They walked through the hospital in the clothes they had managed to grab in the lost and found, their suits, minus the tracking chips they removed, tucked into a backpack resting on Annabelle's shoulders. Steve was in a pair of gray sweatpants and a blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over his head while Annabelle had managed to slip on a simple pair of jeans and a purple hoodie with her hood up also. They made their way to the vending machine, finding the bubble gum section empty.
"So much for your genius plan."
"How would I know that fifteen sticks of bubble gum would be bought in three hours in the ICU unit of a hospital?" Their argument was cut off as they heard someone pop a bubble behind them, Natasha's reflection appearing in the glass. They turned around, Steve quickly backing her into a room and slamming her into the wall, pulling his hood down as Annabelle closed the door behind them.
"Where is it?" he demanded.
"Safe."
"Do better."
"Where did you get it?"
"Why would I tell you?"
"Fury gave it to you," she realized. "Why?
"What's on it?"
"I don't know."
"Stop lying."
"I only act like I know everything, Rogers." Steve glanced back at Annabelle who glanced at him before keeping watch again.
"I bet you knew Fury hired the pirates, didn't you?"
"Well it makes sense. The ship was dirty, Fury needed a way in, so do you."
He gripped her tighter, pushing her more against the wall. "I'm not gonna ask you again."
She paused, looking into his eyes. "I know who killed Fury."
Annabelle turned around, walking closer to them. "What are you talking about? Who?"
"Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists. The ones that do call him the Winter Soldier. He's credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years."
"So he's a ghost story," Steve said.
"Five years ago, I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out. But the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer so he shot him straight through me." She reached down and pulled up her shirt to show the bullet scar on her left side. "Soviet slug. No rifling. Bye bye bikinis."
"Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now."
"Going after him is a dead end. I know, I've tried." She held up the drive. "Like you said, he's a ghost story." He took the drive from her hand.
"Well, let's find out what the ghost wants."
YOU ARE READING
For Better or For Worse - Book 3 (The Winter Soldier)
Fanfiction"I need to see what I think of the world first. It may be a new world, but in some ways it's still the same." Annabelle woke up in the twenty first century after spending almost seventy years in ice. Not only is she thrust into a new world, she also...
