Same disclaimers at Chapter 1.

A/N: Again and again, I want to thank all my readers and reviewers. The amazing amount of positive support I've gotten from you all is astounding and I thank you for it immensely! It really does inspire me to keep going! I'm writing this all for you guys!

Now, I know I left you guys hanging in that last chapter, and you must all hate me, so I wrote a nice long chapter for you guys. It's the longest one yet, and I hope you guys will be able to appreciate why once you finish reading! Enjoy!

I was vaguely aware of the perspiration dewing at my hairline and felt it start to trickle slowly down the back of my neck. I didn't chance a stop to catch my breath. I couldn't just now. I was already so close. So I continued my hurried jog down a hall that seemed to stretch forever, ignoring the stifling smell of dust threatening to choke me. It smelled old—if old can be said to have a scent—like still air that hadn't been stirred in too long. Gravel and debris crunched beneath my boots, common in buildings that had fallen into disrepair such as this one. The hall was dark, the walls shedding their last strokes of aged paint. I was tired, oh, so tired, and was just starting to consider stopping when a wild cry pierced the silent air like a knife, cutting into my ears painfully with its familiarity. I sped up, breaking into a flat-out sprint, suddenly panicked, sure I'd heard it coming from the door at the end of the hall, the only door I could see, in fact. Maybe it was fatigue that made it seem as though it was backing away even further with each step I took. But I had to reach it, I had to get to it, I had to move faster. My breath came in harsh pants, sweat now coating me entirely, my blood pumping loudly in my ears, a sudden knot tying my throat painfully. I was close, I was so close, I would be there in a second, I had to make it, I—

Slammed into the room just as the knife slit his throat.

"CLINT!" I cried wildly, snapping up in bed so rapidly my head swam. My own scratchy shriek still vibrated in my ears as I tried to fight off the sudden wave of vertigo and nausea. I looked around with bleary eyes, trying to regain my grip on reality even as my heart continued to race, sweat sticking my threadbare sleep shirt to my body.

"You are alive, you are okay, you were just dreaming," I reminded myself out loud, a habit I'd quickly fallen into after the nightmares began. "You are alive, you are okay, you were just dreaming. You are alive, you are okay, you were just dreaming."

I blinked, forcing myself to believe it, dragging myself out of my own nightmares. It had gotten more difficult with time. "You are alive, you are okay, you were just dreaming. You are in a hotel in Budapest, not in an endless hallway in an abandoned building, and you are alive, you are okay, you were just dreaming."

I continued to chant my little mantra to myself, taking care to count my breaths until my breathing slowed. Just going through the motions. I tended to forget things when I was in this state. Like how and when to breathe.

I looked around again. Rain was falling in earnest outside, pattering aggressively against the fancy glass balcony door the hotel room provided. The suite was spacious and lavishly decorated in tones of white and beige with touches of red. It would have been a beautiful room except the red accents reminded me too much of splashes of blood, as if someone had just had their brains blown out on the white furniture.

I got shakily out of bed, a sudden clap of thunder almost knocking me off my wobbly feet. I gritted my teeth and stomped to the bathroom, feeling particularly pitiful and pathetic. I filled myself a glass of water and drank slowly, reminding myself to swallow, to breathe, to set the cup down—without excessive force because last time, that had ended with glass shards in my palm. I gripped the counter as the pain in my head ebbed, staring at my feet because I knew the mirror before me would show exactly what I didn't want to see. But I was a masochist and looked up anyway, slowly taking in the image in the glass of the shell I'd become.

Thin face, pale skin, dark circles under my eyes, hair knotted and tangled from all the thrashing nightmares entailed. This is what the fabulous Natasha Romanoff, assassin wonder, became at night: a worn down, shattered shell. During the daytime, I could plaster on makeup and a smile and get the job done, but this was the life I lived when no one was watching.

I gritted my teeth, hating myself with every ounce of life I had left, hating the pathetic mess I'd become, a walking disaster of pain and fury and shame and fear. I hated—loathed the girl in the mirror with tears already threatening to spill over. When had I ever been known to cry so much before?

