Chapter 8

Vienna, Austria

Summer 2007

Nadine couldn't help but chuckle, a smile rising to her face of its own accord as the girl across the high-ceilinged room spun and danced along with the music playing through the studio.

Even before she had left her life in that place far behind, Nadine had vowed she would never dance again once she left the Red Room, and that no one would ever force her to again. She'd had enough of it. At first she'd stuck to that vow, the thought of ballet and ballerinas and dancing making her feel physically ill.

But as time passed and she got deeper into constructing the identity and life of Nadine Ryker, it began to edge its way back into her thoughts.

Nearly a year after she stopped dismissing the idea out of hand, after years of moving, of running, she had opened her Ballet Studio.

And in the handful of years that had passed since, she had grown to appreciate the art as she never had during her days in the Red Room. Strangely enough, it allowed her distance from her life before. While discipline was still valued in her Studio as it had been then in the Red Room, it was encouraged to very different ends. Where once dancing had been a facet of being molded into a killer, in her Studio, girls who danced under her tutelage were being molded into artists. Her dancers danced for the sake of dancing, not for the sake of becoming 'unbreakable'. They didn't dance to weed out the weak or to break the spirits of those not strong-willed enough or to hone bodies destined to become the ultimate weapons. Her girls danced to create beauty, to embody the music with every breath and gesture and to hone their bodies into living works of art. These girls were everything the girls Nadine had once known were not.

But Nadine never had to dance herself. Eventually she did try, turning on the music with the volume down low, dancing late at night in the private emptiness of the Studio she ran. And she knew as she did that she never had to again unless she wanted to.

It actually made her…happy.

For the first time, it had made her feel like her life was truly her own. To know as she spun and swayed and dipped that she never had to do it again if she didn't want to was profoundly calming and oddly wonderful.

She hadn't felt the need to dance again since that night.

And for some equally odd reason that she couldn't explain, that knowledge had made the mantle of The Ghost easier to bear.

That the skills she possessed proved valuable outside the framework she'd been raised within became readily apparent almost as soon as she'd abandoned the Red Room. As a result she'd fallen into that life almost immediately. Spying and killing had been all she'd known and all she knew how to do. She'd needed to make a living, to survive, and utilizing what the Red Room had taught her was a way to do it, unpleasant as it felt. She'd moved quickly from small hits to trickier, harder to track targets, building a reputation as an assassin who always found their mark. She never missed.

As her reputation grew the offers grew as well, as did the challenge inherent in each mission.

And then she had been offered a contract to take out another assassin, one she'd known. She'd remembered him from the Red Room; he'd been brought in to test them. Nadya had passed; seven others hadn't. To take out a contract on another assassin was a massive gamble. To even offer the contract was sometimes suicide, since some assassins took such things personally. Few hired guns would agree to go after one of their own. It was harder, more dangerous, and the chances of it failing or simply going wrong were exponential if the target could even be found. Attempts backfiring completely were not uncommon to hear about. After all, assassins didn't stay in the business long if they were easy to track down or kill. When Nadine had finally tracked Andrei Azarov down in eastern Moldova, she hadn't hesitated.

It was the first hit where she didn't feel hollowed out after; the thrill and the satisfaction of it hadn't been unpleasant either.

Ripples had spread through the intelligence community; an assassin who successfully took out other assassins. Ripples became waves when she took out her second. It was said she might as well have been a ghost for all the trace she'd left. The name had stuck.

The Ghost had been born.

She was rarely ever offered standard contracts again.

She wasn't unaware of the irony of her situation. But she could live with it. She became the one to go to with contracts on those other assassins didn't want to touch; almost solely other assassins.

Soon, there was no one better.

And she used the payouts to bury herself away from the rest of the world.

Across the polished floor of her Studio, the song changed and the girl darted over to the stereo to return to the song before. Nadine shook her head in fond amusement before retreating to her office. As much as she wanted to stay and watch, there was always something to do. The monotony and comparatively straightforward responsibilities of a 'normal' life were grounding. It balanced her life as The Ghost.

It was a good life she'd buried herself in, one completely separate from the one she'd lived in before and the parallel one she lived where she earned her way dispatching others who killed for a living. She'd gone to great pains to make it so, distancing herself from particularly telling details that could directly link her to the KGB or the Red Room, all while positioning herself to hide perfectly in plain sight. There were still links; her new name was a loose derivative of her birth name, for instance, but sometimes the obvious choices were the best. She used the things she couldn't change to her advantage.

