Page 184 of The Echo of Forever

“I’m so sorry, sweetie. I’ve made so many mistakes with you. Trying to control everything. Keeping secrets I thought would protect you.” She shook her head. “I want to do better.”

I held on to her until I snapped out of my trance. The contact felt strange after years of distance, but I wasn’t against it happening more.

“Come on, I’ll take you home.”

We left the facility, and I walked beside her rather than ahead of her, like in the past. There was still awkwardness between us, wounds that would take time to heal.

“Do you want to go home? Or to your apartment in the neutral zone?” I asked as I started the engine, giving options since a lot had changed. “Or maybe to my apartment? Your husband trashed it, but mine had it cleaned. He wants me to get rid of it, but it’s a perfectly good apartment.

And part of me was attached to it, though it never felt like home to me.

She looked out the window. “Your place is fine.”

I took her there and promised to have Kai bring her car later. She wouldn’t stay cooped up for too long. Keeping busy was in our blood.

Word had already spread about my dad’s death, the lingering stares as I walked through EG twenty minutes later, telling me so. Eyes tracked my movement across the marble floor. And I guess I had shot a man dead in the lobby not too long ago.

“Lucien is waiting in your office,” Carmen said as I walked off the elevator to find her waiting for me, keeping her voice low. “He’s been there for thirty minutes. Oh, and the results came back for the Naratriptan. Lab says there’s nothing abnormal about them.”

I nodded, grateful for one less mystery to solve.

“I’ll be in my office if you need anything,” she said, pausing outside my door.

I pushed it open to find Lucien sitting in one of the chairs facing my desk.

“Forever,” he greeted, not bothering to stand. “You look well.”

I ignored his greeting and took a seat.

“To what do I owe the pleasure? You here to talk about how all this time you knew Demetrius had a brother? How his mother was already dead?”

He smiled, the expression never reaching his eyes.

“I take my duty as a neutral party in Everwood’s political sphere seriously, Forever. My father left me a task, and I did what was asked of me. However, I don’t see neutrality as a good thing like the men who came before me. There’s just some shit, you can’t be on the fence about.”

I matched his expression, rocking back in my chair. He made sense, but fuck what he was talking about. Being lied to and played like a video game wasn’t gonna keep happening moving forward.

Lucien chuckled after the silence stretched between us.

“You’ve done your part,” he added for clarity. “And as long as you continue to do it, the rest will fall into place.”

He reached for the briefcase sitting by his chair, placing it on my desk and popping it open. Inside were stacks of documents.

“We can’t kill him outright; his position in Everwood is too entrenched. His allies are too far and wide. But we can isolate and strip away his support.”

I flipped through the papers. There were financial records, shipping manifests, and photographs of known associates.

“Your mother and her friends have been collecting evidence for years,” Lucien continued. “Enough to expose parts of his operation without bringing down the entire system.”

I looked up at him. “And why not bring down the entire system?”

“Because chaos benefits no one, Forever. Better the devil you know than a power vacuum that could be filled by someone worse.”

I nodded slowly, appearing to consider his words while thinking it through carefully. He wasn’t wrong about the danger of a power vacuum, but his approach was too cautious.

He was too concerned with maintaining the status quo.

“And the trafficking?” I asked.