Notes: I should probably note that I'm kind of imagining Tony to be like 35 rather than his actual age for this story.
Warning: Kind of child abuse/Neglect. Could be a trigger?
Chapter 2: A Killer is Born
A little girl, no older than five, wearing a filthy once-white dress sat alone in a dank wine cellar beneath a bustling gourmet restaurant in Florence that had been in business since the Renaissance. She was a waif of a creature with a gaunt face, dull grey eyes and very thin due to only being fed once every two days with scraps from the restaurant's waste. Her mouse-brown hair was matted with filth. The only thing of value she possessed was a solid gold crucifix that hung from her neck on a thin gold chain. She thinks it belonged to her mother, but she can't really remember her mother. She only remembers the screaming, and the blood – warm as it gushed from a lifeless form to pool at her shaking feet.
Her parents were Mafia. But they got involved in something they knew full well that they should have stayed out of. They paid with their lives, and no one would ever find their bodies. Of course, their orphaned daughter didn't really understand that. No, she knew only the 'kindness' and 'mercy' of the man her parents had worked for.
Dante Carnivale was his name. He was a well known restauranteur by day, and the leader of a very powerful branch of the Italian Mafia by night. In other words, everyone knew who he was and what he did, but no one would dare touch him. He had the police in his pocket and the politicians wrapped around his pudgy little finger. The girl knew him as a terrifying monster of a man, who taught her the meaning of pain and fear. If he told her to do something, she did it without hesitation. Punishment for disobedience was severe.
The first time she rebelled, she was beaten bloody and left without food for a week. She survived by killing and eating a rat in the wine cellar. But she was strong. She promised herself to avenge her family's murder – whatever it might take. The second time she rebelled, she was left with a broken leg and a jagged, almost lightening bolt shaped gash in her left cheek from the heavy gold ring Dante wore when he backhanded her across the face. The gash healed into a gruesome scar, leaving her face forever marred. She did not rebel a third time.
The child cringed at the memory and took the little gold crucifix between dirty, little fingers. "Father in heaven, may you deliver me safely from harm and give me the courage to do what I must to survive." She whispered in a broken voice, fighting tears that stung her eyes. As if on cue, the door to the kitchens burst open, bathing her in a sliver of light. Fearfully, she looked up at the giant of a man standing there.
"Assunta!" He shouted. She scrambled to her knees, with her hands on the floor in front of her and her head bowed.
"How may I serve you, Il mio salvatore (my savior)?" The little girl, Assunta, said with practiced calm.
"I have a job for you. Do well, and you will be given a proper room, and another job to follow. If you do as you are told, you will be rewarded for each task you complete. If you defy me, or botch an assignment you will be punished. Refuse me now, and you will breathe your last." Dante said and pressed the barrel of a handgun to her head.
Assunta fought the urge to look up at him. Looking up at him meant getting his boot in her face, or worse. But she didn't have to see him to envision the hulking, bald-headed Italian businessman with a neatly shaved black goatee who was most likely dressed in an Armani suit. It smelled like he even had one of his favorite cigars clenched between his yellowing teeth.
"I will accept your most generous offer. What you would have me do?" Assunta asked, hiding her inner terror behind a carefully constructed veil of calm and willing submission. Her only answer was a soft metallic clatter, as a dagger fell to the stone floor in front of her with a sealed envelope. With that, Dante Carnivale turned on his heel and left her. With shaking hands, Assunta tore open the envelope. She knew how to read, of course, she had been a privileged little girl who attended a very expensive private Catholic school and was considered a child prodigy before her parents' deaths.
The envelope contained the address of a man that had betrayed Dante's organization. The punishment: death to be dealt by Assunta's hand. It was genius, really. Who would suspect a five year old girl to be capable of murder? ...No one that hadn't met a desperate, starving five year old girl with an IQ far beyond her years in fear for her life, and driven by revenge.
Assunta knew she had no choice, so she steeled herself and walked right out the door that Dante had left open for her. Two hours later, she stood over the corpse of a man that she had stabbed to death in his sleep. He lived alone, and Dante's men had seen to it that his doors were unlocked for her. It was a test. She knew that. Dante wanted to know how far Assunta could be pushed. She looked down at her small hands, covered in still-warm blood and frantically wiped them on the white sheets.
Trembling, her dress as stained as her hands were, Assunta stood at the edge of a sewer grate in the streets of Florence some time later.
"My Lord, forgive me for I have sinned, as I forgive you for failing to protect me and my loved ones." Assunta whispered to the night and ripped the crucifix from her neck. "May the man whose life I have ended this night know peace, for I never shall so long as I breathe." With that, she let the only thing of meaning that she possessed fall through the cracks of the sewer grate with a quiet tinkling as it fell.
"Is she alive?" Tony asked, landing near the place where Agent Steel had been blown into the side of the building. The woman she'd rescued was standing over her looking horrified and trying to dial 911 on her cellphone with badly shaking hands.
"I-I think so. Oh my God! You're Iron Man! I - She's breathing, anyway." The woman said. "She saved us..."
"Good. I know. Get away from here; it isn't safe. I'll make sure that she gets medical attention." Tony said and winced when he finally looked at the prone form of Agent Steel, whose body was twisted at a horribly unnatural angle. "Give me vitals, Jarvis." Tony said to his AI, when the woman grabbed her child and left.
"Not good, sir. Her pulse is weak, blood pressure is dangerously low and she appears to suffering major spinal damage with possible irreversible quadriplegia. There are also several minor injuries and broken bones as well internal bleeding. Her likelihood of survival is two percent." Jarvis replied as the actual stats showed up in the HUD for him to see, titled as 'Agent Hollie Anne Steel (Assunta Belinda Antonelli)'.
"Shit." Tony cursed and shook his head as he wondered how in the fuck she was still breathing at all. "Steel's a wreck. Vitals are low, Jarvis' sensors are showing full-body paralysis and major spinal injuries." He said over the comms to Fury who swore like a sailor.
"I don't care. Get her to a hospital and have them at least try to get her stabilized. I need to know what happened in there. How the fuck does she get herself killed doing this when she decimated three entire Vatican police squads in under sixty seconds with nothing but two throwing knives and didn't get as much as a scratch?" Fury growled. Tony sighed and very carefully lifted Agent Steel from the ground hoping he wasn't just doing more damage.
"Any last requests? You put up one hell of a fight, I can at least give you this much."
"Sì (yes). Please don't kill me, Signora (Madam). I have never had the chance to truly live, and I have yet to avenge the deaths of my family who were slain by the very monsters I unwillingly serve." Assunta (then twenty-eight years old and one of the Italian Mafia's most notorious and highly paid hitmen) said to the red-headed Russian spy who had her pinned to the ground with a gun at her throat. Assunta closed her eyes and waited for death to come as life went on in the bustling streets of the Vatican City above them. Perhaps it was fate. Assunta didn't really want to kill the Cardinal believed to be next in line for the Papacy, even if she had stopped believing in God the night she committed the first of her countless murders. She just wished she didn't have to die in a rank sewer, of all places.
"Fine." The spy said and removed the gun. "I have a better idea, anyway. It would be a damn shame to waste your skills. From now on, you are an agent of SHIELD."