Trust no one.

That was one of the first lessons Syn had taught her when she’d told him about her desire to work alongside him.

She hadn’t expected him to agree so easily, especially when he kept her under lock and key more often than she would have liked, but she wasn’t going to question it in case he changed his mind.

But that didn’t mean she could work with him just because she wanted to—not without a test.

And whereas she’d thought that test, whatever it might have been, would come from him, it hadn’t.

It came from his boss.

If she remembered nothing else, Winter was sure she would never forget the first time she’d met Syn’s handler.

No one knew his name, nor where he was actually from despite the cultured accent he possessed—they knew only of his power to give a person anything they wanted for a price.

They called him The Kingmaker.

For a while, she had thought Syn was the toughest man in the world, but that was before she was introduced to other mercenaries, and before she was introduced to The Kingmaker.

He didn’t have the same amount of muscle, but he exuded the same level of danger without ever speaking a word.

While Syn was still in charge of her, The Kingmaker ultimately made the final decision whether she would work for his organization at all.

She didn’t pretend to understand the relationship between Syn and The Kingmaker, especially when the latter didn’t seem to have much patience for anyone. But he did bend to some of Syn’s requests—like him refusing to allow her to sign a contract with the Den.

That contract was both a blessing and a curse.

It allowed the signer an opportunity to join something bigger than themselves and to align with a team who were the best in the world, but when you answered to The Kingmaker, it didn’t matter how powerful you were—you were never as strong as the man pulling the strings.

No, she wasn’t officially part of the Den, but she still had to answer to The Kingmaker whether Syn liked it or not.

And she was glad for that.

If Syn had his way, she would probably be tucked away in some nunnery away from civilization and away from anyone or anything that wanted to harm her.

But because she worked with The Kingmaker on various things, she spent much of her time learning everything there was to know about the shady world she was a part of as well as what to look out for.

If there was one thing she had learned, it was that mercenaries were distrusting. They tended to work alone, knowing that even friends were willing to sell them out if the price was right.

But hackers? Hackers were worse—they were paranoid by nature.

The Kingmaker or the mercenaries who worked for him might have set up a meeting time and did a little surveillance beforehand, but the hacker whose event she was going to didn’t just have one level of security to make sure no one uninvited came to his event.

He had eight.

So even if someone stumbled upon the invite and managed to get it decoded, there was still more to do before someone could even make it to the warehouse where it was all going down.

Thankfully, between the four of them, it hadn’t taken them long before they had all the clue and directions deciphered.

In the back of Ollie’s truck, Winter watched the city pass her by as they drove toward the address on the invite.

Located in an industrial neighborhood that brimmed with life during the early hours of the day but was now a ghost town, the warehouse was the perfect location.

Every year, Piston changed the venue of his events, trying to stay one step ahead of anyone who thought to track him.

Apparently, tonight’s location was an homage to some crappy TV show he liked to watch.

Once they’d parked about a block away from the building, Winter dug out her phone and turned it off.

By the time she was stepping out of the truck, Ollie was already waiting on the sidewalk, eagerness making him bounce on his heels.

She wished she still felt that same sort of excitement. His came from the high of it, for breaking the rules and getting away with it, and hers came from the desire to prove herself.

She didn’t have to know what the task was to know it wasn’t going to be anything she hadn’t done before. More than three years working with mercenaries doing a bit of everything made it hard to find a job that was new.

She remembered the wonder she’d felt attending an event with others like her—people who wouldn’t think anything was strange about spending hours upon hours on the internet practicing coding.

Her adoptive family, the Michalaks, just didn’t understand it.

Agree to a mercenary’s request that they allow her to live with them and raise her as one of their own? They could do that—after all, they had fully intended on buying a child on the black market—but she had never been their ideal daughter.

They had wanted a little girl they could mold in their image—one who was prim and proper and had a mind for business and wanted to marry well.

Sometimes, she thought that was what Syn had wanted for her as well—or at least the part where she didn’t work side by side with his co-workers.

Instead, Winter wore all black like it was going out of style, had more piercings than she could count, and tended to do what she wanted at any given time.

She liked her freedom.

Her desire for freedom had ultimately made her leave their home and get a place of her own.

