Page 163 of Reckless

Funny, somewhere along the way, my little sister became the steady one.

I stand too fast, my chair scraping against the floor, and Piper catches my sleeve before I can move away from the desk. ‘Where are you going?’ she signs.

‘To get Ghost. Can you send this info to my cell?’

She lets go with a single nod, and I’m already moving down the hallway toward the main room, my heart working harder than the short distance should account for, because twelve hours from now Sin, Slate, and every man who has put himself between us and Calloway for the last two months is going to walk into a room with everything we’ve gathered, and this changes what that room looks like.

Ghost is at his workstation the way he always is, laptop open, the low blue light of the screen the only thing illuminating his face, and he looks up before I’ve even said his name, like he clocked the shift in me from the doorway.

“Piper found something,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel.

“I know,” he says. “She texted me ten minutes ago.”

I stop in front of his desk. She must have texted him just before I got to her room, but the fact that she texted him about this at all before coming to me first is a shock. “She texted you?”

“Well, yeah, she’s been texting me directly since the beginning of July.”

The words land somewhere deep inside me and sit there for a second before I can process them properly. I feel my mouth open, and nothing comes out of it for a beat too long. Because Piper doesn’t text people directly unless she trusts them, unless she’s decided on her own terms that someone is safe enough to let past the careful distance she keeps with almost everyone who isn’t me.

“It’s mid August?”

He simply grins at me like him texting my sister for a month and a half isn’t a big deal.

“Ghost.” It comes out sharper than I mean it to, somewhere between disbelief and something that might actually be gratitude if I had room to feel it properly right now.

He doesn’t flinch at the tone. He holds my eyes with that patience of his, the one that used to feel like distance and now feels like the steadiest thing in my life. “She wanted a direct line. Someone who’d answer fast if she needed it. I gave her one, which she clearly needed when those assholes were stalking her on the side of the road yesterday.”

I think about all the ways I’ve spent the last year trying to be the wall between Piper and every hard thing headed her direction, and I think about the fact that somewhere in the middle of that, without me noticing, she went and built her own protection instead of waiting for mine.

I sit down on the edge of his desk, the way I do now without thinking about it, and I pull my phone out and open the photograph Piper sent through of the two documents side by side.

Ghost takes the phone from me and goes quiet.

Not the comfortable kind.

The dangerous kind.

His jaw flexes once before he looks back at the screen.

When his eyes finally meet mine, I already know I’m going to like whatever comes out of his mouth next.

Neither of us says anything.

We don’t need to.

Every piece is finally in place.

Travis Cole gave us the trail. Waterton connected the dots. Montana proved it wasn’t isolated. The committee buried it. The money explained why. And Calloway?

Calloway tied it all together.

Twelve hours from now, one of us walks away from that meeting with everything.

The other walks away with nothing.

Either Calloway falls…

Or we do.