While she hid that she was born in Russia, she didn't hide that she had grown up there or that she could speak the language. It was then logical because of that detail that she made her documented living teaching ballet that leant toward the Russian styles she'd been taught rather than the German ones common in Vienna where she eventually settled. The backstory she'd fabricated was meticulously constructed from a subtle mix of truths and half-truths mingled with falsehoods, right down to the smallest details.

Her training to become a master spy had not been wasted.

A faint ping distracted her from her thoughts. At once her mind switched gears. Normally, when her secret, untraceable black phone—her Work phone, as she thought of it—pinged, it meant that a contact had come through or a search that she'd been running had come up with hits or other such developments. Since she was between contracts at the moment, the soft ping indicated the algorithm she used to flag offers sent through the deep web for The Ghost had gotten a viable hit.

As her reputation and exclusivity grew, the offers for contracts that she seriously considered waned, especially as her price went up. She simply didn't need to take as many, so she didn't. But that was alright with her. She was perfectly content to take only one or possibly two contracts every year or so, especially as it sometimes took that long to track down her marks in order to take them out in the first place. There were always offers for The Ghost but few caught her interest. There was only one genuine Ghost, and her reputation alone allowed for her to be very picky about what she would come out of hiding for.

Standing and walking sedately across the room, she closed the door to her office before returning to the dark-wood desk and retrieving the black phone from its hiding place. No one but Nadine knew of her Work phone, just as no one knew about her Workshop. One practice she adhered to above almost all others was to keep her dual lives as separate as possible. It took only a moment to enter her codes and decrypt the phone. But it wasn't a usual offer that was waiting for her.

This time it was very different.

As soon as she accessed the offer, the notification for a message appeared, sent directly to her; an untraceable message sent directly to a phone that was supposed to be untraceable.

Her brow furrowing with confusion, she opened it. As soon as she read the message all the blood rushed from her face, dropping to feel like it was pooling in a heavy sludge in the pit of her stomach. Feeling sick, she sank back into her desk chair before her legs managed to collapse beneath her.

There were two attachments.

The first held photos. Photos that nearly had the nausea suddenly roiling in her stomach clawing up her throat. There were photos of her as a child, deep in the regimen of the Red Room, one possibly even of her first kill, judging by how young she looked. Pictures of her as a teen, dispatching one of her tests with cool impartiality, the proof of the dispassionate killer she'd become in her hard grey eyes. Pictures featuring pale blonde hair, training uniforms and ballet leotards. Pictures of knives and guns and broken bodies. Of metal arms and grappling hands. Pictures she'd never known existed, hadn't even realized had been taken. Pictures of blood and sweat and a young life devoted to one thing; violence and death. Pictures of a life she wished she could forget.

But most disturbing of all were pictures of her life now. Copies of documents she'd kept safely hidden away, ones never meant to see the light of day, each pointing a spotlight on the lies she'd built her life around. Pictures of her little home, of her studio, her students.

Pictures with a little girl with blonde hair just as pale and fine as Nadine's.

Abruptly, Nadine wanted nothing more than to throw the phone against the wall and watch it smash to pieces. She would run. She'd built a life from scratch once and she could do it again. She'd do it better. Somewhere, she'd made a mistake, and judging by some of the pictures, it had been a long time ago.

Whoever this was, they'd been watching her for years.

She'd find the mistake and she'd fix it.

She'd disappear again.

But as the images she'd never realized were taken burned into her brain, she realized she didn't truly have that option. If they'd been able to find her through all the safeguards and smokescreens and work she'd put into hiding herself and the normal part of her life…it meant even if she ran, if she completely started over, they'd find her.

She looked down to the message again.

Hello, Nadya. Yes, we know who you are. We know you're The Ghost. You have no secrets from us.

And we have a mission for you.

The second attachment was the docket for an assassination.

There was no need for an explicit threat. It was implied in the precise order of the photos, of which photos were specifically included.

Pictures of her daughter playing…

…immediately followed by pictures of another fair-haired girl paying the ultimate price for her weakness at Nadya's hand.

Biting back a furious dry sob at having allowed herself to be trapped like this, Nadine had to fight to get her fingers to type out a return message. It felt like her joints had turned to stone, each tap of her fingers grinding and heavy.

I accept.

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