Her desire for recklessness also had her walking toward the entrance of the warehouse when she knew she shouldn’t.

“So who was the hot guy you were talking to back at The Hall?”

Winter blinked out of her thoughts, glancing over at Tessa. “Who?”

“Ollie said you met up with a guy at the bar, and he had that look on his face he gets when we talk to any guy other than him.”

“Tăcut?” she questioned with a laugh. “He’s a friend.”

And a pretty hot friend too if she were being honest.

She might have been hung up on Syn, but even she could admit that Răzvan was nice to look at.

More than even.

The cheekbones, she thought with an absent smile.

“Ooh. Another mercenary?”

“Something like that.” It was far easier to agree than try to explain just what Răzvan was.

‘The Romanian Robin Hood’ just didn’t seem good enough.

“Are you going to introduce us?” Nicole asked, thinly veiled excitement in her eyes as she glanced back, butting into their conversation.

She had a thing for danger.

It wouldn’t be the first time she’d tried to hop on one of the mercenary’s dicks for the fun of it. Even Syn, who Nicole had known she’d had a thing for, hadn’t escaped her notice.

“You mean, am I going to introduce him to you?” Winter asked dryly.

Nicole wasn’t picky—she liked what she liked, and Winter didn’t judge her for it—but the thought of putting the two of them together didn’t sit well with her.

Thankfully, she was spared from answering once they reached the main doors where they entered the passcode and slipped through the doors.

This warehouse hadn’t been selected by chance—none of the places Piston chose for his events were picked at random. They needed to be large, open spaces, with enough electrical capacity to run several hard drives at once while still maintaining the privacy he sought.

Even as they passed the main doors, it took another five minutes before they reached the basement level and a few minutes more before they heard the muffled sound of voices. As they neared the final checkpoint, Winter’s excitement kicked up a notch.

One flash of their invitation later and they were inside the main room where three long tables were set up in the middle of the floor. Each held at least five computers with a sea of cords falling behind them and zip ties holding them all in place.

There was even a kill button connected to each of them should any uninvited guest interrupt them.

Right in the thick of things, Piston looked around the room with a wide grin on his boyish face.

Outside this place, he was just an average teenager who’d only recently graduated high school, but here and behind the anonymity of the dark web, Piston was a legend.

Winter had only met him on a few occasions, but his presence was better felt online than in person.

They’d only been in the room for a few minutes before Piston jumped up onto one of the tables and clapped his hands, the sound loud enough to silence the room and turn all attention to him.

“Let’s skip all the boring shit,” he announced, rubbing his hands together. “We’re doing it big this year! We’re not uncovering black sites, exposing government conspiracies, or anything boring like that. No, this year I want to up the ante. I want to see who’s really the best of the best.”

Piston had always had a flair for the dramatics, considering his notoriety, but it also didn’t help that he had more money than he knew what to do with.

His father was the CEO of a conglomerate Winter didn’t remember the name of and was worth billions. Piston’s allowance was in the six figures.

Men like that blew through money without thought or care.

For him, funding this little event was nothing more than a bit of entertainment that wouldn’t last more than a few hours.

“What’s the prize?” someone called out, cutting straight to the point of why they were all there.

Sure, the game was fun, but it was the prize at the end that made it all worth it.

At the question, Piston smiled wider. “The prize is what you find.”

A murmur of disquiet stirred the room as everyone’s disappointment was clear.

Even Winter glanced over at Ollie, wondering if he’d known about this little detail, but he merely shrugged, his excitement not deterred in the slightest.

“Then what the hell are we doing here?” someone else asked.

Piston paused, building suspense, and then finally answered, “The ghost account.”

“Bullshit,” Winter said, loud enough to draw everyone’s gaze to her, even Piston’s. “It doesn’t exist.”

Piston’s smile was a mix between amused and annoyed. “You should know better than anyone in this room that some legends are real.”

She knew exactly what he hinted at, or rather who.

The Kingmaker.

A man who was as much a myth as he was a legend.

It still baffled her sometimes that people thought he wasn’t real, but then again, out of the hundred or so people in this room, she was pretty sure she was the only one to have spent any time around the man.

Clearing her throat, she didn’t back down. “What evidence do you have that it exists, let alone that it can even be found?”

