Page 2 of Mile High Heist

I was the cool girl. The popular girl. The bright, perky, sunshine girl who wouldn’t let some asshole dim her shine.

Or so I told myself.

My screen went dark, and my reflection glared up at me. Taking a breath, I softened my face. No guy was worth premature frown lines.

Besides, I had more important things to worry about, like the mission.

Despite Preacher’s assurances that all my fake credentials were in order, I couldn’t stop thinking about everything that could go wrong.

Like being exposed. Like losing the prototype. Like losing Molly again.

Sweat prickled at the back of my neck. I unlocked my phone and scanned through the attachment brief again.

The target was a man named Peter Vincilli, a former CIA agent gone rogue. There were no pictures of him, but his rap sheet painted a pretty grim picture.

Murder, kidnapping, conspiracy to commit murder, and lastly, treason.

Peter had stolen the CIA’s classified baby, a prototype cyber weapon known as the SKS, or Satellite Kill Switch. I wasn’t a techy person, so I had Preacher dumb it down for me.

“Imagine, darling, you wanted to invade a country, and all you had to do was flick a switch and turn off the lights. No one can see you. They can’t call in or out. Even their military is in the dark.”

“So…it’s bad bad?”

“Yes, darling. It’s bad bad.”

That bad bad device sold on the black market for a whopping half a billion dollars.

My job? Help steal the prototype before it landed in Zurich.

The hard part? Not only was Peter a scary-ass dude, but he was also a trained CIA profiler. That made him a living, breathing lie detector.

My phone suddenly buzzed in my lap, causing me to jump and nearly launch it across the room. Molly’s name flashed across the screen.

“Hey,” I answered, keeping my voice low. “Are you okay?”

Molly hated that question. Her response was always the same these days; a quick, automatic: “I’m perfect.”

The old-Molly used to strive to be perfect. The perfect older daughter, with her perfect law degree, her perfect choice in future suitors so that she could produce her perfect children.

It used to drive me crazy. Now I would do anything to have the old-Molly back.

The new-Molly was something else. Quiet, introspective. She flinched when I touched her. She slept with the lights on, when she slept at all. She refused to talk about what happened during the two years she was missing. But I’d seen the boat. I’d seen the hollow-eyed, broken girls trapped within it. I’d seen the monster Molly had to become to survive the unsurvivable.

I tried to keep things light, like I always did. “How did therapy go? Give me the waiting room cast.”

Molly chuckled, but it was a breathy, barely-there sound. “The guy with the foot fetish was back.”

“Ugh. Did you wear closed-toe shoes this time?”

“Yeah. I learned my lesson.” She fell silent. I waited, but the silence grew awkward. That was also new.

“Anyone else?” I pushed, my fingers picking at a loose thread on my skirt. I stopped when I remembered the uniform police was still in the room with me.

“Woman who licks her cat was back. She coughed up a fur ball and tried to hide it under her purse.”

“Ew.”

“Yeah.”