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.
Chapter 4
The crack of the whip sounding in the small room was all it had taken before Răzvan burst into tears, knowing with a sense of dread in his gut what would come next.
&nbs
p; He hated to cry, showing just how weak he was—he hated the way the professor snarled and snapped at him when he did, but he had never been able to control it, even when he desperately wanted to.
Even now as he tried to shove his fist into his mouth to muffle the sounds that left him, it was too late. The professor’s gaze swung in his direction, narrowing before he dropped his weapon of choice. The boy he’d been punishing dropped to the floor in a heap of exhaustion and relief.
He was spared, if only for a moment.
Răzvan was small for his age with a head full of wavy brown hair. He didn’t look like the other boys who had been here just as long as he had.
Their faces were weathered, even as young as they all were.
It was the crying, he thought, that made him a baby still.
He still looked every bit the cherub faced child he’d been when he was first dumped on the front steps of this place that cold winter night more than a year ago.
He hated it.
He hated himself.
“Be silent,” the professor ordered between gritted teeth once he was mere inches away, so close that Răzvan could almost smell the peppery scent of him. “If you continue to wail, I’ll cut out your tongue.”
The idea should have frightened him silent, but it only made more tears sting the back of his eyes as more choked sobs caught in his throat.
The professor looked as if he were mere moments from striking him … until a textbook hit the floor to the left of them.
Fang.
One of Răzvan’s only friends in this place.
One of the only boys who didn’t attempt to use his weakness against him.
The professor and his minions might have been who they all feared, but they weren’t the only bullies in the school.
Though he was the youngest between the two of them, Fang had always been bolder than Răzvan and had become something of a protector when he needed one.
“Pick it up,” the professor demanded, his annoyance with Răzvan momentarily forgotten.
Fang, who had earned himself a bit of respect after biting a chunk of flesh out of a former guard’s neck—the reason he was called Fang in the first place—looked up at the professor with a swollen black eye and a split lip, defiant as ever.
But what he didn’t do was pick up the book he’d purposely dropped onto the floor.
Răzvan wished he was that fearless.
He wanted to stand up to their abusers the way Fang so often did, even when it meant pain for him. Yet as Fang was yanked from his desk, his punishment swift and severe, Răzvan didn’t move.
And he didn’t speak.
Blinking, Răzvan dragged himself out of the memory, scrubbing a hand down his face to rid himself of the thoughts that plagued him more often than he liked.
He tried not to think about that time in his life—back when he was weak and helpless and reliant on others to fight his battles for him.
Meek was the word the professor had always like to use to describe him—meek as the mice that scuttled constantly through the corridors of the orphanage.
Until his voice was taken.
Until he’d learned to fight back.
During those first few weeks, the guards had beat the shit out of him—his screams silent even to his own ears.
The first time, they had only broken his ribs, leaving him in excruciating pain for weeks until the injury healed.
He hadn’t been able to tell Fang or his other brothers about the abuse, not when he’d lost his voice.
The second time had been worse. He didn’t actually remember the beating itself, only the result of it when he’d woken up hardly able to breathe.
As he’d lain sprawled on the floor the third time, holding up a scrawny arm to ward off more hits, he’d been saved.
But not in the way he’d ever expected.
Someone else had been there that last night—someone who had taught him how to fight back.
Sometimes, when he closed his eyes at night, Răzvan could still see the desperation in Sebastian’s eyes as he’d tried to flee right behind them, then the haunting the realization that he wouldn’t be able to make it out.
If Răzvan could change one thing about his time at the orphanage, he wished he could have saved Sebastian.
But that was a lost dream.
Now, as he stared at his reflection in the foggy mirror after he stepped out of the shower, his hand went up to the scar on his throat.
It wasn’t a hideous mark, and only when he tilted his head back at a certain angle was it particularly noticeable, but he knew it was there.
Usually, when his thoughts wandered, dragging him back to the past, he always thought of the day the professor hurt him the most.
It was funny the way memories worked.
He could remember the beatings all too well, could even see the swinging fists and feet coming at him from every direction, but he no longer felt the phantom pain of them. Yet he still remembered with startling clarity the day he’d woken up and realized he would never speak again.
