Location: Crystal Sands Motel, Route 1, California
Consciousness returned to her not as a waking, but as a resurfacing.
She gasped, her lungs seizing the stale, recycled air of the room. The first sensation was pain—a sharp, throbbing ache in her cheekbone and a stinging split in her lip. The second sensation was restriction.
She tried to sit up, but metal bit into her wrists.
She hissed, her eyes snapping open.
She was in a bed.
Cheap floral sheets. The room was dim, lit only by the neon sign outside buzzing in a rhythmic, dying flicker. Red. Black. Red. Black.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in her chest. She remembered the study. The panic run of Sokolov. The door opening. And then... a blur. A shadow that moved faster than human reflexes allowed. A hand on her throat. And the last thing she had seen before the darkness took her...
A barcode.
She jerked against the cuffs, her training kicking in.
Assess. Escape. Survive.
"It is futile," a voice said.
It came from the corner of the room, deep in the shadows where the neon light didn't reach.
She froze. She peered into the darkness.
A silhouette sat in a worn armchair. Still. Perfectly, unnaturally still.
She couldn't make out the features, but she could feel the eyes. Ice-blue. Unblinking. Dissecting her.
"You're finally awake," the man muttered.
It was him. The Asset. The Wolf.
She stopped struggling. It was a waste of energy. If he wanted her dead, she would be dead. The fact that she was breathing meant she was currency.
She forced her heart rate to slow, though it felt jagged, erratic—unlike the smooth, machine-like rhythm she usually maintained.
"Why didn't you kill me?" she asked. Her voice was raspy, her throat bruised from his grip.
"Do you want me to kill you?" 47 countered.
The question hung in the air, devoid of mockery. It sounded like a genuine inquiry.
47 watched her. He was confused.
When he had encountered her in Sokolov's study, she had been a machine. Her biometric readings had been flatlines of efficiency. 45 BPM. No wasted movement. No hesitation.
But now? She was a mess of biological noise. Her respiration was uneven. Her pupils were dilating with fear.
Her micro-expressions were leaking anxiety, anger, and confusion.
It was as if the machine had been turned off, leaving only a terrified human in the cockpit.
The Widow chuckled. It was a dry, hopeless sound.
"In my line of work, death is just a retirement plan," she said, a bitter smile touching her bruised lips. "Being killed by the boogeyman himself? Who wouldn't want that honor?"
Sarcasm. Defiance. Emotions.
47 narrowed his eyes.
Confirmation.
She wasn't just trained; she was programmed. And the programming was failing.
"Dreykov," 47 said. "Where is he?"
The reaction was instantaneous and violent.
The moment the name left his lips, the woman's body seized. Her eyes went wide, the pupils contracting to pinpoints. Her breathing stopped—not held, but paralyzed.
47 watched with clinical fascination.
A red hue seemed to bleed into the pupils themselves. Her heart rate didn't skip; it plummeted, forcing itself into a bradycardic state so severe it mimicked death.
She gasped, her back arching off the mattress, veins bulging in her neck. She was fighting her own biology.
Five seconds. Ten.
Then, she collapsed back onto the pillows, gasping for air, sweat breaking out on her forehead.
She looked at 47, her eyes filled with exhaustion and a deep, ingrained terror.
"Even if I knew," she whispered, "I wouldn't be able to tell you anything."
47 sat back in the shadows. His mind, operating on the enhanced cognitive platform of this new reality, ran the simulation.
Scenario Analysis:
Subject displays involuntary physiological lockdown upon trigger phrase.
Psychological conditioning (Pavlovian) ruled out; response is systemic, not mental.
Conclusion: External chemical agent.
"It seems the Red Room has learned from their mistake," 47 said quietly. "Allowing Romanoff to defect was a failure of loyalty. They realized that psychological conditioning isn't efficient enough to control the variable of human will."
He leaned forward slightly, the neon light catching the curve of his bald head.
"So they changed the method. Something that affects you biologically. A chemical subjugation?"
The Widow's eyes widened. She stared at him, stunned. She had heard the rumors—that the Wolf was the perfect assassin, the apex of the program.
But to deduce the deepest secret of the new Red Room protocol from a ten-second observation?
It wasn't just skill. It was processing power.
"And you broke free," 47 continued, his voice a steady drone of logic. "They don't have control of you right now. In the study, you were a drone. Here, you are human. The police took you to the hospital. They administered fluids. An IV drip."
47 nodded to himself.
"The chemical agent must be maintained. It has a half-life. Or perhaps the saline flushed the receptors. Either way, it is not a permanent bond. Therefore, you still have utility."
"Is that why I'm alive?" she asked. "Because I'm useful?"
"Everything has a use," 47 said. "Until it doesn't."
Silence stretched between them. The hum of the refrigerator was the only sound.
