"Some days she felt like she was swimming in lies, treading water in a sea of deception. One day, surely, she would drown in her own secrets."
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Venetia Sarafian was never like other women. Rather than sitting back and thinking of how she coul...
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Throughout the course of Venetia Sarafian's short life she had grown accustomed to losing people-- people she loved. She was only four when she lost her beloved grandmother, the older woman having succumbed to a long and painful battle of lung cancer after years upon years of smoking. Despite Venetia's young age, she and her grandmother had been close, the woman having been the only family the girl had outside of her parents.
She was twelve when her mother died. Isabella Sarafian had been a kind and loving mother, always wanting the absolute best for her daughter. It was that love and desire for her daughter to have the best life possible that had led to the woman's untimely death. After years of moving and hiding, trying to protect Venetia from a world of people that wanted to weaponize her, Isabella had been captured by a Soviet spy. She had been shot half a dozen times rather than giving up her husband and daughter's location.
Venetia was nineteen when she lost her father, the man that had been her best friend her whole life. After Isabella's death, Matteo Sarafian had continued to constantly move around the world, never staying in one place for too long, constantly fearing for his beloved daughter's life. He wanted the same thing for her that Isabella had, for her to have a long and happy life, not to be locked up in a lab as someone's weapon. For seven more years he had managed to accomplish that, had managed to protect his baby girl. However, with the world on the teetering on the brink of a second world war, a German man by the name of Johann Schmidt had managed to get his hands of the Sarafian man. He had demanded to know where the girl was, but Matteo refused to tell him. It was his devoted silence that had earned him a blade across the throat, left to choke on his own blood.
Venetia was twenty-five when she lost one of the finest mentors in the field of science that she could ever ask for, Dr. Abraham Erskine. She had only known the doctor for a year and a half prior to his death. After starting her work with Howard Stark, the woman had found herself crossing paths with the German scientist, hearing whispers about his top-secret project. A project that she had managed to become a part of, working alongside the man and constantly learning from him, more than she ever could have hoped for. And when she had revealed her own secret to him he hadn't casted her aside or tried to use her as a tool or another experiment, he simply continued to treat her as a peer, just as Howard had. She had quickly grown to see the man as a second father-figure, someone she could look up to. Of course, it had only been fitting that he was torn from her life in the blink of an eye, under the orders of the same man that had killed her father six years earlier.
And now at twenty-six years old, Venetia found herself experiencing the pain of losing a loved one all over again, but this time it was different. James Buchanan Barnes hadn't been a family member and mentor as the others had been. No, instead the man had managed to worm his way into the woman's heart in a matter of months, making her feel things that no other person ever had.