"You're weak! You're pathetic!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, infuriated when the girl yelled them right back. She was the weak one! She was the pathetic one! I'd show her! I yanked open the bathroom drawer to my right, my hands curling around the first object they encountered—a thick brush—and hurled it with all my force at the mirror, making it shatter into a thousand pieces and splintering the image of the girl. I dropped the brush, trying to remember to breathe again. I ran my fingers through my hair but they only got tangled in the twisted mat. I groaned, pulling and tugging my fingers through the hair stubbornly, not caring as delicate strings of long red hair fell on the white tile. I did it again and again, pulling and yanking it until I pulled the drawer open again, this time digging through it until my hands closed around the cold metal of a pair of large fabric scissors. Ten pairs of the girl's eyes stared at me from the shattered mirror as I tugged the whole train of hair around one shoulder and haphazardly cut through it, the long thick locks falling to the floor with what seemed to me overly dramatic slowness.

I stepped back blindly so it wouldn't fall on my feet, instead stepping on the shattered glass. I yelled out in sudden pain, stumbling back only to step on more glass, already smearing blood on the floor. I tiptoed to the bathtub, sitting on its edge with my head between my knees, again having to remind myself to breathe. I picked out the glass shards slowly until they were all out but didn't bother to bandage my feet. I jumped over the broken glass and made my wobbly way back to bed, tracking blood on the white carpet.

Note to self: do not use excessive force on the mirror, results in shards of glass in feet.

I curled back into bed, reminding myself to breathe, reminding myself I was alive, I was okay, I was just dreaming. Just dreaming. Just dreaming...

Everything seems surreal in the morning. I could wake up anywhere from one to six times in a night, but when morning came around, I always woke with the sense I'd dreamnt it all, even the episodes in between. I was never sure. Just as I was never able to recognize when I was in a dream even though I'd been visiting that endless hall at night for over a month now, always bounding through that door just in time to see Clint fall victim to some new torture.

I only knew it wasn't a dream when I found evidence, this time in the form of sheets soaked in scarlet at my feet and red splotches on the carpet. I grimaced. It fit in perfectly with the decor.

I tried to remember the rest of the night, and with a sudden jerk, reached around my back. With horror, I realized what I was feeling. Nothing. At the small of my back, where I'd known the end of my curls to rest, there was nothing. My hand inched higher, higher, until finally meeting the blunt ends of my hair lying on my shoulder blades. So that hadn't been a dream either. I felt a scream well up in me and had to fight hard to swallow it back, because the sun had risen and that meant it was time to get my shitty semblance of a life together and pretend everything was okay. I had someone to be in the daytime, a role to play, a purpose to fill the empty shell. Only when the light fell away did my tenacity go with it.

I closed my eyes, breathing deeply, asking myself what Natasha Romanoff would do. Natasha was the one good at decision making, and it always took me a while to slide back into her skin in the morning. I tended to forget we were the same person sometimes, because most of the time, I just didn't feel like anything.

In the end, I bandaged my feet, cleaned up the mess, and brushed gingerly through what had been my mane of red. Once untangled, I saw the gravity of my destruction. It was frighteningly uneven, one side still managing to rest on my back while the other barely grazed my shoulder. I sighed, pulling it into a ponytail and deciding I didn't trust myself to try and correct it.

"My god, sweetheart, what happened to you!?" exclaimed a flamboyant hair dresser in rapid Hungarian when I pulled my hair from its disguising ponytail. I'd found a chic little salon just two blocks from the hotel and decided I didn't really have the energy to try and find anything else.

"I lost a bet," I replied tonelessly in equally fluent Hungarian. He fingered through my remaining curls with a heartbroken sadness and an almost comical sigh as he sat me down in a chair. He had various pictures of hair models taped to his mirror. I stared at one, feeling the resolution settle into me and deciding before I could change my mind.

"Make me look like her," I said, pointing at one. He stared from it to me, an eyebrow raised, before a sudden excited grin spread across his face.

"Yes, alright, you'll look fabulous, sweetheart," he said, already starting to comb through my hair eagerly.

"Wait. Turn me around. I don't want to see," I told him. He nodded understandingly, giving me a smile as if we'd just shared a secret, and swung me around. I closed my eyes, wishing I could tune out the snipping sound of his scissors.

He turned me around an hour later, and I had to admit, he had done a good job. The haircut even managed to make my thin face seem fuller and healthier, even a little rosy. It was as long as he could've possibly managed—just above my shoulders—and the curls framing my face were now a striking platinum blonde.

"You look beautiful," he'd sighed dreamily. I smiled at him, not feeling beautiful at all.

"Oh, my God! What did you do!?" Maria yelled into the phone by way of greeting, not two minutes after I'd sent her a text telling her I needed new false passports and IDs. I sat up from the bed in the hotel room.

