𝒊𝒓𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒐𝒄𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆 | ʜᴇʟᴍᴜᴛ ᴢᴇᴍᴏ

𝟐 ᴄᴏᴍᴍɪᴛᴍᴇɴᴛ

paris, france

2012

The restaurant Kalina found herself in this evening was crowded and bustling. She had started to call Paris home, as it was where she had decided to establish her business headquarters, and the only thing calling her back to Sokovia were the distant whispers of memories she wished to forget. She stayed close to a small network of friends in the small Slavic country, and remained loyal to those relationships, but her heart no longer called out to the estates where she once imagined a family.

She was an empress in her own kingdom in western Europe. Everywhere she went, her name resonated with tourists and locals alike. She had moved her stocks and assets out of the National Bank of Sokovia, and spread them across financial institutions in Switzerland and France. Concerned with the destabilization of her country, the protests, and the underground murmurs of an organization named HYDRA establishing a foothold in the region, Kalina felt it best to secure her name in a more global economy.

Seated across a round table from a tall man with a dark complexion, in a more secluded part of the restaurant, Kalina sipped red wine from a glass that seemed too small for her liking tonight. The grating voice of the man droning on about his family's money and his sudden rise to success selling luxury animals for the black market in Madripoor was unsettling. She hated his demeanor tonight, and the man had arrived to the dinner with such an arrogance that had immediately set Kalina's blood pressure off.

"...you see, I, like any other man of my taste, will not settle for that kind of money. I needed more, so... there he sat, a drunk little man at our table... trying to argue the price down. Like I am some kind of charity case..." His words, through the bites of food he inhaled between each phrase, were enough to make Kalina want to dump her wine on his lap and walk out of the date, if one could call it that.

The woman sipped on the glass again. Many men in her social circle engaged in underground businesses, but something about the extortion of live animals for a monetary gain made Kalina cringe. She was a woman of ambition and power, but she lived with a set of morals, and that did not include exploiting near-extinct animals to savages who would either purchase them as pets, or worse. Kalina knew the fashion industry, and it was as dark as it was cut throat. She would never revert to such atrocity, but many did and the consumers would pay.

The man across the table cackled at his own story, spitting pieces of food around. Kalina quietly reminded herself why she was even here: to appease a potential partner, the man's father, Enrique De León, Spain's most wealthy entrepreneur and marketing director for almost every acclaimed fashion designer in the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. She intended to sway Enrique with her intellect and charisma, but he had made it very clear at their business meeting that he was increasingly interested in connecting her with his son, Beltran, the obnoxious, greedy man seated at the table with her now.