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The cicadas were singing their droning, electric song, a sound Melina had come to associate with the oppressive humidity of an Ohio summer. It was a sound of life, insistent and brainless, and it grated on her nerves. In the yard, under the heavy boughs of a weeping willow, Yelena was chasing fireflies. Her small, six-year-old body was a blur of motion, her laughter like tiny bells scattered on the thick evening air. She cupped her hands, chubby fingers laced together imperfectly, trying to trap the ephemeral lights. She was failing, but the failure brought only more giggles, not frustration.
Inside, at the kitchen table, Natasha was hunched over a comic book, her brow furrowed in concentration. At twelve, she was on the edge of everything. The gangly awkwardness of youth had not yet settled. The American clothes still looked like a costume on her, but less so with each passing day. Her blue hair was pulled into a messy ponytail. She was reading about heroes who flew and smashed things, heroes who saved the world in bright, primary colors. It was a fantasy Melina knew to be a lie, but she never corrected the girl. Let her have this, at least.
This was the tableau of their life. Melanie, the doting mother. Alex, the charming, slightly oafish father. Natasha and Yelena, their girls. A perfect, four-piece family unit dropped into the heart of suburban America like a picture in a catalog.
And every piece of it was a perfectly crafted falsehood.
Melina watched them from the kitchen sink, her hands submerged in warm, soapy water. The delicate floral pattern on the ceramic plate beneath her fingers was chipped. She had bought the set at a flea market their first year here. It was part of the story. We don't have much, but we make it a home. A home. The word was acid on her tongue. Her home had been a sterile room with a cot. Her family had been a rotation of trainers who broke her bones and scientists who broke her mind.
She had been cycled through the Widow program four times. Four times they had broken her down to her core components and rebuilt her into a weapon.
Natasha had only just begun her own training when they were pulled for this mission. Melina could still see the echoes of the Red Room in the girl’s posture when she thought no one was watching; the unnerving stillness, the way her eyes tracked every exit in a new room. But three years in this quiet town had worked like a balm, smoothing over the sharpest edges of her training. She had friends. She went to school dances. She dreamed of caped crusaders. The Red Room was becoming a bad dream she was slowly forgetting.
Yelena, though. Yelena was different. Plucked from her real family as a two-year-old, she had no memory of anything but this. This house, this yard. Melanie as her mother, Alex as her father, Natasha as her sister. She had never held a weapon. She had never been starved as a lesson in endurance or made to kill an animal as a lesson in detachment. Her hands, currently failing to catch a single lightning bug, had never been used for violence. They were soft.
That innocence was a ticking bomb.
Alexei came in through the back door, letting it slam behind him. He smelled of sweat and some strong perfume he favored.
Melina saw Yelena being strapped to a table. She saw Natasha’s nascent spirit being snuffed out for good. She saw them both becoming her.
For three years, a part of her—the cold, scientific part that analyzed every variable—had treated this as an extended observation. She noted the way Yelena’s attachment to her developed, her cries for "Mommy." She cataloged Natasha’s gradual deprogramming, the slow return of a genuine smile to her face. It was all data. Fascinating, but ultimately irrelevant to the mission parameters.
But the data had coalesced. The observation had yielded a conclusion, one her analytical mind could not refute: the introduction of these variables had irrevocably altered the experiment. The mission was a failure because her own internal chemistry had been compromised. The scientist had been contaminated by her own subject matter. Her heart, a dormant organ she’d long considered little more than a biological pump, had begun to ache. It ached with a fierce, terrifying love.
Alexei ruffled Yelena’s hair as she finally ran inside, her cupped hands empty and her face bright with exertion. "No luck, little firefly?" he asked.
"They're too fast, Daddy!" she chirped, her English flawless, unaccented. She knew no other language.
Little firefly. The endearment was another part of the lie, but it landed like a physical blow on Melina. He saw her as a prop. A tiny, blonde piece of their cover story. He would happily, proudly, deliver this bright, laughing child to the abattoir. For the glory of his nation. For Dreykov.
Tonight. It had to be tonight.
