Page 1 of Ghost

Ghost

Albuquerque

Fourteen Months Earlier

Hacking is art, andwith every stroke of the keys, the person on the other side of the screen lets me know who they really are. They give themselves away bit by bit until I see their truth.

Some hackers are easier to detect than others. They storm in, and I catch them when they hit the first tripwire. Others are quieter. They’re careful. They get deeper before giving themselves away. Weaving a careful web as they roam my network, thinking they’re getting somewhere when I’ve made sure they still havefar to go.

It’s artwork that I appreciate, even if I ultimately lock them out before they can get anything from the Twisted Kings. I admire them for trying.

Whoever I’m up against now knows what they’re doing. They’re almost as good as I am as they tiptoe through my system, sneaking around.

Almost.

No one gets through without me knowing about it.

Sitting back, I watch the hacker work. I’m familiar with the patterns of most of our rival club’s tech specialists, so this person must be new. If it were Richter or Snake, they would be barreling in. Both tend to take a hard and fast approach. They’d plant a virus in an attempt to cripple the system before I could shut them down.

This person operates differently. They’re barely a whisper, sneaking through the firewall. Every movement is delicate. They’re cautious with their approach but bold in what they target, as they immediately seek out files with our bank account information.

They won’t find anything in there. It’s a dummy folder set up to distract them when they get this far. I lean back and smirk as I watch them take the bait, but I don’t shut them down just yet.

They hacked me, but they don’t seem to have any sense of direction with their random strings of code. At first, I thought they were planting a virus because that’s the easiest way to get in and get out, but if that was the plan, they’ve yet to do it.

The hacker breaks through another firewall, and it would be impressive if I didn’t already know they werethere. Their skill level far surpasses anyone I’ve seen try to break into our system in the past year, which has me curious about who I’m dealing with.

My fingers fly across the keys, and I divert them again, watching to see what they’ll do.

When faced with a wall, they work around it. When given an obstacle, they weave.

They still haven’t realized I fed them into a backup server ten minutes ago, so anything they find won’t compromise the club, but I use the time to study their movements.

Glancing at my second screen, their location finally pings. As talented as they appear to be, they must be new because they left their network open. It took less than five minutes to trace where they are, and, as it turns out, they’re at a coffee shop less than three miles away.

Opening another browser, I break into the city’s transportation department to pull footage off the nearest traffic camera, but it’s no good. I can only make out the corner of the shop.

Closing the traffic camera, I dive back into the backup server and retrace the hacker’s footsteps, being bolder this time because I have no choice.

The Merciless Skulls have been relentless since the Twisted Kings arrived in Albuquerque to help the Road Rebels defend their territory. They’ve been hitting us from every angle, and when the Iron Sinners showed up to help them, they became even more persistent.

I have no choice but to connect directly to the hacker’s server if I’m going to report back to Steel about who is trying to strip financial information from our records.

Eyeing the clock, I set a mental timer. I’ll have no more than sixty seconds before their system detects my presence.

Luckily, it doesn’t take that long.

A few more keystrokes, and I’m in their settings, feeding the laptop’s camera view directly to my second screen. It blinks, and the face of the person walking around my system comes into view.

I expected someone like me—a biker.

A recluse.

Someone who hides in the shadows, protecting the club without being seen.

Instead, I’m met with the image of a girl who beams as bright as the sun. Her black-rimmed glasses frame her bright-blue eyes, and they’re the color of the sky on a perfectly clear day. They narrow as she continues to type, and she’s biting the inside of her cheek.

The girl’s hair is blonde at the roots, but the rest has been dyed a pale lavender. She has it tied up in a loose ponytail with a few pieces falling around the sides of her face.

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