Author's Notes:

This is officially the longest fic I have ever written. It's taken FOREVER to get it this far. Major kudos to Jess for her plotting help. Cheyenne for making my grammar betterer. ;) as well as Jenny, Lucy and Maja for your constant amazingness and support. While the story is not finished yet, it will be finished and posted in its entirety by the end of the month. Since I'm going out of town then and also the WIP Big Bang Deadline. I don't miss deadlines. I just run right up against them. :D I don't own the things.

~-~-~PROLOGUE~-~-~

Natasha adjusted the top of her dress, making sure to reveal just the right amount of cleavage to throw her mark off his game. She sighed as she fell back into the comfortable sofa. The monotony of solo missions was starting to bore her to tears.

It had been over two months since Agent Barton had been sent off on some super top secret mission that not even she was allowed to know the details of and she was starting to miss his annoying chatter that usually bombarded her over her earpiece as he covered her from two buildings over. She was sure he was having just about as good a time as she was.

She pulled at her dress again, more out of boredom than anything else. The mark was supposed to be meeting her for a "drop." She just hoped there weren't any dull cronies. The seduction aspect of her mission never worked as well when there were cronies.

A specific knock pattern fell upon her door, and Natasha flipped her brain back into mission mode. She was Marie DuBuis, a French woman vacationing in Rome. Quietly striding to the door, she mustered up her best French accent and pulled the door open.

"Bonjour, Monsieur….s?" She faltered, her accent holding long enough for her to trail off her words.

"Madame," The mark replied. "I trust we're not too late for you."

"Oh, non! Not at all." She fought to hold the accent steady as she held the opened door for Peter Bemovich and his croonie of choice – Clint Barton.

Peter made his way in, instantly finding the dish of fruit she had arranged at the coffee table. Clint was slower to follow and made no indication that he knew her. His left eye – his aiming eye as she knew – was partially swollen shut and the injury seemed to be about 2-3 weeks old based on the bruising. He held himself stiffly as he walked, a way she'd known him to do when trying to conceal an injury. Based on his gait it was something with one of his legs, the left if she had to guess.

As he passed her she noticed his hands were clasped firmly behind his back and three of the fingers on his left hand were taped together. A bit of bandage was just poking out from under his sleeves on both wrists. He stood just behind and to the right of Peter and took up a typical guard stance.

What the hell kind of mission was Clint even on?

She put all speculation out of her mind and turned with a smile back to Peter. "Can I get you a drink, Monsieur?" She knew better than to offer one to Clint, as backup for the mark he would be ignored by Peter unless absolutely necessary. She could tell by his dry lips and slightly open mouth that he was parched and wished she could do something, anything to alleviate just one of his many aches.

"No, no. Just the briefcase." Straight to business, Natasha could handle that.

She padded across the room barefoot and leaned against the desk. "And the payment?"

"Fifteen. As negotiated."

"We negotiated twenty." She didn't really care about the numbers, or the exchange. Her mission was ulterior to that. Clint only complicated things as she wasn't sure what his mission was. She was going to have words with Coulson about that.

"I'll pay fifteen." Peter stood and held a hand back to Clint who promptly took an envelope from his jacket and deposited it into Peter's hands.

Natasha turned her head away and lowered her shoulder just enough to allow one strap of her dress to fall loose against her arm. "Fifteen then, but only if you personally make up the difference." She mustered up a look that seemed to long of lust and glanced back to him.

"I've heard you prefer to take your payments by more," he drawled out his next words, "unconventional means." Peter removed his jacket and started to work on the buttons of his shirt. "I'm sure I can make it up to you."

Everything was playing according to the mission protocol, except Clint. She needed him out so she could finish her job. "What about your friend?" She purred into Peter's ear as she pulled his shirtless body against hers. "I prefer not to be watched by strange men when getting my payment…"

He put the envelope on the desk beside her and, with his other hand, brushed the remaining dress strap off her shoulder. Without the straps, she was able to wiggle her hips just enough for the dress to fall to the floor. "He stays." Peter took in her lace underclothes before closing the distance between them and beginning to kiss up her neck. "Barton, the door." He managed in between kisses.

She gasped, allowing him to believe it was his hands causing her shock and not the fact that Clint wasn't using a code name. Every mission had code names. Every. One. She'd been forced to remember dumb name after dumb name, one backstory after the next. And here was Clint Barton responding to his own name while undercover.

Peter pushed her up onto the desk and shoved his still clothed lower half between her legs. He started to grind rough pants against her and she knew she had to make her move before this went too far. She trusted Clint would back her up.

