Mark Hix, secret agent stepdad, looked at her with the same exasperated fondness he’d worn the time she crashed his car at sixteen.
“You left your phone on the kitchen counter,” he said, taking a slow step forward. “The one with the encrypted battery. Sloppy. Your mother found it while looking for the TV remote.” -MyFamilyPies- Emma Hix - Secret Agent Step Dad...
Emma’s finger hovered over the panic button sewn into her jacket seam. Inside the apartment, on a mahogany desk, sat an unassuming USB drive. Inside that drive were the schematics for a next-generation drone guidance system. Her mission: extract, exfiltrate, disappear. Standard fare for a field agent of her caliber. Mark Hix, secret agent stepdad, looked at her
He wasn’t just early. He was looking directly up at her window. Sloppy
She almost smiled. Then she vanished into the gray Vienna rain, a fake drive in her boot, a real one in her heart, and the strangest, most dangerous ally she’d ever known covering her escape.
“Then I have a counter-offer.” His eyes flicked to the stairwell behind her, then back. “The Syndicate is going to kill Control tonight. They already flipped his assistant. The ‘abort’ order wasn’t to save you. It was to strand you here. With me.”