Black Widow

Prologue

Prologue:

For a long time I had flinched away from the thought of blood. I remember being coated in the blood of my parents. Now I am consumed with the thought of the blood of their killers on my hands. As twisted as it is, I even dream about it. Soon it will be my time.

The goal of the Red Room was for you to forget your past. Forget your name. Forget that you are human. In their eyes, you aren't human. You have become something else entirely.

I don't remember everything. I have flashes of memories. Most are bad memories, such as the murder of my parents. Mostly I remember the feelings I had during those memories. Sometimes that can be stronger than having the full memory itself.

My parents had been killed when I was six years old. I was sold into slavery. A year later I was sold into the Red Room project. I don't know how long I've been here. I just remember waking up one day handcuffed to a bed surrounded by a bunch of other girls.

We were trained to be the perfect assassins. Out of every class at Red Room there could be only one survivor. I was in a class with twenty-four girls. I was the first to kill a classmate during one of the sparring matches after she showed a weakness by not going for a killer blow.

Despite being the first to kill, I struggled the most. Most of the girls were naturally flexible and could easily bend into positions to defeat their opponent. I struggled doing a high kick, much less a split. The instructors took aside the less flexible and broke their limbs into flexibility. My arms and legs have been broken more times that I can count on both hands. After months of going through this process as well as many others, I was just as flexible as any gymnast or ballerina in the world.

By the time I reached the age of ten, there were only three left in my class. Rebekah Gustoff was a tiny blonde thing with black eyes. Then there was Milah Costello who was originally an Italian girl. Lastly there was me, Natalia Romanova, Russian through and through. They kept us in separate rooms, thinking that we would slit each other's throats in the middle of the night. Perhaps we would, if we had been given the chance. Instead of forcing us to fight to the death, we were each given missions.

The thing about assassins is that they like to have a way to remember those that they have killed. Even at a young age, we liked to have trophies. Rebekah had started getting tattoos of stars on her body. In each star was the initials of her victims. They started on her arms and then inched their way down her torso. Milah enjoyed taking an item off of her victims. In the Red Room we didn't have any belongings, so she took a locket of hair from each girl she killed. I had begun making tally marks on my thighs. The silver scars covered most of my thighs, it was only a matter of time before I ran out of space.

I was thirteen when Milah had been taken into custody by the German government. She'd slipped up and gotten cocky. I was the one they had sent in to handle her. She was found dead in her cell before she'd seen a day in court. This left Rebekah and I as the lone victors of our class.

I was returning from a mission when the Red Room was infiltrated by soldiers. Everyone that was inside the building was taken into custody. I watched as Rebekah barely escaped, fighting her way out. We met up outside of the compound.

"We should find them, Natalia. We need to rescue them." she told me.

I shook my head. "We are free, Rebekah. We have survived the Red Room. Those men will kill us as soon as they get their hands on us."

That was when our alliance had truly begun. We were all each other had left. Together we started selling our services as assassins to those rich, powerful, and corrupt that didn't want to get their hands dirty.

We were created to adapt to our surroundings to survive. Together we spoke a grand total of eight languages. It didn't take long for us to realize that we could easily seduce our targets into getting them alone. The following morning they would be found murdered in their beds, leaving their wives widows. That's how we created a name for ourselves, Black Widows.