She wrapped her legs around his waist and he groaned, thinking this was her way of escalating things to the next step, but instead she smashed her forehead against his nose and pushed off the desk with enough force to knock him flat on his back. He missed banging his head against the coffee table but before he could comprehend what had happened Natasha was rolling over his head in a tight somersault to the other end of the small round table.

Reaching up underneath the coffee table, she pulled loose a set of handcuffs and was springing back towards Peter when a strong left hook caught her from behind in the side of the head. Despite her vision dancing with stars for a moment, she turned and was ready to fight –

Clint.

She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to silently get him to communicate his plan but he was having none of that as he unleashed a fury of punches straight for her face. Natasha deflected the majority of them before kicking him in what she had rightly assumed was his injured left leg. He grunted at the pain but wasted no time in adjusting and pressing back on the offense.

She was pulling her punches and not aiming for his face, but could tell he wasn't doing the same. The confusion threw her off and before she knew it, he had her right arm wrenched up behind her back and the left one pinned across the front of her body.

Peter sat on the floor and started to chuckle as Clint handcuffed her left hand to the doorknob. He kept her right wrist at a painful angle that she knew could pop her shoulder out of its socket easily. One of his legs was wrapped around hers, immobilizing it, and she knew based on his stance how easy it would be for any number of her bones to be broken if she bothered moving.

"Now you see, Madame DuBois, why I keep him around." Peter lifted himself off the ground with another chuckle. "The briefcase?"

She pulled for show but relaxed submissively into Clint's grip. "Under the bed." Peter moved to retrieve it and Natasha turned her head ever so slightly towards Clint. "Clint?" she whispered, barely able to see his swollen eye from the corner of her own eyes. "What's going on?"

Clint said nothing and merely tightened his grip on her wrist, causing her to wince in pain as Peter came back to the room. "I can see based on its location, you had been expecting a more enjoyable evening…But handcuffs and all that other bondage stuff isn't my style. So you're fine with the agreed upon fifteen then?"

"It doesn't appear you're giving me much of a choice." She hissed at him as he crossed the room to stand in front of her. He was taking her in again, specifically the fast rise of her chest after the scuffle with Clint. He ran a hand delicately down her right side where Clint had her arm pinned back.

"Shame, really. We could have had such fun."

"I told you I don't like audiences."

"Clint, I don't think I want to kill her...if we run into her again, she may be fun to have around." He winked before slapping her on the butt. "But do make things difficult."

She only had a second to wonder what that meant before Clint was snapping the bone in her right wrist. Her cry of shock and pain seemed to fall on deaf ears as he walked away and left her hanging from the doorknob.

Natasha barely waited for them to leave the room before shouting into her comm. "Coulson. What. The. Hell?"

The clean up team found her right where Clint had left her. One arm dangling from the doorknob in a tight cuff, the other cradled against her chest. Aside from the broken bone her injuries were superficial and she knew it. Even the break seemed relatively smooth.

Coulson came in personally with the extraction team – his usual M.O. for missions that went to hell. He kneeled beside her and ghosted a hand along her head. "Tell me what happened, Natasha." He went to work picking the lock on the cuff.

"Clint."

Phil faltered with the lockpick. "He was here?" She could only nod in response as Phil clicked the lock open. "What happened?" It was clear Phil was holding his breath, knew they'd have to pull her out of the field for her arm anyways…but there was something he wasn't telling her about Clint.

"He didn't say anything. Didn't even blink."

Phil draped a blanket over her shoulders and helped her cautiously to her feet. "Okay."

"Phil, where did you send him? What is this mission he's on?"

"Natasha…protocol –"

"Bullshit, Phil! My partner just walked in here and I was unprepared. I did not have sufficient intel to do my damn job. And what the hell kind of mission did you send Clint on that would cause him to break my fucking arm!?"

Phil turned away but Natasha wasn't having any of it.

"He's hurt, Phil. He needs to be pulled out."

"I… I can't." Phil stammered. "He won't."

"What?"

"We sent him on a deep cover mission. He needed to infiltrate an organization and get them to trust him. Half the family ended up murdered, we lost all contact with him. There were some that thought he might have died-"

"And you didn't think to tell me any of this?!" If she'd had full use of her right hand, she might have punched him.

"It was need to know. Only a half a dozen people even knew about his mission. I was going to tell you after the first two weeks of radio silence but we got wind of someone matching his description from one of our sources. It was enough for me to believe he was still alive…"

"What did you mean when you said he wouldn't come out?"

"I sent the signal for him to extract." Phil shifted. "I sent it five times. Protocol dictates that I call it when it's been ignored twice!"

She didn't want to ask, even though she knew the answer before her mouth formed the words. "Call. What."

"Agent Barton has officially been declared a traitor to SHIELD and his country."