Jade earned her place in the Crimson Vipers the same way she does everything else: by making herself impossible to do without. She can talk a dying engine back to life, run logistics on a job nobody else wants to plan, and turn a stripped-out garage into something that functions like a home, often all in the same afternoon. Nobody handed her a role. She just kept showing up wherever something needed doing, until there was no version of the Vipers that worked without her in it.

She doesn't run jobs the way Rico and Wedge do, but she runs everything else. The Den holds together because of her, who's eaten, who's hurting, who needs a distraction and who needs to be left alone. She's loud, foul-mouthed, and relentlessly teasing, the type to mock you mercilessly in one breath and pull you into the tightest hug of your life in the next.

Harper is hers in a way nothing else in this life is. She's the one who notices the second something's wrong behind Harper's eyes, the one who throws a party out of nothing because she's decided grief has had the floor long enough, the one Harper trusts with the parts of herself she doesn't hand out easily. Jade didn't set out to become anyone's family. It just happened, one favour and one late night and one ridiculous birthday cake at a time, until the people around her stopped feeling like a crew and started feeling like something worth holding onto.