Natasha Romanoff | Guns and Roses

5. Facing The Alpha

"I am dearly sorry for Russia, they have just lost one of their best trained assassins, or what could have been..." trailed off the Master. I wasn't entirely shocked by that, I'd defeated the soldiers in the tunnel, but when lost in a maze of caliginous passages and tunnels, there is no way your going to make it out, alive or not. But I knew I was good. Maybe too good. I'd heard over the speaker that they had halted the assessment. Seems like I was the one to put them in there and the one to get them out. Someway or another. I felt like the master expected a response, but I remained silent. I had worked my way into his brain more than once before; it wasn't a hardship to do it again. "Natalia, you must understand that this is your token to the future if you pass the assessment. Why do you always think there is another way out?" I could see straight through the Master. "Because there always is. All your schemes to find the best assassin always have a flaw, a weakness. Some may be as clear as day but others lie dormant underneath your planning until they leap out and bite you. Like a Black Widow spider, or maybe the Black Widow is just one of us..."

I'd gotten right into the Masters brain. Maybe too far. He knows what I can do. He had taken everything away from me. My mother, my sister, my sanity, my life. My whole life was now owed down to him. The guns I held, the people I killed; everything about me was now his. I'd been taken to the safety rooms. Standard protocol for rebellion influenced people. Or that is what they call it. I knew it as "the insane asylum" but now I was in it, I wasn't so sure. I wasn't nuts like the rest. My brain functioned normally, I knew who was right and who was wrong, but most of all, I knew they would need to strap me down. Everyone else fought the chains, I didn't. I had no need. I was escorted past multiple rooms of people restrained down to a bed. Most seem to be asleep, but a few seemed to fight. Screaming, shouting, wriggling, writhing. It wasn't necessary. You had to be the elitest of the elite to be able to fight them chains. I knew that. One of them stopped and stared at me as they walked past. It was Joel. He was cool. Emphasis on the was. He only took 3 years training. He was good, but not great. He could throw a punch, but didn't know how to avoid one. He was a few years younger than me. I would have said 2. But how would I know. For all I could tell, I was moth tangled up in the masters web, trying desperately to fight my way out of it. I would rather be in the spider's shoes, taking who I wanted, and for once, they would be the right people for the right reason.