Not for the first time, he wondered what he would sound like now? That question always plagued him.
Back then, his voice had been high pitched like that of a child.
Would it have deepened with age?
Would it reflect the man he saw in the mirror now?
Did it really fucking matter?
What was done to him couldn’t be fixed, so there was no point in stewing on it.
Not even the doctors Nix had on his payroll could fix what was done to him.
To this day, Răzvan still didn’t know who the doctor was the professor had brought in to remove his vocal cords. He hadn’t even known a procedure like it was even possible, but he was living proof it was.
The professor hadn’t wanted him to cry any more or beg and whine because of his mistreatment.
He hadn’t wanted him to speak.
He’d gotten his wish, after all.
Scrubbing a scarred hand down his face, Răzvan yanked the towel from around his waist and headed back into his bedroom, dressing in his usual attire of jeans and a T-shirt.
Once he finished, he went over to his bed in the corner of the room and pulled the sheets back into place, yanking and tucking the corners until it was all smooth and even.
By the time he finished, it didn’t look as though the bed had ever been slept in.
Old habits died hard.
Normally, by now, he would have gone off to find Fang and spar with him in the converted gym on the second floor of the loft, but as he walked by the closed door of his brother’s room, he was reminded that Fang was gone.
Death was a needy mistress—it stalked them constantly.
He couldn’t count how many times they had evaded it over the years, but those they loved weren’t always so lucky.
There once had been five of them—five little orphans trying to survive in a place determined to break them—but only four had managed to escape.
It had been Sebastian’s loss that had inspired Răzvan and his brothers to do everything they could to ensure they would never be that weak again.
They trained with the Lotus Society—an organization of assassins Nix had recruited them into—which consisted of not just shaping their bodies, but also shaping their minds, ensuring any challenge put before them was not a problem.
After two years, they’d left and become freelancers, answering only to themselves and Nix.
In that time, they had put their skills to use and became the one thing that proved the most lucrative—thieves.
They’d become unstoppable.
They’d become arrogant.
Even Răzvan, who knew all good things came to an end, hadn’t believed they could ever be compromised again—not like they had back at the orphanage.
Until Aidra.
Until Răzvan had watched his best friend lose everything in a matter of seconds.
It had been a long time since he’d felt that helpless in
the face of a problem, and seeing the pain on his brother’s face had made him wish he could have taken that agony away.
Since losing her, Fang had disappeared, leaving the loft where they all lived for somewhere he could be on his own and disappear into the bottom of a bottle.
There were days when Răzvan thought about dragging his ass back, and if he wanted to drink himself into a coma, he could do that here, where at least he’d be able to monitor him.
But Fang was stubborn and did what he wanted.
He wouldn’t be coming back until he was ready.
And they couldn’t do anything about it.
The loft was too quiet as Răzvan left his bedroom for the kitchen.
No matter how loud the television was, or the sheer amount of fucking noise Thanatos could keep up by himself, the silence of Fang’s absence was too audible.
He was just rounding the corner when he caught sight of Thanatos leaving Invictus’ bedroom, pulling a shirt down over his tattooed chest.
Thanatos and Invictus had a different sort of relationship—one that Răzvan didn’t completely understand, nor did he care to figure it out.
If it worked for them, it worked for him.
It was that simple.
Of the four of them, those two had always been the closest, sharing a bond that went back to their very first days at the orphanage. He hadn’t been the only one bullied for being smaller.
Thanatos had suffered too—his bullying made even worse because he had hair the color of gold that curled a bit too much.
People had a tendency to pick on what was different, and among all the dark-haired boys who had made up the orphanage, Thanatos had stood out.
He still retained his lankiness, though he’d added more than a hundred pounds of muscle. But where his skin used to be covered in bruises and welts and scars, he’d concealed them with dark ink.
He and Invictus had disappeared for a little more than a week years ago, and once they’d returned, there was hardly an inch of skin on Thanatos that wasn’t shaded in some way.
The artist had skillfully and almost lovingly brought the skeleton to life, the bones inked from his fingers, up his arms, and across his chest and back.
Shadows & Silence: A Wild Bunch Novel Page 4