“Time to go write that proposal.”
CHAPTER 3
MIA
It tookall weekend to work on my proposal, a step-by-step document outlining my goals and objectives for the interview with Vanguard, with some samples of previous works that could follow the same format and examples of my questions. I sent it to my boss, Roger Mank, first to get his approval. Poor sod hates being bugged on the weekend, but he read it through. Then, I sent it off to the email Van Veen gave me.
Now, it’s Monday, and I’m heading to work, hoping to God I’ll get some sort of news soon before our monthly debriefing.
The Tube is packed this morning, bodies pressed together in that uniquely British way where everyone pretends they’re not touching even though my arse is pressed against someone’s hand and my boobs are squished against a woman’s back. I get off at Vauxhall and walk along the Thames, the autumn wind cutting through my leather jacket. The River House is a large, brutalist building on the south bank of the river that everyone knows is MI6 even though no one’s supposed to say it. All bulletproof glass and geometric angles, it looks like a fortress designed by someone who wanted spies to feel like accountants.Despite the sprawling corporate façade, there is something thrilling about clocking into that building every workday.
But I don’t work at MI6, not really. Oh, I’m a spy alright, a trained assassin for the government on days when they might call for it. But to them, I’m a NOC, so I don’t really exist, nor does anyone else on my team, except for head honcho Roger, who manages to toe the line between government darling and agency outcast.
No, where I clock in is at the top floor of a converted Victorian warehouse in Southwark, accessible only by a cargo lift that groans like it’s dying and occasionally does die, leaving you trapped inside for a few hours before the chain-smoking maintenance guy pays a visit. There are no sleek offices here; instead, we get mismatched furniture, radiators that clang in protest against the London damp, whiteboards covered in photographs and red string alongside digital holographic screens, and the perpetual smell of Tabby’s Earl Grey tea and Bayo’s burnt toast. It looks like an underfunded university department crossed with a nan’s attic—which is exactly the point. The kind of place no one would ever suspect housed Britain’s most deniable operatives.
We are SOE—the Special Operations Executive. SOE is what happens when MI6 needs something done but can’t afford to have its fingerprints anywhere near it. We’re the ghosts, the unit that doesn’t exist on any organizational chart. Officially, the original SOE was disbanded in 1946 after running sabotage operations behind Nazi lines. Unofficially, Mank rebuilt it from the ashes of MI6 after the Dark Decade, when the world got messier and the rules got murkier. We handle the jobs that would cause international incidents if they went wrong—and sometimes, even when they go right. Black ops, off-book missions, the kind of work that makes bureaucrats nervous and politicians pretend they’ve never heard of us. If MI6 is thescalpel, we’re the knife you keep hidden in your boot, ready to shank someone at a moment’s notice, but the blood is always on our hands, never on theirs.
Normally, I pop into our SOE headquarters for briefings between missions, but for the last few months, I’ve been taking the tube from my flat in Kennington to the warehouse nearly every bloody day, resigned to a desk that isn’t really a desk, just a fold up table by our sorry-arse kitchen, crammed between the breadbox and the wall. Until about a week ago, I’d not been doing anything important. Not handling our agents in New Taipei or Yusuf in Amman, not helping Kat follow some leads, or even mentoring Fiona.
No, I’d been filing. Actual, physical filing—because apparently, in 2040, with all our fancy tech and hacked satellites and biometric earrings, someone still needs to organize three decades worth of paper documents Mank refuses to digitize because he doesn’t ‘trust the cloud.’ The man runs black ops across four continents but treats his filing cabinet like a mausoleum.
It was punishment, of course. A gentle one, by Mank’s standards—he could have benched me entirely, sent me to some godforsaken listening post in the Outer Hebrides, where I’d have to live among sheep, spying on a shepherd. Instead, he kept me close, kept me occupied with busywork, gave me just enough rope to feel the chafe without actually hanging myself. Classic Mank. The man makes disappointment into an art form.
I deserved it, though. That’s the part that stings.
Operation Black Ice was supposed to be simple. A honeytrap in Minsk—my specialty, if you can call it that. The target was Dmitri Olkov, a mid-level FSB officer with a gambling problem and a weakness for women with big brown eyes. He had information we needed about Russian interference in the Balticstates, and my job was to extract it in the most permanent way possible.
The plan was simple, almost elegant, the way the best ones are. I’d meet him at a casino, let him think he was seducing me, get him alone in his hotel room. One kiss, and it would all be over. Four minutes of convulsions that would look like a heart attack—the man drank and smoked like he was trying to die anyway, so no one would question it. I’d slip out, and by the time housekeeping found him in the morning, I’d be halfway to Warsaw with whatever intel I’d lifted from his phone.
Easy in. Easy out. No bloodshed, no mess, no diplomatic incident.
That’s the thing about being a honeytrap with a lethal kiss. When it works, it’s perfect. Clean. Untraceable. The kind of kill that makes you feel less like a murderer and more like a natural disaster—inevitable, impersonal, just the way things go. Story of my life, etcetera, etcetera.
But that’s not what happened in Minsk.
I should probably explain. I’m not like other people. I’m not saying that as a pick me, ‘not like other girls’ girl either. I’ve never been like other people, though I didn’t know it until I was thirteen years old, kissed a boy named Toby behind a museum exhibit, and watched him die in four minutes flat.
My mother was an MI6 scientist, brilliant, driven, and deeply fucked up in ways I’m still unpacking to this day. When she was younger, before I was born, she was captured on a mission and brutally assaulted. The trauma broke something in her—or maybe it just revealed what was already broken. Either way, she became obsessed with making sure her daughter would never be helpless the way she had been.
So, she engineered me. In utero, before I even existed as anything more than a cluster of cells, she and my father modified my genetics. They based the work on a species of moth—theErasmia Pulchellamoth—that produces a lethal toxin as a defense mechanism. They coded poison glands into my DNA, set to activate at puberty.
I was even named after the moth: Erasmia Reeves. A scientific inside joke, and only my parents knew the punchline.
The poison is in my saliva, not my skin. I can touch people, hug them, shake their hands. I just can’t kiss them. Can’t share a drink or suck a dick, for that matter, or do any of the hundred small intimate things normal people take for granted. And if I do, if my wet saliva or, erm, other fluids (other than sweat), makes contact with someone’s bloodstream, their mucous membranes, even a small cut on their skin—they die. Seizures, foaming at the mouth, cardiac arrest. Four minutes from contact to flatline.
There’s no antidote. According to my father, anyway.
I’ve been an operative for eight years, and I’ve killed more people than I can count with a weapon I never asked for.
But I remember every name.
Toby was the first. I was thirteen, and I didn’t even know what I was. I just knew I had the biggest crush on him, and when he pulled me aside down that dark hall and kissed me, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Only he’s the one who died, collapsed on the floor of the Royal BC Museum while I screamed and screamed and didn’t understand what had happened to him.
He’s the one who went to heaven. I’ve been in hell ever since.
After that, my father told me the truth. About my mother, about what she’d done to me, about why.She thought she was protecting you, he said.We both did.
