As cold and calculating as the Arachnid she was named after, the Black Widow lured unsuspecting men to their deaths by fluttering her eyelashes, stroking their egos and getting them to drop their guards. From a young age, the unconventional assassin acquired and developed a very specific skill set. A skill set that put her on the map. To potential employers and hired assassins alike.
Not for the first time, and she knew for certain that it would not be the last, the Black Widow was marked for death. The assassin trailing her this time was unfamiliar and worked in a frustratingly unusual style than any other assassin she had encountered. For the first time in the two decades she had been alive, she felt her heart elevate as she experienced the unfamiliar emotion of panic. It derived from the fact that she couldn't work out what her follower's next move was going to be, when he was next going to appear and how he planned on killing her.
The Black Widow ducked her head further into the maroon head scarf. She wore the garment because it fulfilled two satisfyingly useful objectives: one, it half concealed her face in shadows, causing some difficulty for her tailing assassin to catch a glimpse of her face in full view; and secondly, the alluring sense of modesty and attractive shyness that was created by the simple concealing garment had caught the attention of her mark. Antonio Gravardas was a well-known Italian businessman who dealt in the export business. His front was the exportation of car parts, but behind the mask of the transaction of various scraps of metal, there was the concealed arsenal of the best weaponry Italy had to offer. She had cared very little for his two-faced dealings. But then he appeared in Russia and was working to strike a deal with Dimitri Vloskov, an opposing territory leader of her current employers. Now, she cared very much. Well, about as much as 50,000 rubles would allow anyway.
After six days and already two contacts with the mark, who seemed unaware of the initial threat of coincidentally bumping into the same woman twice since arriving in Russia, the Black Widow was ready to move onto phase two.
She provoked him into initiating a conversation by suggesting they had something in common: she knew he could not buy strawberries for he was allergic. Now, so was she. The couple stood at the strawberry market stall for ten minutes before he invited her as his plus one to the club he was at that night, a club owned by Dimitri Vloskov.
That wasn't the hard part. She had played this scene over and over in her life. The mark sees a pretty face, is initially attracted, his defences get lowered and there you have it: he has revealed the secrets he swore not to. The marks never see what is coming because to them, this pretty little face is just something to do for entertainment whilst they are on business. Their plans are always to carelessly drop her when they need to leave anyway. She takes satisfaction in the fact that she gets to drop them first.
With her invitation to Vloskov's club in the bag, she returned to her safe house to focus on the hard part, and the thing that has been bugging her all week. The assassin who had been on her tail for six days. Well, six days that she knew of anyway. She experienced the momentary panic when the thought of her unknowingly being followed flashed through her mind. But she quickly dismissed the thought. She was the Black Widow, she was always one step ahead, not two steps behind.
She booted up her encrypted laptop to play back the video from the small camera she had strapped in the fold of her coat collar that morning. For the next four and a half hours, she studied the footage determinedly, her eyes narrowed on the screen, barely blinking as she did not know the face of the person she was looking for.
After the four hours of fixated staring at the laptop screen, she suddenly jumped from her statue like state and hit pause. She slid out the photographs from a folder she had hidden behind the wardrobe just in case, and spread them across her desk. Her green eyes flickered to the laptop as she held up one particular photograph by the screen. The photographs were taking in very different places at very different times but had one thing in common: and that thing was looking back at her from the photo with blue eyes framed with windswept blonde hair.
"Gotcha".
And Natalia Romonova's red-headed reflection in the laptop screen half smiled.
The unusual style of her shadow's trailing techniques derived from the fact that he did not conform to any type of spy training she had ever come across. Any spy who knows where his intended mark is and what they are doing, moves in closer for the kill. As logic would follow. Natalia was positive that this spy knew who she was already after being spotted in her vicinity at least twice now, but he seemed to have dropped back. Was it incompetence? She couldn't put her life on the hope of another spy's potential lacking abilities. If he had dropped back with a purpose, she figured that purpose was to watch from a distance. But why? Who watches from a distance?
She glared at the reflection of her brush in the mirror as she prepared herself for tonight's events. She would have to put the unusual behaviour out of her mind if she wanted to get the job done tonight.