Alexei’s loyalty was a block of granite. It could not be chipped away or reasoned with. It could only be shattered. And his presence here, his role as "husband," was a constant, festering wound. Every night, playing the part of a wife in their shared bed was a violation that stripped away another layer of her autonomy. Dreykov had taken her body for the program; Alexei, in his own oblivious way, was a willing extension of that theft. His death would be a necessity for the girls' survival. But it would also be a quiet, deeply personal act of vengeance.
She had a plan. Of course she had a plan. She had a plan for Dreykov discovering their betrayal. A plan for S.H.I.E.L.D. discovering their identities. A plan for a house fire, a car accident, a sudden tornado. And she had a plan for Alexei.
She dried her hands on a dish towel, her movements calm and economical. "Alex, dear," she said, her voice the perfect pitch of wifely affection. "You look exhausted. Let me get you a drink."
His face lit up. "Ah, darling. You know the way to a man's heart."
The poison was odorless, tasteless, and derived from a compound she had synthesized herself from household chemicals and several specific species of garden plant she had cultivated for this very purpose. It was a beautiful piece of chemistry, an elegant solution. It mimicked the effects of a massive, sudden cardiac event. It would be untraceable by any small-town coroner. Alexei, a man in his physical prime along with some Soviet super soldier serum in his veins, would simply be dead. A tragedy. A terrible, unforeseen shock.
She mixed it into the high-quality vodka he kept hidden in the back of the pantry for ‘special occasions.’ Tonight, the successful acquisition of the second to last keycard from a compromised Hydra agent, was such an occasion.
He drank it down, toasting the Motherland, Dreykov, and their imminent success. Melina sat across from him, sipping a glass of plain cold water, her expression giving away nothing. She had already packed the bags. They were in the trunk of the station wagon, hidden under a blanket and a pile of beach toys. Cash, forged documents for a dozen different identities, medical supplies, weapons. Enough to disappear.
They sat in the living room, the television murmuring softly. Natasha had gone to her room to read, and Yelena was asleep upstairs, clutching her purple stuffed pony. The house was settling into its nighttime rhythm.
Alexei started to look confused. He put a hand to his chest. "That's... funny," he rasped, his jovial tone fraying at the edges and accent slipping away. "Feel... a little..."
He looked at her then. The flicker of suspicion, the dawning horror. He was a blunt instrument, but he was not stupid. He saw her face, devoid of the panic or concern a loving wife should be showing. He saw the detached observation of a scientist watching an experiment reach its conclusion.
"Melina?" he whispered, the name a foreign object in his mouth after three years.
His body seized. He gasped, a wet, rattling sound, and pitched forward, knocking a stack of magazines off the coffee table. He landed heavily on the shag carpet, his body convulsing once, twice, and then going still.
Melina didn't move for a full sixty seconds. She timed it with the grandfather clock in the hall. She listened for breath. There was none. She watched for movement. There was none.
She rose, her body moving silently. No wasted motion. She walked upstairs, her feet making no sound on the creaking wooden steps. She went to Yelena’s room first. The little girl was tangled in her sheets, breathing softly. Melina gently scooped her up. Yelena stirred, her eyes fluttering. "Mommy?" she mumbled, her breath warm against Melina’s neck.
"Shh, my love," Melina whispered, smoothing her hair. "We're going on an adventure."
She carried the sleepy child to Natasha’s room. The older girl was already awake, sitting bolt upright in her bed. She wasn't looking at Melina; she was looking past her, down the hallway, listening to the profound silence from downstairs. The silence where their father's boisterous snoring should have been.
"Natasha," Melina said, her voice low and firm. "Get your shoes, big girl. We're leaving."
Natasha’s eyes, wide and intelligent, snapped to hers. She saw the sleeping Yelena in Melina's arms. She saw the grim set of Melina's jaw. She nodded once, a sharp, jerky motion, and slid out of bed. The training, buried but not gone, was already reasserting itself. She was quiet. She was compliant. She was ready.
As they slipped out the back door and into the humid night, the cicadas still buzzing their relentless song, Natasha finally spoke, her voice a ghost of a whisper. "Where's Dad?"
Melina buckled a sleepy, pliant Yelena into her car seat. She didn't look at Natasha. She just opened the driver's side door.
"He's not coming with us."