Piston snapped at the man sitting at the table next to him to get his attention, practically snatching the keyboard from his hands once he passed it over. As he started typing, a projector flared to life.

On the screen, a grainy image of a man with white hair and a bushy mustache appeared, unaware that he’d been the subject of a photographer.

“Meet Sylvain Richards. Renowned defense attorney for the wealthy and depraved. Until two weeks ago when he was gunned down outside his favorite haunt.”

The next image was that of a bloodied man. Had it not been for the snowy white hair, Winter wouldn’t have thought it was the same man at all.

She didn’t flinch away from the image the way Tessa and Nicole did, but she did feel a twisting in her stomach at the idea of what had happened to him.

“Unfortunately for Mr. Richards, he stole money from a number of his clients and well … he was a dead man walking. But you’ve probably heard the rumors about the ghost account he funneled money into to the tune of two-point-five million.”

It went beyond an account in the Caymans or a safe-deposit box in Switzerland—the ghost account was supposed to be untouchable and unhackable.

Rumors had it that it had been set up the same way bitcoins made their way around the web. Completely anonymous and only known to whoever had one of the accounts.

No wonder he wasn’t offering a cash prize this year. If one of them actually was able to recover the account and dump the money from inside, it would be the biggest payday any of them had ever seen.

Tessa, who’d whistled at the amount of money but didn’t appear convinced quite yet, asked, “What’s the catch?”

To this, Piston smiled. “It wouldn’t be a challenge without one, right? Not only will you need to find account information, but you will also have to access the secure servers in the Lofton Building.”

Murmurs of excitement echoed once more, another challenge to best, but Winter wasn’t one of them.

What a lot of them seemed to have forgotten was that the servers inside the Lofton Building couldn’t be breached remotely.

If anyone wanted information from inside them, they had to manually download the data by being in the same room.

She knew the game wasn’t going to be easy, but this was starting to sound impossible.

“But,” Piston continued, “if you’re good enough, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. And what better motivation is there than the promise of millions at the end of it?”

Piston hopped off the table, brushing his hands along the front of his jeans. “So if you’re in, drop your handle off with my man here”—he clapped the shoulder of the man sitting—“and we’ll get you taken care of.”

Now that the announcement was officially over, conversations started back up again as each person in the room discussed the benefits and repercussions of the game.

“What do you think?” Ollie asked, not looking the slightest bit deterred. If anything, he looked more excited.

“In case you forgot, I may work with mercenaries,” Winter said as she folded her arms across her chest, watching as others gave their online name to Piston’s right hand, “but I’m not a mercenary. Trust me when I say I’m not the person you want trying to break into a building.”

He waved her words away. “My dad was a locksmith, remember? I can pick a lock.”

She was starting to think he was legit insane. “You know actual people are in the building, right? Security guards? Any of that ringing a bell?”

He actually blinked at her as if he hadn’t considered the possibility.

She was surrounded by idiots.

They might have had the tools to disable security cameras and erase any digital footprint they left, but that was just it—that was all digital.

She couldn’t do anything in person.

“Maybe you can ask one of your mercenaries to help us out?” he suggested with a shrug of his shoulder.

Now, it was her turn to blink at him. “You’re kidding, right? Syn would never go for that.”

Not before London and definitely not after.

Plus, no mercenary would act against him when it came to her.

They liked to say it was because she was Syn’s charge, that they wanted to keep her safe because that was what he wanted, but the truth was that Syn sparked fear in a lot of people, and that was just when he was in a bad mood.

When it involved her? He didn’t respond well.

“I don’t know, Ollie. This might be—”

“Come on, Winter,” he begged, grabbing her hands and not letting go. “We need this. We haven’t had any work in months.”

Plenty of work existed for black hats, but not every job was worth the risk. And sometimes, it called for the kind of person who was willing to cross a few moral lines for the right price.

They just weren’t the type.

Before she could respond, Ollie released her. “What if we just gave them our handle and then think it over some more? There’s no harm in that.”

No, there wasn’t.

Except she knew the moment he did, she would try to find a way to find the ghost account.

Because at the end of the day, there was no challenge she wouldn’t try to best when presented with it.