Page 121 of Reckless

She slides her phone across the table without hesitation, and her laptop follows a second later. No questions, just trust. The same trust she’d given me the day she signed, ‘He learned.’

Somewhere between then and now, she’d decided I wasn’t just learning her language anymore, I was one of her people.

I work through her devices at the kitchen table while Sage makes dinner neither of us asked for. I add new passcodes, location sharing locked down to two people, a tracker I build into her phone in under six minutes, one that will ping Sage and me both if her signal drops somewhere it shouldn’t.

Piper watches my hands the entire time, her eyes tracking every movement across the screen. She never asks what I’m doing, but trusts that if I needed her to know, I’d tell her.

When I glance up, she’s already signing to Sage, angled so I won’t catch it if I’m not paying attention.

But I am always paying attention.

‘Does he do this for everyone?’

Sage’s hands answer without hesitation. ‘No.’

Piper’s mouth curves. ‘I knew you were special.’

She pauses, and something in the set of her shoulders tells me she’s about to say something she’s been sitting on for a while. Her signs shrink smaller, private, the kind she’d only use with her sister, except I’ve spent eleven weeks learning this language, and I catch every letter of it.

‘You guys fucked!’

Sage goes completely still beside me. Her mug stops halfway to her mouth. ‘How do you—’

Piper doesn’t even let her finish. ‘Your faces. Both of you.’

I keep my expression as level as I can manage, which isn’t level at all, because I can feel heat climbing up the back of my neck the way it never does in situations that actually carry risk. Sage looks somewhere between mortified and helpless, glancing at me like she’s hoping I’ll offer some kind of denial she can hide behind.

I don’t offer one.

Piper leans back in her chair, entirely unbothered, entirely serene, the same steady confidence she carried into this conversation about her own safety twenty minutes ago. ‘It’s about fucking time,’ she signs, and there isn’t a trace of teasing left in it. Just something quieter, something that looks almost like relief.

Sage laughs, the sound breaking loose from somewhere she’s clearly been holding it, and I feel my mouth pull sideways despite every instinct telling me to keep my face unreadable.

Piper watches the two of us for a moment longer, then reaches for her newly secured phone, checking something on the screen as if she hasn’t just upended the entire evening with six signs and a smirk.

I finish locking down her laptop and set it back in front of her.

She looks up at me, and for the first time since we sat down at this table, there is nothing guarded in her expression at all. ‘Thank you,’ she signs. ‘For telling me the truth. Even the part you didn’t say out loud.’

I don’t correct her because she’s smart.

She already knows deep down, this shit is bigger than we are letting on.

Chapter Twenty-Four

SAGE

The Next Day

The email lands in my inbox at eleven. I barely glance at the subject line before flagging it for later. My screen is already crowded with seating charts for the fundraiser, donor confirmations, volunteer schedules, and a spreadsheet Piper helped me color-code because apparently my filing system is ‘controlled chaos,’ which is rude, but not entirely inaccurate.

I smile to myself as I move another donor into the confirmed column.

Three years.

Three years of planning, fundraising, meetings that ran late into the evening, and convincing people that Unsilenced deserved to exist. Every green square on the spreadsheet feels like another tiny promise kept.

A soft knock lands against my office door, and I don’t look up immediately. “Come in.”