'Sure, that'll be easy,' she thought, 'it might only cost me my life.'
Then she laughed a little. 'Yeah, right'
She was gorgeous. She had to be. Her red curls were tied elegantly in a loose bun at the back of her head. Her dress, the same green as her eyes, exposed her back and ended above her knees.
She was easily allowed access to the club, the doormen didn't think much about a young woman in a short green dress so they easily missed the fact she was concealing two hand pistols, a vile of poison and a dagger. She smiled sweetly as she passed but walked with a purpose once inside. The club was dark and full. The bar gleaming black bar was on the other side of the flashing dance floor where a large group of bodies pulsated with the music. Lining the room were tables, where men drinking brandy sat, talking in quiet murmurs or women wearing lethal looking shoes rested their feet.
Natalia perched on the end barstool, catching the eye of the bartender. He slipped over to her and opened his mouth to ask what she wanted when his eyes trailed up to something stood behind her.
"Wine. Red." The voice of Antonio Gravardas drifted from behind her and Natalia pretended to be surprised at his sudden appearance.
"Antonio." She greeted, allowing him to place a kiss on her knuckles.
He had a very calculating expression as he smiled back at her, his eyes scanning the rest of her.
"Shall we?" He asked.
It wasn't difficult to lure Gravardas closer to his death. Once Natalia had inflated his ego and mixed that with alcohol, she used a special technique to coax information out of him: pillow talk.
Obviously he didn't start relaying every detail of his dealings with Vloskov, in fact he thought he was being very secretive, but once he started talking vaguely about his 'business' in Russia, Natalia was able to unpick the important strands from his mindless talk.
She trailed a finger across his bare arm her head was resting on to distract him from the fact that she was paying an immense amount of attention to his slightly slurred words.
"There was a chance I wasn't coming to Russia, now I am very glad, for I have never seen such beautiful women..." He purred, trying to sweet talk her but all Natalia heard was the fact that the transaction between Gravardas and Vlokov was not pre-planned. So it was a last minute deal, that increased its importance.
He unknowingly betrayed more of his secrets: he was unsure how long he was needed in Russia (meaning the deal hadn't been broken yet, so his trip to Russia was purely to see if a deal could be struck with Vloskov). Natalia steered the conversation towards the "owner of the lovely club you were able to get us into". At this, he vaguely boasted his many connections before slipping that Vloskov and him were good friends (as mobsters and arms dealers didn't have 'good friends', this meant that Vloskov was trying to butter Gravardas up, until he got what he wanted then he would most likely get a hit on Gravardas. Too bad Natalia had got there first.)
As expected to Natalia, Gravardas' phone began to buzz from the pocket of his trousers strewn on the floor. She figured it would be Vloskov: no mobster enjoyed the feeling of a stray arms dealer inside his own club. Well, none that she knew to date anyway.
Natalia had already decided that poison would be the most efficient way of killing Gravardas so when he excused himself to take the call, she slipped from between the sheets, stepped back into her dress and pulled out the small vial of Belladonna, otherwise known as Deadly Nightshade from where it was strapped between the cups of her bra.
She had only tipped the vial over Gravardas' glass of wine when the very man walked back in, too soon from what should have been an unfriendly conversation with a Russian mobster. The purpose of his return was to laugh about something that was sticking to the door but the amused expression quickly fell from his face when he saw the vial in the Black Widow's hands. She had frozen, not at the sudden appearance of Gravardas, but at the very thing he had found amusing in the first place: the thing that was stuck through the door was a sleek black arrow.
Her heart jumped into her mouth after all the air vanished from her lungs. Her mind had gone too far into shock and panic that she almost didn't register Gravardas charge at her in a sudden fit of rage. She ducked just in time as his hands grabbed at the air where her neck had just been. She used his chest as a boost to flip herself over the bed at the same time as knocking the wind from him. She grabbed one of the bed's post and spun around it, kicking the soul of her foot into his jaw and disconnecting it.
But only part of her mind was on defending herself. The other part was dominated by thoughts of arrows and what they meant. Every spy, assassin and henchman in the world knew what that arrow meant: it meant trouble, it meant you were marked. It meant Hawkeye knew where you were.