The Widow looked down at her hands, clenched into fists against the sheets. She was in turmoil. She was relieved to be away from the Red Room, away from the needle and the chair. But she was in a room with a monster.
Growing up in the academy, Agent 47 wasn't a person. He was a ghost story.
When 47 had escaped the facility seven months ago, the Red Room had panicked. Dreykov had panicked.
The training changed. It stopped being about espionage and started being about survival against him. They were shown blurry photos of crime scenes. They were taught that he was faster than thought, stronger than thought.
They expected a beast. A wild animal that needed to be put down.
But the man sitting in the corner wasn't a beast. He was... calm.
"What happens to me now?" she asked, her voice small.
47 looked at her. He saw the fear. But beneath the fear, he saw the exhaustion of a soldier who had been fighting a war she didn't choose for too long.
"Tell me, Widow," 47 said. "Do you want to break free?"
The question caught her off guard.
47 knew about the Widows. In his files, in his research. They weren't clones. They weren't test tube creations like him. They were stolen. Girls taken from families, from lives, and forged into weapons.
In a way, their tragedy was greater than his. He had never known a normal life to lose.
They had it ripped away.
"Free..." The Widow chuckled, a sound devoid of humor. "There's no such thing as that word in my world."
She looked at her hands. She didn't see skin; she saw stains.
"These hands..." she muttered, her voice trembling. "These hands have taken too much."
She closed her eyes. The memories were always there, waiting behind her eyelids. The faces. The father in Minsk. The journalist in Paris. The child who was in the wrong car at the wrong time.
She wasn't the one who accepted the contracts. Dreykov pulled the strings. But she was the bullet. And the bullet is what tears the flesh.
"There is so much blood," she whispered. "It never washes off."
47 watched her. He recognized the sentiment. He had seen it in others. He had felt the echo of it in himself, once, a long time ago, in a garden in Sicily.
"There is already so much blood that has stained your hands," 47 said. His voice was not soft, but it wasn't harsh. It was factual. "That cannot be undone. Entropy only moves forward."
He paused.
"But the blood of those who wronged you... that is still out there. Do you accept that?"
The Widow's eyes snapped open. She looked at him.
Revenge.
It was a foreign concept. A forbidden thought. Since she was eight years old, she had been taught that her desires didn't exist. That her anger was a flaw to be corrected.
But the anger was there. Buried under layers of guilt and chemical fog.
"It's useless," she said, shaking her head. "Many have tried. Many have tried to bury the Red Room. Even Nat... she thought she killed him. It's futile. He's too big. He's everywhere."
47 stood up.
He moved out of the shadows. He walked to the window, peering through the gap in the curtains at the falling sun.
The orange light illuminated his profile—the sharp nose, the high brow, the absolute lack of doubt.
He turned to look at her.
"Many have tried," 47 said. "But they aren't me."
The words were spoken with such quiet, absolute conviction that the Widow felt a chill run down her spine.
It wasn't arrogance. Arrogance was loud. This was a statement of natural law.
Gravity exists. Water is wet. It was inevitable.
She stared at him. For a moment, the monster in the corner vanished, replaced by something else.
She found herself laughing. A breathless, helpless sound.
"If we're going to be... whatever this is," she said, gesturing between them. "I'll get annoyed with you calling me 'Widow' this, 'Widow' that."
47 looked at her.
For a microsecond, the muscles around his mouth twitched. It wasn't a grin. It wasn't even a smirk. It was a relaxation of tension that hinted at approval.
An almost imperceptible smile.
'Did he just...?' The Widow blinked. 'Impossible.'
She shook her head, clearing the thought. She looked him in the eye.
"You can call me Diana..." she said.
47's face froze.
The micro-expression vanished, replaced instantly by a mask of granite. His eyes sharpened, the pupils contracting.
Diana.
The name hit him like a physical blow.
Diana Burnwood. The Handler. The friend. The betrayal. The redemption. The only human connection he had ever truly maintained across decades of slaughter.
The coincidence was a cruel joke of the universe. Or perhaps a reminder.
The Widow didn't notice the shift. To her, his face remained the same impassive wall it had always been.
"Diana Volkova," she finished.
47 stared at her for a long beat. He processed the name. He separated the memory from the reality.
This was not his Diana. This was a variable. A resource. A broken weapon looking for a new trajectory.
"Diana," 47 repeated. The name tasted like ash and iron.
The Widow watched him, sensing the shift in the air.
"And you?" she asked softly. "Do you have a name?"
47 remained silent.
His mind can't help but think back on that snowy ICA facility with Diana and him.
"47... You can call me 47," he finally said.
The Widow frowned slightly. "That's... not a name."
47 turned his head, his ice-blue eyes catching the flickering red light.
"It is mine."
He turned back to the window, watching the final sliver of the sun disappear below the horizon.
"For now, rest," 47 ordered.
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