AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hello there lovelies! This is something new I'm trying out since I just recently hardcore got into Blacklist. I do hope that everyone that happens to read it, enjoys immensely as is such the dream of any author. As always, any criticism, insight or thoughts on the intro presented to you below is more than welcome. Thank you so much for even looking at my writing. Feel free to fav, alert and reviews as they're much appreciated.
Russian Beauty / American Psycho
This feature is rated T, for obscene language and mild gore. But mostly the language.
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing but Natasha and Dimitri Angelov. Things that are unfamiliar and original in plot, also belong to me. Anything recognizable, does not but to its respective owners.
The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.
Leonardo da Vinci
BEGINNING
Natasha Angelova had a family once, or at least those were the stories she had been told by the man that refused to be called her father or much of anything really but a man.
He honestly couldn't tell her that much about this family of hers. The only facts he had were that her father was a somewhat good man, that was the head of a shady Russian crime family deep in the heart of Moscow and because of the lifestyle he led, he had been murdered, along with all of the Angelova family and loyalists. He could tell her nothing of her mother, be it that she was already dead when he had come to find her or that she hadn't been all that involved in the family business, Natasha didn't really care.
She had never had them, well she honestly couldn't remember having them, even though she hadn't lost them until she was eight. He never failed to admit that he had never actually met her father and was only telling her things he had heard in the company he had kept. All she could remember was Red. He was all there ever had been, all she could remember from her childhood – if you could even really call it that.
Red hadn't wanted to be her father, hadn't wanted to mentor her in any way in her childhood. You could say that the moment he decided to save the little Russian doll, had been a moment of weakness for the man. He honestly hadn't had any good intentions when he entered the Angelov estate that night. He had been with a business acquaintance and looking for any information on the Russians and their more nefarious deeds that he could get his hands on and then, then he had walked into Dimitri Angelov's office. Which just happened to the be the very room that the criminal kingpin had stored his most valuable treasure, his daughter, his Natasha.
The entire family had already been rounded up and shot, point blank in the back of the head. They had assumed they had gotten each and every of of the Angelov's, but they were wrong. The smallest of them was hidden under her fathers massive desk, shivering and with tears falling down her face silently. His hardened heart had broken when he found the little girl, a reaction he did not expect in the slightest. She didn't look even the tiniest bit like the daughter of his own that he had lost, no, she was the complete opposite.
She was so small and so frail, so unknowing to the ugliness that the family she belonged to was. But those glassy blue eyes had looked up at him with such terror in him that her entire body had stilled, except for her bottom lip that began quivering and he couldn't help it. He couldn't stop the decision already being made. The tiny Angelova would live, and he would be the one to give her this gift.
He hadn't regretted it at first. Not when he picked the tiny thing up while reassuring her that she was completely safe and that he was taking her away to somewhere even safer. She never questioned or fought him once as he carried her away from the only home she knew. He had wondered then if it was a self preservation tactic, and realized quickly, weeks later, that it was more than that. That in that moment, before he took even more of her childhood away, she truly was innocent and pure. Perhaps it was the moment that he regretted it, because it was that moment that he realized that saving her came with so much more than just taking her to safety and washing his hands of it.
She was a child, a smart one at that. One that been born into the life of crime, lies and deceit and had known nothing but. She wouldn't be easy and satiable, she would require so much more than he could give her, or even wanted to. He would never allow himself to be her father figure, a man of guidance and love. He could never be that to anyone but the child he had lost, that part of him was dead and far gone.
Natasha Angelova only ever knew Raymond Reddington as a man. A distant man. A distant man that had saved her in fact, from the very life she couldn't even remember. He was the man that sent her away to a secluded boarding school in the mountains of Nepal when she was nine because he could no longer bear the bright blue eyes of her begging for love and affection that every child wanted. He was the man she didn't see again until she was graduating, with honors and at the top of her class. He was the man that would make her a killer of lesser men. He was the man that would make her more than any other Angelov had lived to be.
If Raymond Reddington was the Concierge of Crime, then Natasha Angelova was the Saint of it.