's when I heard the click. Jonathan had freed one hand from his restraints, a small capsule between his fingers.
"Project ECHO dies with me," he snarled, raising the capsule to his mouth.
Everything happened in slow motion. I pulled the trigger deliberately, the bullet catching my father in the shoulder. He screamed in pain and rage.
"That," I said coldly, "is for my childhood."
The second bullet went through his knee.
"That's for Olivia."
His eyes widened with realization as I stepped closer, pressing the barrel against his chest. I leaned in, my voice barely above a whisper.
"And this is for everyone else you destroyed."
The final shot echoed through the room. My father's body slumped forward, blood pooling beneath the chair. In the silence that followed, I could hear my own heartbeat, thundering in my ears.
I dropped the gun, my hands shaking uncontrollably now. What had I done? What had I become?
"Sebastian." Olivia's voice reached me through the fog of horror. Her hands were on my face, turning me away from the sight of my father's body. "Look at me. Look at me."
I met her eyes, expecting to see fear or disgust. Instead, I found only compassion.
"He deserved it," Vince said from behind us, his voice flat. "After what he did to all those children. To Mom To Maya. To you and Eve."
But the words brought no comfort. I sank to my knees, the weight of everything crashing down at once.
"I'm just like him," I whispered, as the first tears broke free. "I became exactly what he wanted me to be."
Olivia kneeled beside me, her arms encircling me as I sobbed. "No, Sebastian. You are nothing like him. Nothing."
"I tortured him. I killed him. I wanted him to suffer."
"He tortured children for years. He enjoyed their pain. You acted to end suffering, not create it." Her voice was fierce with conviction. "You did what you had to do to make sure he could never hurt anyone else again."
Eve appeared in the doorway, her eyes widening at the scene before her. She crossed the room swiftly, kneeling on my other side.
"It's over, Sebastian," she said softly, her hand on my shoulder. "The nightmare is over. Dad can't hurt you or anyone else now."
My sister. The only family I had left in the world. Eve had suffered too, though differently than I had. He has beat me infront of her many time she has to close her ears
"We're free now," Olivia whispered, her forehead pressed against mine.
I turned away from him, unable to bear the sight any longer. Olivia's arms encircled me as the first sob tore from my throat.
"Let it out," she whispered. "He can't hurt you anymore."
The raid on the main ECHO facility happened at dawn. Alarm systems disabled, guards neutralized, and finally—finally—the evidence secured. Years of research data, test results, video documentation of "experiments" performed on children. It was all there, damning and irrefutable.
As the building burned—a controlled demolition after all evidence was secured—Beside me, olivia, my sister, squeezed my arm.
"It's really over?" she asked, her voice small against the roar of the flames.
"Yes," I said, though part of me couldn't believe it either.
My father was dead by my own hand. I had ended his reign of terror permanently. Despite knowing it was necessary, the act had left a wound inside me that I wasn't sure would ever heal.
"I still feel him inside me," I whispered to Olivia later that day, as we sat in the safe house that now felt too big, too empty. "Like a cancer. I'm exactly what he tried to make me—a killer."
She took my face in her hands, forcing me to meet her eyes. "No. You're nothing like him, Sebastian. He hurt people because he enjoyed their pain. You stopped him because you couldn't bear to see anyone else suffer."
Dr. Anika Grey's testimony, extracted during her captivity, broke across news channels worldwide that evening. The details of Project ECHO—a clandestine government initiative to develop methods of emotional control for military applications—shocked the nation. Photos of children with electrodes attached to their heads. Clinical notes describing induced trauma responses. And the names—so many names—of those who hadn't survived the "treatments."
Two weeks later, I stood before her grave for the first time. The simple headstone read only her name and dates: Elizabeth Patterson. Nothing of the gentle mother she'd been, nothing of how she'd tried to shield me from my father, nothing of how she'd died "accidentally" when I was only nine years old.
Eve placed wildflowers on the stone, her fingers lingering on the carved letters.
"Mom would be proud of you," she said quietly. My
I closed my eyes, trying to conjure any memory of my mother's voice. There was nothing but an echo of warmth, a sensation rather than a sound.
When I opened my eyes again, Olivia was walking toward us across the cemetery lawn, her hair catching the late afternoon sun. A beacon in the darkness that had been my life for so long.
She stopped beside me, her hand finding mine. Her parents had been sentenced that morning—Five years for child endangerment and conspiracy. They had willingly placed Olivia in Project ECHO, monitoring her emotional development while systematically neglecting her at home. The perfect control subject, they'd called her in their notes.
"How are you feeling?" I asked her.
"Free," she answered simply. "Sad. Angry. Relieved. All at once."
I understood perfectly.
The three of us stood there as the sun began to set, casting long shadows across the graves. Survivors of something that should never have existed. Broken, but healing.
"What happens now?" Eve asked.
I looked at Olivia, who had already started establishing a foundation to find and support other victims of the project. There were hundreds scattered across the country, many unaware of what had been done to them. Many still suffering from the emotional conditioning they'd endured.
"Now we help others like us," I said. "We rebuild what they tried to destroy."
As we walked back toward the car, I felt Olivia's hand tighten around mine. Behind us, Vince waited by his vehicle, his face a mask of contained grief. Earlier that day, he had visited Maya's grave—his fiancée whom my father had brutally murdered years ago. His battle against Project ECHO had begun with her death.
"Sebastian," Olivia whispered, stopping me before we reached the others. "I want you to know something."
I turned to her, this woman who had found me at my darkest moment, who had helped me piece together the fragments of my past, who had stood beside me as we brought the whole corrupt system crashing down.
"You are nothing like him," she said fiercely. "Nothing. Your father tried to create a weapon. Instead, he created his own downfall."
I drew her close, feeling her heartbeat against mine. Steady. Alive. Real.
"We're free now," I whispered, the words both a statement and a question.
She nodded against my shoulder. "We're free now."
As we walked together toward the waiting cars, toward Eve and Vince, toward whatever uncertain future awaited us, I felt something unfamiliar bloom in my chest. Not happiness, exactly. Something more fragile. More precious.
Hope.
The sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple. Behind us, my mother's grave stood silent witness to a promise unspoken but firmly made: that her death, and all the suffering caused by Project ECHO, would not be in vain.
We would make sure of it.
We were free now, and we would use that freedom to ensure no one else ever had to fight for theirs the way we had fought for ours.
Dawn was coming. And for the first time in my life, I wasn't afraid to face it.