Page 115 of Reckless

I get up, long enough to pull the throw blanket off the back of the sofa and lay it over her shoulders. She doesn’t stir, and I go back to the desk.

I work until five in the morning. The map finishes itself somewhere around four thirty, the last connections locking into place, twenty years of Calloway’s committee laid bare across three screens in a shape that will hold up in front of anyone who knows how to read it. I cross-reference it against everything Sage gave me tonight, and the two halves fit together clean, no seams, no gaps, nothing left for him to argue his way out of.

I have a name.

I have a framework.

I have the beginning of a plan that starts with a room and ends with a man who has spent his career hiding behind committees finally running out of places to hide.

The coffee maker clicks on at quarter past five, set the night before because I knew this was coming. Sage stirs when the smell reaches her, lifting her head slowly, blinking against the early morning light starting to come through the blinds.

“You stayed up?” she asks, her voice thick with sleep.

“I finished it.”

She sits up properly, pulling the blanket around her shoulders, looking at me across the desk with an expression that is somewhere between disbelief and something warmer than that. “All of it?”

“All of it.” I turn one of the monitors toward her so she can see the shape of what we built together, locked into a file that tells the entire story without a single gap for Calloway to slip through. She stares at it for a long moment, and I watch her understand exactly what it means, the same way I understood it an hour ago sitting here alone.

“We need to go to Sin,” I say.

She looks up at me, and there isn’t any hesitation in her face at all. “Yeah, we do.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

SAGE

Ghost walks beside me, his hand resting against the small of my back just long enough to steer me through the doorway before it slips away.

The gesture lingers anyway.

Before we left the workstation, he’d looked at me with that steady certainty of his and said the words I keep hearing on repeat, ‘I’m not handing this to him. You built it. You tell it.’

At first, I thought he was pushing me into the spotlight.

Now I understand.

He isn’t asking me to stand alone.

He’s reminding me this fight has always been mine to lead.

Sin sits behind his desk with his poker chip resting between two fingers, not moving yet, and his eyes come up to mine the second I step inside. There’s nothing unkind in his face. There rarely is. But there’s a stillness to him, the kind of attention a man gives when he already suspects the conversation is going to annoy him. “Sit,” he says.

I do. Ghost takes the chair beside mine instead of standing behind me, close enough that I can feel the solid presence of him without needing to look. My hands are folded in my lap, and I make myself unfold them, force myself to stop pressing my thumbnail into my palm the way I do when I need somewhere for the nerves to go.

I start with the texts, reading them out loud because seeing them typed on a page never carries the same weight as hearing the words land in a room, and I want Sin to feel exactly what I felt standing in that break room when I received it. My voice catches once, on the line about Piper’s contract, and I clear my throat and keep going, because stopping now would mean admitting how much that sentence still costs me every time I say it out loud.

I tell him about the group home inquiry. These twelve families trusted me with the worst parts of their lives, twenty-three individual accounts documented and cross-referenced until I could recite them in my sleep. I tell him about the grant rejections, three of them, each one wearing the careful language of an accident. I keep talking, watching Sin carefully. You learn pretty quickly who’s listening because they have to and who’s actually hearing you.

Sin is hearing me.

Ghost slides another page across Sin’s desk. “I’ve got him.”

Sin looks up. “Who?”

“The man behind the man… Travis Cole.” The name lands in the room as if it should mean something.

To me, it doesn’t.