Chapter Twelve
GHOST
The Next Night
Her building doesn’t have security worth mentioning, which is a problem I’ve been meaning to fix for weeks and keep not raising with her, because I already know what she’ll say about it.
She opens the door before I knock, like she heard the bike two streets over.
Maybe she did.
“You look like a man with a laptop,” she says, stepping back to let me in.
“I look like a man who got tired of texting you ‘Go to bed’ and being ignored.”
She almost smiles at that, but it doesn’t quite land, and I clock the shadows under her eyes before she turns to clear space on the dining table.
The mess is worse than I expected. Manila folders stacked three deep, printed photographs fanned out like she’s been looking for a pattern in faces instead of numbers, a legal pad covered edge to edge in her handwriting, getting smaller the further down the page it goes.
“Sage.”
“I’m fine.”
“I didn’t ask.”
That gets me a look, tired rather than sharp. Sage drops into her chair like her legs have been waiting all day for permission. “I didn’t invite you over to fuss.”
“I invited myself.” I set the laptop down on the one clear corner of the table I can find. “What’s all this?”
“Occupancy discrepancies.” She drags a folder toward her without much enthusiasm.
“Group homes reporting numbers that don’t match their licenses.
I’m trying to cross-reference every facility against every management company before I hand any of it to the State, because if I get one number wrong, they’ll throw out the whole file. ”
“How many facilities?”
“Fourteen. So far.”
“How many have you finished?” She doesn’t answer right away, which is an answer in itself. “Sage.”
“Four,” she admits. “I keep losing my place. The numbers start swimming after a while.”
I pull the stack toward the middle of the table before she can stop me. “Give me the list. Names, registered agents, the works.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.” I open the laptop and start building a spreadsheet, because that’s faster than whatever cross-out system she’s using on the legal pad. “I’m offering.”
She watches me for a second, like she’s deciding whether to argue about it, then pushes the top folder across. “Sanderson Group Home. Occupancy reported at Twenty. Licensed capacity is twelve.” She taps the page, then rubs at her eyes again. “Cross that against the management company.”
“Blackstone Residential Partners.” I’ve had the entity structures memorized for weeks, though I don’t tell her that part yet. “Give me the next one.”
“You’re not supposed to make this look easy.”
“I’m not making it look easy. I’m making it look fast. There’s a difference.”
That actually gets a real smile out of her, small and worn out but real.
She hands me the next folder, and the one after that, and somewhere in the third folder she stops watching to make sure I’m doing it right and then starts reading the next file out loud instead, her voice steadier now that she isn’t carrying the whole list in her head by herself.
Around midnight, I catch myself staring at the same cell for the fourth time.
The numbers aren’t the problem.
Sage is.
She’s reading quietly to herself, checking figures against reports, and somewhere over the last hour her voice has changed.
It’s lower now, softer around the edges, the words blurring together just enough that I know she’s getting tired.
She loses her place once, rubs at one eye with the heel of her hand, then reads the same figure twice without ever realizing she’s done it.
“Riverside Group Home. Occupancy reported at eighteen. Licensed capacity is twelve.” She taps the page, then rubs at her eyes again. “Cross that against the management company.”
I pull up the entity structure on my laptop, the one I’ve had open for three weeks now, the shell layered under a shell layered under something that used to be a legitimate accounting firm before Calloway got his hands into it.
“Blackstone Residential Partners. Same registered agent as the other two.”
“Same registered agent as all of them,” I say.
“Yeah.” She sits back in her chair and looks at the mess spread across her kitchen table—three years of her life in Manila folders and printed photographs, next to three weeks of mine in spreadsheets and flowcharts nobody outside my head could follow.
Two different maps of the same territory.
Hers built from people, mine built from paper.
Neither one complete on its own, but together, they tell a story that doesn’t leave much room for argument.
“We’re close,” she says.
“We’re close.”
She doesn’t say anything more for a while, and neither do I.
The apartment slips into that easy kind of quiet that only ever seems to happen after midnight.
The laptops hum between us, papers scattered across Sage’s dining table in organized piles only she probably understands, while the lamp she’d dragged in from the living room throws a warm circle of light over the reports.
Outside, traffic moves somewhere below the apartment, a constant reminder that Vegas never really sleeps, and upstairs Piper’s television keeps talking to itself until it suddenly doesn’t.
I don’t notice the silence straightaway.
I’ve been listening to Sage read figures to herself for so long that somewhere along the way it became part of the background. It’s only when I realize I haven’t heard her voice for a while that I finally look up.
I sit there a minute, looking at the shape of her, curled sideways in a chair that was never built to be slept in, a highlighter still loose in her hand like she meant to keep going.
The case files are still spread across the table.
Twelve families, twenty-three names. The same structure, over and over.
Overcrowded and understaffed. A caseworker’s signature on a form that never should have needed one.
I’ve read that structure before. It used to be my life.
Riverside isn’t the first group home I’ve seen the inside of.
I did four years across three of them before I aged out, different names on the letterhead, same file underneath.
I know exactly what ‘occupancy eighteen, licensed for twelve’ looks like from the wrong side of it.
A hallway you learn to avoid, a room shared with too many other kids, a caseworker rotating out before she learns your name properly.
Nobody gave me a computer to fix that.
There wasn’t a fucking computer.
There was a library two bus transfers away, four ancient terminals, and a thirty-minute limit I used like it mattered, because it was the only place nobody could reach me.
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.