The first few hours were a blur of dark highways and the rhythmic thump of tires on asphalt. Yelena slept, cocooned in a soft blanket that Melina guarded with the ferocity of a mother animal. Natasha sat in the passenger seat, a silent, watchful statue. She hadn't asked another question. She was processing, her young mind sifting through the data: the abrupt departure, the packed bags she hadn't seen before, the missing father, the tension radiating from Melina like heat off pavement.
Melina drove south, then west, a deliberately erratic route. She avoided major interstates, sticking to state routes and county roads that bled into one another, weaving a thread through the dark tapestry of the American Midwest. She drove with one part of her mind, the other was a whirlwind of calculations. Dreykov’s reach was long. His network of sleepers, informants, and Widows was a web laid over the entire globe. He would not know about Alexei yet, but he would know they had broken protocol the moment the mission deadline passed without a check-in. They had days, maybe a week, before the hunt began in earnest.
"That’s the Big Dipper," Natasha said, standing by the car in the vast, empty dark of the Midwestern plains. She pointed to the sky, a brilliant canopy of stars unobscured by city lights. "And if you follow the two stars at the end of the cup, they point to Polaris. The North Star. If you can find it, you always know which way is north. You can never truly be lost."
Yelena, who just woke up and was bored out of her mind after several loops of her song was played, stared mouth agape. "Whoa."
Natasha didn’t look at the sky. She looked at Melina, her expression unreadable.
By dawn, they were a hundred and fifty miles away, somewhere in the rolling hills of southern Indiana. Yelena, now antsy after a couple rounds of ‘I spy’, immediately announced her primary concern.
"I'm hungry, mommy."
It was such a simple, human need. A logistical problem that, for the first time in Melina's operational history, superseded everything else. She couldn't tell the child to suppress it. She couldn't teach her to metabolize her own muscle for energy. She was a six-year-old girl who needed breakfast.
Melina pulled off the main road, following the signs to a small town that looked like it hadn't changed since the 1950s. A single main street was lined with brick buildings, a post office, a hardware store, and a diner with a buzzing neon sign that read "Cup & Saucer."
It was a risk. A massive one. Stopping meant being stationary. It meant being seen. But Yelena’s stomach was rumbling loud enough to hear from the driver's seat.
"Alright," Melina said, pulling the station wagon into a parking spot. "Ten minutes. We eat, and we go. Natasha, you stay with Yelena. Do not let her out of your sight."
Natasha just nodded, her eyes scanning the street.
A bell chimed as they entered. A few farmers in overalls sat at the counter, nursing mugs of coffee. A family was crammed into a booth near the back. Melina chose a booth by the window, one that gave her a clear view of the door and the street beyond. She sat on the outside, boxing the girls in.
Yelena immediately grabbed a menu, her eyes wide. "Pancakes! Can I have pancakes with a smiley face?"
"Of course, baby," Melina said, her own eyes never stopping their sweep of the room.
A waitress with a beehive hairdo and a kind, tired face took their order. Yelena chattered happily about the syrup options. Natasha was quiet, picking at a loose thread on the vinyl seat, her gaze flicking towards the door every time the bell chimed. She was learning.
It was then that Melina saw her.
A woman sitting alone at the counter, facing away from them. She was nursing a cup of black coffee, her back ramrod straight. It was the posture that snagged Melina’s attention first. It was too perfect. There was no slump, no casual lean. It was the posture of a body trained to be a weapon at rest, every muscle held in a state of coiled readiness.
The woman had blonde hair, cut in a bob. She wore jeans and a plain grey sweatshirt, anonymous clothes meant to blend in. But she didn't blend. She was a wolf trying to pass as a sheepdog, the tension in her shoulders a dead giveaway to anyone who knew what to look for.
Melina’s blood ran cold. Already? she thought. So soon?
The woman shifted slightly, turning her head to look at her reflection in the dark window beside the counter. For a fraction of a second, Melina saw her face in profile. It was a face she didn't recognize, but a type of face she knew intimately. The expression was one of profound emptiness. A placid, vacant look that was the hallmark of a Widow who was either deep undercover. It was the face of a doll waiting for its instructions.
Melina’s hand instinctively moved to the small of her back, where a pistol was tucked into her waistband. Her mind raced. Was she an observer? Had she been stationed here, in this random town, as part of Dreykov’s sprawling network? A living tripwire? Or was it a coincidence? Was she another operative on another mission?
