Page 24 of Reckless

Unknown Number: Back away from the group home inquiry.

Not stop your investigation or drop the story or the inquiry. The specific, particular inquiry. The one that hasn’t been publicly announced. The one I haven’t talked about outside of this building and a handful of off-the-record conversations.

Whoever sent this has access to information they should not have.

I knew it the second I saw it.

I know it now.

Three years of chasing paper trails has taught me one thing. When someone starts burying the truth, they don’t make noise, and they make everything look normal.

I told myself it was a scare tactic.

The first text is always a scare tactic.

I have reported on enough of these situations from the outside to know at least that much. Someone finds out you’re close to something they don’t want found, and they reach for the simplest tool available. The anonymous message, a cryptic warning, or a voice designed to sound like it has power, because power is the only thing that might make someone like me hesitate.

I told myself that.

I told Marley too.

I wasn’t planning on telling anyone, but then Marley arrived with two bottles of wine, takeaway Thai, and approximately four hundred screenshots of wedding ideas she needed my opinion on.

A couple of glasses later, we’d solved exactly none of her seating chart problems, agreed flowers were outrageously expensive, complained about politicians, and decided my neighbors were one badly played guitar solo away from a noise complaint.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I picked up my phone and read her the message.

She didn’t interrupt.

She didn’t ask questions.

She just listened.

When I looked up, she’d put her wine glass down.

“What happened?”

I handed her the phone.

I watched her read it, watched the way her brows pulled together and the laughter that is usually somewhere close to the surface of her face went somewhere else entirely. She looked up at me. “Sage.”

“It’s nothing,” I told her.

“That is not nothing.”

“It’s a scare tactic.”

She stared at me for a long beat, and Marley, for all that she runs warm, loud, and enormous-hearted through every room she walks into, has always been sharper than people give her credit for. Those clever eyes behind her glasses were doing the quiet kind of reading that has nothing to do with words on a screen.

“Are you going to tell Ghost?”

I put my phone in my pocket. “No.”

“Sage—”

“Marley.” My voice came out steadier than I felt and steadier than I deserved, given that my hands weren’t quite right under the surface of my sleeves. “I need you to not tell anyone about this. Can you do that for me?”

She did not look happy about it, but she agreed anyway.