Chapter Eighteen
GHOST
Two Days Later
Sage texted me an hour ago.
Sage: Still at Unsilenced. The group home inquiry needs another pass before morning. Don’t wait up.
I read it twice before slipping the phone back into my pocket.
I’ve learned what those texts mean. She’ll still be sitting at her desk with half a dozen files spread across it because she refuses to stack anything she’s actively working on.
The office door will be locked, the blinds drawn against a building that’s probably empty by now, and somewhere beside her will be a mug of coffee that’s gone cold because once Sage disappears into her work, the rest of the world has a habit of disappearing with it.
Part of me considers driving over there anyway.
Not because she needs me. But because I’ve discovered I’m considerably better at convincing her to take a break than she is herself.
Or maybe I should text Liam to check on her.
He’s probably bored out of his brain having to babysit her from the parking lot of her work.
The thought barely has time to settle before the clubhouse door opens.
I glance up automatically to see Piper strutting in like she owns the place.
Three weeks ago, she stood in that doorway for almost a full minute, reading the room before she’d taken her first step inside.
Tonight she walks straight through the clubhouse as if she’s been coming here for years, greeting people as she passes with an easy confidence that wasn’t there when she first arrived in Vegas.
Koa catches her attention first, and she lifts a hand in greeting.
He answers with two fingers against his forehead before going back to whatever Deek is trying to explain with far more enthusiasm than coordination.
Piper smiles to herself and keeps walking, not toward the bar or to the women in the club, but toward me.
She reaches my workstation and drops into the chair opposite mine without the slightest hesitation. The same chair Sage claims every time she wanders in here to ‘borrow’ five minutes that somehow become an hour.
The corner of my mouth threatens a smile. Apparently, some habits run in the family.
Piper catches it immediately, and she points at my face. ‘You smiled,’ she signs, smiling right back at me.
‘I did,’ I sign back.
‘I saw it.’ Her eyes are wide like she’s just seen a miracle.
‘I’m aware.’
Her grin widens. ‘I call that progress.’
‘It was brief. Don’t get excited.’
She snorts out a laugh. ‘It still counts.’
I shake my head, reaching for the keyboard while she sets her water bottle on the desk with a quiet thunk. ‘You’re spending too much time around your sister.’
She doesn’t even pretend to be offended. ‘Best influence you’ve ever had.’
I roll my eyes at her. ‘Debatable.’
She snorts silently, her shoulders shaking with the effort before nudging the second monitor toward herself. ‘Liar.’
“Probably,” I mutter under my breath.
Her eyebrows shoot up. ‘That almost sounded like a compliment.’
‘Don’t get carried away,’ I sign back to her.
She laughs, already shaking her head as I pull up the lesson module and angle the monitor so we can both see it. We settle into it, working through the first few signs before she reaches across the desk and quietly adjusts my hand again.
I glance down. ‘I’ve practiced that one.’
She grins at me, shaking her head. ‘Poorly.’
I furrow my brows at her. ‘I’ve practiced it!’
She reaches over and quietly adjusts my hand again, rotating my wrist a fraction before separating two fingers I’d let drift together. The movement is almost imperceptible.
The meaning isn’t.
‘Better,’ she signs.
‘I was close,’ I defend.
She gives me a look. The kind that makes it very clear she and Sage share more than DNA. ‘Close isn’t the same as right, Ghost.’
‘No,’ I admit. ‘It’s not.’
For a second, she watches me. Then she folds her hands on the desk and looks at me with an expression I’ve started to recognize over the last few weeks. It’s the same look Sage gets right before she asks a question she already knows is going to make my life considerably more complicated.
‘You know something’s wrong with her.’
I hold her gaze for a second before I answer. There is no version of this conversation where I pretend not to understand what she is asking, ‘Yes.’
‘She won’t tell you.’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’
I let the pause sit there because the honest answer costs me something to give, even to a twenty-six-year-old kid who has known me for three weeks. ‘Yes.’
Piper leans back in the chair, arms crossing, and for a moment, she looks so much like Sage that it catches me somewhere under the ribs. Same tilt of the head when she decides how much to say, and the same stillness right before she says it anyway.
Piper signs slow enough that I catch every word without asking her to repeat it.
‘She’s been doing it her whole life. Puts herself between everyone she loves and anything hard.
Even when she shouldn’t…’ she pauses, her hands settling in her lap for a beat before she continues, ‘I’ve been watching her do it since I was five. ’
I wait. More is coming, and I have learned not to rush her when more is coming.
‘She never learned to let anyone stand beside her,’ Piper signs. ‘Only in front of her.’
Something settles heavily, familiar enough that I recognize it, unfamiliar enough that I leave it alone.
‘What does she need?’ I sign back.
Piper holds my gaze for another second before answering. I’ve learned that silence isn’t hesitation with her. It’s deliberation.
‘Someone who doesn’t let her keep doing it,’ she signs, plain and direct, no softness around the edges of it.
‘I’m working on it.’
‘Work faster.’
I huff out something close to a laugh, and Piper’s expression shifts in quiet satisfaction.
Somewhere along the way she’d started treating every genuine reaction she managed to get out of me like a small victory.
“You’re bossy,” I say out loud, mostly for my own benefit, because I know she reads lips well enough to catch it anyway.
