Page 161 of Reckless

Calloway.

Every shell company, every financial trail, every connection he’s spent years burying behind layers of paperwork sits in front of me with nowhere left to hide. Sin already has the meeting scheduled. Forty-eight hours from now, the man who’s spent years manipulating everyone around him is finally going to run out of places to stand.

I save the file, close the laptop, and let the room settle into silence.

My eyes drift to Sage.

She’s asleep on the edge of the desk, her head pillowed on her folded arms, completely unaware she’s still holding a pen between her fingers.

A smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. She will complain about the crick in her neck tomorrow.

Forty-eight hours.

Then we finish this.

Chapter Thirty

SAGE

The Next Night

Piper is exactly where I left her. Three monitors throw pale light across the room as she works her way through the creative brief for Calloway’s latest group home campaign, completely absorbed, one hand flying across the keyboard, while the other scribbles notes she probably won’t be able to read tomorrow.

Ghost built her workstation the day she moved in.

She called him ridiculous.

Two days later she admitted she loved it.

The dinner I left beside her hours ago is still sitting beside the keyboard, untouched.

I swear the two of them would forget to eat if someone didn’t remind them.

It’s almost ten at night when I stop beside her desk. A second later, Piper catches the movement in her peripheral vision and looks up with the focus she gets when she’s buried inside something still written all over her face.

Instead of signing ‘hello,’ she waves me over.

My stomach tightens before I even cross the room.

I pull the second chair over beside her. She turns one of the monitors my way and starts flicking between two documents, her finger tracing the same handful of lines each time she scrolls.

She isn’t guessing.

Whatever she’s about to show me, she’s already checked it twice.

‘Government departments copy-paste constantly,’ she signs first, her hands quick and certain. I nod because I already know that. I spent three years reading committee language so dry it could strip paint.

‘This isn’t an accidental copy-paste.’ She points at a paragraph on the left screen, the internal operational language buried in the creative brief she’s been paid to design around, and then at the right screen, at a paragraph in the public-facing care standards document that Unsilenced circulated to every family in the program.

The wording is identical. Not similar—identical. Down to the punctuation, down to the strange little phrasing choices that no two people would use independently.

‘This is the same person writing both documents,’ she signs, and the certainty in her face makes my stomach tighten. Piper isn’t the kind of person who throws theories around for the fun of it.

I read the paragraph on the left again, slower this time, then the one on the right. “Holy shit…” The words slip out before I can stop them.

It’s been sitting right in front of us this whole time. I read the public document first. Every line says exactly what you’d expect it to. Families are promised dignity, compassion, safety, the reassurance that the people they love will be cared for by professionals who see them as people first.

It’s polished, warm, and every sentence has been carefully chosen to make someone signing those papers believe they’re doing the right thing.