The pancakes arrived. Yelena gasped with delight at the chocolate-chip smile and whipped cream hair. She dug in with gusto, completely oblivious. Natasha, however, had noticed the shift in Melina. She followed Melina’s gaze to the woman at the counter. She didn't have Melina’s years of experience, but she had the instincts. She saw the woman's stillness and understood it was unnatural.
The woman at the counter paid her bill, leaving a few dollars on the counter. She didn't look at them. She walked towards the door, her steps silent. As she passed their booth, her eyes flickered towards them for a second. Her eyes were grey and flat, like stones at the bottom of a river.
And then she was gone. The bell chimed, and the door swung shut behind her.
Melina felt the air rush back into her lungs. She hadn't realized she’d been holding her breath. She forced her hand away from her gun.
"Mommy?" Yelena said, her mouth ringed with chocolate. "You're not eating."
Melina looked down at the untouched toast on her plate. She looked at Yelena’s happy, messy face. She looked at Natasha, whose young face was a mask of tense awareness, little hand clutching a bread knife tight. And she thought of the woman with the dead eyes. That was their future if she failed. That soulless automaton was the finished product.
She had seen her own reflection in that woman’s vacant gaze. She had seen the ghost of Natasha, the ghost of what Yelena would become. The chance encounter, a one-in-a-million probability that felt like a direct warning from the universe, solidified her resolve into something harder than steel.
She picked up a piece of toast. "Eat quickly," she said, her voice a low command. "We have a long way to go."
The road became their new reality. The world shrank to the confines of the Ford station wagon, a rolling metal bubble of secrets. Days were spent driving, the landscape of America spooling past their windows like an endless film. Cornfields in Iowa gave way to the vast, empty plains of Nebraska, then the stark, rising majesty of the Rockies in Colorado. Melina drove with a relentless, burning intensity.
Nights were spent in cheap, anonymous motels off forgotten highways. Melina would pay in cash, using a different name each time. She taught the girls the new routine. Never use the names Melanie, Natasha, or Yelena. Tonight, she was Susan. Natasha was Emily, and Yelena was Daisy.
"It's a game," she explained to Yelena, who was delighted in having a new secret name every night.
Natasha knew it wasn't a game. She watched Melina check the room before they entered; sweeping the bathroom, looking behind the curtains, checking the flimsy lock on the door. She watched as Melina laid a small, thin pistol on the nightstand before she went to sleep, her body always angled towards the door.
One night, in a stuffy room that smelled of stale cigarettes somewhere in Wyoming, Yelena was showing Natasha the new cat's cradle string figure Melina had taught her. She was surprisingly adept, her small fingers weaving the complex patterns. "See?" she said proudly. "This is the Witches' Broom!"
Natasha watched her, a strange, sad look on her face. Later, after Yelena had fallen asleep between them in the queen-sized bed, a tiny, warm furnace of trust, Natasha spoke into the darkness.
"The woman in the diner," she whispered, not a question, but a statement. "She was like us."
Melina lay on her back, staring at the water-stained ceiling. The moonlight filtering through the thin curtains cast everything in a ghostly grey. "Yes."
"From… back there."
"Yes."
Silence stretched between them, thick with unspoken things. Melina could feel the gears turning in the girl’s head. Natasha had memories, fragmented and nightmarish, of the place. Of the cold floors and the instructors who never smiled. Of pain as a teaching tool.
"Are they hunting us?" Natasha asked, her voice tight.
"Yes."
"Because of Dad?"
Here it was. The question she had been dreading. The lie she had to construct. Her own identity was in flux, a composite of the killer, the scientist, and this new, strange creature called a mother. The identities she gave the girls were for survival, but the story she told them now would shape who they became.
"Yes," Melina replied. "They gave him an order. They gave us an order. An order that would have hurt you and Yelena. I… I couldn’t allow that. So we had to leave."
It was a version of the truth. A carefully edited abstract of the full, brutal report.
"You said he wasn't coming with us," Natasha pressed, big green eyes piercing through Melina’s soul. "Is he... is he coming after us too?"
