Dark Obsessions (Emma Myers X Jenna Ortega)

Chapter one

Minsk, Belarus - 09:45

With her nose tucked safely behind the confines of her scarf, Emma pushes open the heavy door that opens up to a narrow staircase running underground. It's still cold inside this passageway, though not nearly as cold as it currently is outside in the city this winter. Brushing flakes of fallen snow from her shoulders, Emma sets off down the steps, taking them one at a time and holding to the guardrail to avoid taking a tumble down the stairs as she nearly had upon her arrival into the city three days prior.

"Lorenzo," Emma calls out as she enters the little bunker down below, shoving her way into the room as she unwinds her scarf,

"Drew is running hot this week; he has me shipping out again tomorrow." Emma pauses to scan the clustered counters inside the dimly lit cellar, stopping at the one nearest her and running her fingers over the crate of hand grenades there.

"I know the original plan was to wait to gather supplies from you in a few days," Emma continues, looking around for the spectacled man who has been her contact in this city for two years now,

"But I wanted to see if I could get those weapons in advance so I don't have to search for them when in my new city."

A mumbled reply comes from the back room, a room that Emma had learned to never enter long ago. Lorenzo dabbles in poisons and toxins, and Emma had nearly inhaled his latest project about a year ago when she went back there looking for him. Pulling her gloves from each hand and tucking them in her pocket, Emma finds the chair off to the side and takes a seat, waiting for her friend to come out to see her.

It's not often that Emma receives such an immediate request to relocate somewhere else for another job, but Drew has been running her everywhere these past few months, so Emma really should have seen this coming. Drew Starkey has been Emma's handler in this business since she joined. He was the man who recruited her to the Operative when she was only eighteen, and Drew had personally placed her in the training program, where Emma spent two years relearning everything she thought she once knew about the world and international affairs.

It's no secret to civilians that the government has ghost operations and agents moving in shadows who do things they do not wish to be known. However, Emma had never known just how far these clandestine operations truly spread. The Operative is a collection of spies placed all over the globe, a group that was formed years before the Second World War by MI6. While the Secret Intelligence Service does carry out jobs similar to the ones Emma runs, they do not do so in complete secrecy.

The jobs that Emma takes are always performed in the shadows; intelligence stolen from firms and organizations, contracted hits carried out, and meant to either look as if they were an accident or performed by another competing group. It's a job that requires constant movement, and Drew had chosen Emma soon after she entered university at Oxford because he saw that she would be a good fit. Since the death of her parents when she was young, Emma's never really been tied to anything, and she never had a true place that she believed felt like home.

By nature, that made her fit for recruitment, and she had come home to her flat one evening to find Drew sitting there on her couch, something that had all but terrified her until she learned the purpose of his visit. Emma never knew that her father had worked for MI5, nor did she know that Drew had personally known him and had been watching her for years. It had not been her father's wish that she follow in her footsteps, but in training, Emma learned that she had a knack for this kind of job.

Even spies have rules, and Emma abides by each of them very carefully. Every job she takes has a complex plan as well as at least two backup plans that she makes the time to craft before even landing in the new city. This is now Emma's fourth year working for the Operative as a full agent, and she thinks that this life suits her. Except for longer jobs, Emma is in a new city each week, which means that she has traveled to multiple countries in the past few years of her life. Each job means reinventing herself to be the best character suited to complete her task, and Emma places a lot of care in forming her different aliases.