Page 56 of Reckless

I taught myself in fragments, in forums, in cracked tutorials, and guides written for people who already had the software I didn’t. By sixteen, I understood databases better than most of the adults responsible for keeping mine straight, how they logged your name, checked the boxes, then forgot you the second the funding cycle turned over. I learned how to work the system without drawing attention to myself. Fixing things nobody was ever going to fix for me. A placement that should have ended sooner. A note in a file that would have followed me to the next home if I’d let it.

I made myself easy to overlook a long time before this club started calling me Ghost.

The patch came later, and not the way people assume. I aged out with nothing, nowhere legally required to want me, and a laptop I’d built out of three broken ones.

Turns out, knowing how to find things people don’t want found pays pretty fucking well when you’re eighteen and don’t care much about asking questions. A missing account here, a name buried behind six others there. Sometimes it was finding somebody. Sometimes it was making damn sure somebody couldn’t be found.

I took cash, kept my head down, and never met anyone I didn’t have to.

Until Bear.

One of those jobs crossed close enough to Defiance to put me on his radar. I remember him taking the chair across from me, looking from the three mismatched screens on my desk to the skinny eighteen-year-old kid behind them like he was trying to work out how the hell the two went together.

I spent most of that first meeting trying to decide whether he was there to hire me or put my head through one of those screens.

It turned out he wasn’t interested in either.

He was interested in me.

I didn’t know what the hell to do with that at eighteen, so I did what I knew. Kept my head down and went back to the job that had put Bear in front of me in the first place.

That’s when everything went sideways.

Bad enough that walking away would have been the smart move. I didn’t. I stayed and finished what I’d started, because back then, when damn near everything in my life had been temporary, the things I chose to take on were about the only things that felt like mine.

Bear noticed.

I found out years later that was the reason he came looking for me again.

My name came in pieces too. During my prospect years, brothers kept walking into rooms and finding me already in them, no idea when I’d arrived. Somebody started calling me Ghost as a joke. Then Sin handed me a problem that needed to vanish from three systems by morning. I made it disappear clean, and the joke stopped being only a joke.

Two meanings… same name.

I’ve never bothered correcting anyone on which one they mean.

I look at the folder in front of Sage—Riverside. Twelve licensed, eighteen counted. I know exactly what that gap costs the kids living inside it, which is the reason none of this—the map, the shell companies, days buried in spreadsheets—has ever once felt like work to me.

Some debts don’t get cleared by getting paid. They get cleared by making sure the account finally comes due for somebody else.

Three years.

Three years of chasing names, dates, and funding trails, pushing herself harder every time another door gets slammed in her face.

She tells me enough to keep me from worrying. She thinks I don’t notice the rest. The second coffee she never finishes. The extra glance over her shoulder before she unlocks her apartment. The way she reaches for her phone whenever it buzzes, even when she’s trying to pretend she isn’t expecting it.

Now she’s asleep at her own kitchen table because somewhere between one spreadsheet and the next, her body finally decided it was done arguing with her.

I keep looking at her longer than I should before I get up quietly. There’s no way I’m leaving her folded over a kitchen chair all night, so I slide one arm beneath her knees and the other around her back before lifting her against my chest.

She stirs, a sleepy sound catching somewhere in her throat as her head falls against my shoulder. “Ghost?”

“Go back to sleep, baby.”

Apparently, that’s all she needs. Her body relaxes against mine, one hand curling loosely into the front of my shirt as I carry her across the apartment.

I should put her down. Instead, I take the long way around the coffee table.

I lower her onto the sofa carefully, but her fingers stay caught in my shirt for another second, like even asleep she isn’t quite ready to let me go.