Melina turned her head to look at the girl. In the dim light, she could see the glint of tears in Natasha’s eyes. For all her training, for all her preternatural maturity, she was still a child who had just lost her father.
"No," Melina said, her voice softer than she intended. "He won't be coming after us. Ever."
The finality in her tone was enough. Natasha didn’t ask if he was dead. She didn’t need to. She absorbed the information, filed it away, and went silent again. After a long moment, she simply said, "Okay."
From that night on, something shifted in Natasha. She became Melina’s lieutenant. She helped keep Yelena entertained on the long drives. She learned to read a map. When they stopped for gas, she would watch the cars and the people with a sharp, analytical gaze that was a mirror of Melina’s own. Melina began to teach her basic things they didn’t teach them in the Red Room. How to spot a tail. How to hotwire a car. How to create a diversion. She was arming her with knowledge. It was the only way she knew how to protect her.
Yelena, meanwhile, was blossoming on the road. For her, this was the greatest adventure of her life. Every new state was a new world. She collected postcards from gas stations and drew pictures of mountains and deserts in a notebook Melina bought for her. She was the repository of their hope, the living embodiment of the normalcy they were fighting for. Her laughter was the fuel that kept Melina driving. Her simple, unwavering belief that her mommy could handle anything was a burden that felt heavier than any mission.
The end of the road was a small, failing ranch in Montana, nestled in a valley carved by glaciers and forgotten by time. They bought it with the last of the cash under new names. The house was barely habitable, the fences were broken, and the land was wild. It was perfect. Their closest neighbor was eight miles away. The single road in could be seen for miles from the upstairs bedroom window.
Here, a new life began to tentatively sprout. Melina, the biochemist, found herself learning the biology of soil, of crop rotation, of animal husbandry. She bought three pigs. She was a scientist. This was just a new, more complex field of study.
Natasha enrolled in the county high school, a forty-minute bus ride away. She was quiet, withdrawn, an outsider. But she was there. She was learning algebra and American history instead of chokeholds and kill counts. Some evenings, Melina would see her practicing gymnastics in the barn, her movements too perfect for a high school team. The ghost of the Widow still clung to her. But other times, Melina would see her simply sitting on the porch, reading a book, a look of peace on her face so profound it made Melina’s chest ache.
Yelena was thriving. For her, this was paradise. She roamed the fields, collecting rocks and chasing grasshoppers. She named the pigs and spoke to them in a constant, running monologue. She was fearless and loud and full of a light that seemed to push back against the vast, lonely landscape. She would ask for a dog every Christmas and would let her sister braid her hair.
Their identities were layered. They were the family on the ranch. They were fugitives. Melina was a killer who now spent her days mending fences. Natasha was a child soldier learning to be a teenager. Yelena was a happy little girl who had no idea she was a state secret.
One evening, as the sun bled out behind the mountains, Melina was on the porch, cleaning the Glock 26. It was a ritual, a prayer to a god she didn't believe in. The pieces lay on a simple cloth, each part familiar in her hands.
Natasha came and sat on the steps below her, watching. She was fourteen now.
"Do you ever think they’ll stop looking?" she asked.
Melina didn’t look up from her work. She slid the recoil spring into place. "No."
"So we’ll be here forever?"
Melina paused. She looked out at the valley. The sky was a tapestry of deep purple and bruised orange. Yelena’s laughter carried on the wind from the barn, where she was arguing with a pig.
"Forever is a long time," Melina said, her voice quiet. She began to reassemble the frame. "This is not a destination, Natasha. It’s a position. We hold it for as long as we can. I’m teaching you how to read a map, how to drive a car, how to budget your money. I’m teaching you to be independent." She finally met Natasha's eyes, her own gaze clear and intense. "One day, I won't be here. You will have to know how to find your own North Star."
She was not just talking about death. She was talking about capture. She was talking about the day the shadows might finally find them. She was giving her the only gift she had left: an exit strategy. The skills to be her own woman, not a soldier, not a victim.
Natasha looked away, towards the mountains. The last sliver of sun vanished, and the world was plunged into a deep, star-filled twilight. She didn’t say anything. But in the set of her jaw, in the quiet strength of her profile, Melina saw her answer. She understood.
Melina finished assembling the pistol. It felt heavy and cold in her hands, a relic of a past that refused to die.