She grins, unbothered, and signs back without missing a beat. ‘Someone has to be. You’re both hopeless.’
‘I’m not hopeless.’
‘You learned an entire language because my sister mentioned that I was coming here.’ She tilts her head, daring me to argue the point. ‘You’re right, that’s not hopeless. That’s something else. I haven’t decided what to call it yet.’
I don’t have an answer for that, so I go back to the lesson module and pretend the correction I am making to my own hand shape actually needs that much attention.
Piper lets me have the moment, but only for about ten seconds before she starts up again, because apparently that is the only length of silence she is willing to tolerate.
She spends the next twenty minutes running through a list of increasingly ridiculous questions clearly designed to see how much she can get out of me before I stop answering.
Whether I have ever been on a date that didn’t involve a mission briefing first.
Whether Sage snores, which I refuse to answer on principle.
Whether I own a single shirt that isn’t black. I tell her the shirts are practical. She tells me that is the most boring answer a human being has ever given and that she is embarrassed on my behalf.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I catch myself laughing, actually laughing, and Piper looks entirely too pleased with herself about causing it.
I like the kid. I didn’t expect to, not with the speed it happened, but there is something about the way she refuses to tiptoe around anything that makes the room feel lighter every time she is in it.
She reminds me of Sage in the parts that matter and nothing like her in the parts that make her easy company instead of a fight I have to choose to have.
Eventually, she stands, stretches, and signs one last thing before heading for the stairs with her water bottle. ‘Don’t mess this up, Ghost. I like having you around.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘You’d better. I don’t make friends easily.’
Friends. For some reason, the idea of us being friends makes me feel all warm and fucking fuzzy inside.
Get a goddamn grip!
She doesn’t leave straightaway. Instead, she leans over, uninvited, and studies my second monitor, the financial map, still open, still an ugly tangle of boxes and connector lines that means everything to me and nothing to anyone else who looks at it.
She makes a face.
‘What?’ I sign.
‘This is a war crime,’ she signs back, deadly serious. ‘Visually, I mean. Nobody can read this. There’s no hierarchy. Everything’s the same size, same color, same weight. Your eye doesn’t know where to land.’
‘It’s accurate.’
‘It’s accurate and unreadable. Those aren’t opposites, they’re just both true.
’ She taps the screen, right on the tangle around one cluster of shell names.
‘This is what I do all day, you know. Not the crime part. The part where fifty ugly, confusing things all need to become one thing a ‘normal’ person can look at and understand in five seconds.’
I look at the map again, then at her. ‘You do brand work?’ I mock.
‘I’m a junior designer. Which mostly means I do the parts nobody wants to do…
competitor research, digging through some other company’s entire online history to figure out who actually built their site, whether three ‘different’ companies are secretly the same lazy agency wearing three different logos.
’ She shrugs, entirely unaware of what she’s just said.
‘It’s more detective work than people think.
You’d be surprised what you can tell from a bad font choice. ’
I don’t say anything for a second.
I let it sit, knowing damn well I won’t forget it.
‘Interesting,’ I sign.
‘Everything’s interesting to you. You’re a weird man, Ghost.’
She disappears toward Deek, and the clubhouse settles back into its usual late-night hum, low voices at the bar, the clink of glass, Koa’s television running some game nobody really cares about.
I turn back to the workstation. The traffic trace has been running in the background all night, the way it has for weeks now, quietly gathering everything I have been too careful to rush.
I pull it forward and run the resolution one final time.
The pattern locks into place.
I sit for a second and make myself run it again, because I don’t trust a single pass on something this important, not even when the answer looks clean the first time.
The second run matches the first.
I run it a third time anyway.
Same result.
The outgoing signal resolves, and I stare at it for a second longer than I should.
Then I run it again.
Same fucking result! It traces back to Sage’s phone.
Not a spoofed relay.
Not a cloned device sitting somewhere nearby.
Her goddammed phone!
The one she slides into the pocket of her jacket after every message, lifting her head with that practiced little smile like nothing untoward has happened.
The same recovery I’ve watched a dozen times over the last two months, every instinct I own, quietly filing it away while the rest of me searched for a reason to be wrong.
I always found one.
Until now.
My eyes stay on the screen.
The data doesn’t care what I want it to say. It only tells me what’s there, in black and fucking white.
I wasn’t reading it wrong.
I close the laptop.
The room stays quiet around me, and I sit there with my hands flat on the closed lid for longer than necessary.
I open it again.
I stare at the screen as if the data might have changed in the six seconds I let it sit there in the dark. It hasn’t.
Ten weeks. Someone has been sending encrypted messages to Sage’s phone for ten weeks. Sage has been receiving them and saying absolutely nothing.
Not to me.
Not, judging by tonight, to anyone at all.
I think about the parking lot footage. The hand going to her pocket. The delay before she answered me that lasted long enough to mean something.
I think about Piper’s hands moving across this same table an hour ago. ‘She never learned to let anyone stand beside her. Only in front of her.’
I sit with all of it for a long time, longer than I usually let myself sit with anything, because there is a version of me that wants to keep running the trace another time just to have a reason not to move yet.
Then, I pick up my keys and head for my bike.