"I—uh… I'm blonde," I replied simply, not quite believing it even as I said it.

"Blon—what?" she stammered with a half-laugh, not believing me either. "You're not."

"I am," I said, trying for an easy tone. It seemed crucial to act my most normal to Maria, because she seemed to care for me the most. And she didn't deserve worry in repayment.

"What, why? How?"

"I guess I just needed a change," I replied, adding in an airy laugh.

"Oh, man. Well, send me the picture!" she said, laughing too. "You couldn't wait until after the mission?"

"I guess not… Maria?"

A moment's pause. She'd noted the change in my voice. She knew what was coming, but she waited anyway. "Yes?"

I swallowed hard, feeling like I'd traveled back in time. Back to when I was seventeen, young and scared, asking Maria for the first time what had happened to Clint since I'd been dropped off like luggage.

"How is he?" I managed to choke out. My throat felt tight and the words seemed to cut on the way out. I heard Maria sigh. I'd never told her why I had suddenly decided to leave Clint that day that I showed up in her office…what had it been? A year ago? Already?

I'd never explained, no matter how many times she'd asked, but at least she seemed to have kept her promise of secrecy. But sometimes, based on the things she said, I had the feeling she'd made a few inferences of her own. And most of them were probably correct.

"He's fine," she said blandly. I knew I wasn't going to get more out of her. She might have kept her promise, but I knew she didn't think it was fair of me to hide from him. Whatever. I didn't care. I got what I needed.

"Alright, talk to you later," I said, hanging up abruptly as if that hadn't just happened and going to my laptop to send her the passport pictures I'd already taken. I stared at them, feeling more detached from myself than ever. The girl with the blank face and blonde hair in the picture, she really could be anyone. A complete stranger. Certainly not the girl with long dark red curls that had melted like candle wax in the arms of her archer. The distinction had never felt so clear, and the fact they were the same person, and that person was me, that seemed to be the false reality.

I felt the cold metal of the blade I had strapped to my thigh under my champagne-colored dress. I kept tapping it and told myself to stop. Nervous tics were not acceptable. The sun was going down, but I still had a job to do. Tonight, I was working late. Tonight, Natasha had to stick around.

I tipped my balding cab driver generously as he pulled to a stop in front of the Gundel Restaurant, crowds of lavishly dressed people filing in. I got out of the cab, and had the immediate feeling these people could sniff out a secondhand handkerchief if it came into their midst. But I blended in perfectly with my expensive dress and had finally got the hang of my newly shortened hair enough to be able to pin it up. No one gave me a second look.

"Right this way, Miss Rushman," a waiter said to me in accented English immediately. My slightly foreign bone structure seemed to have been toned down with my new blonde hair; that, and the fact I'd taken on my previous alias, Natalie Rushman, for the night made me appear positively American. I guess I couldn't blame him for assuming, though I found myself slightly bothered.

He guided me through the sea of white linen tables, chatter and the clink of wine glasses echoing all around us, until he stopped short in front of the smallest table they offered, and pulled the chair out for me. I thanked him as he handed me a menu with a winning smile and hurried away. I opened it but let my eyes rove over the top of it. I wasn't here to eat.

A few tables diagonally from me, I saw why I was here. Ernö Gaspár, the new king of the Hungarian drug cartel, was sitting at a large table, a few men in suits on one side—presumably to talk about "business"—and his blonde wife and two dark-haired children, both boys, on the other. How sweet. He'd brought his human shield out tonight.

He'd probably been bringing them out a lot lately. His rise to cartel royalty had left a bloody trail of death all over the city, and his competition was not happy. Rumors of an all-out gang war were flying everywhere. No wonder he'd picked a busy place like this to meet. Lots of witnesses, lots of protection. He was no fool. Though he was younger than I expected, tall and dark-haired, and apparently very amused at what one of his colleagues had just said. His wife was staring vaguely at the lot of them with a polite smile plastered on, and the two young boys, completely engrossed in their own world, were entertaining themselves by throwing asparagus onto each other's plates.

I grinned. It'd be easy enough to wait until they left, creep up behind them through the crowd and get a shot at Gaspár before he exited the building, where hoards of his henchmen would surely be waiting at the ready, ever watchful. And in the ensuing chaos, I'd slip away, unnoticed. Easy.

Maybe I'd have a chance for some dinner, after all.

"Miss Rushman." The cheerful waiter was back, grinning as if he had great news. "Your date is here!" he said, gesturing behind me.

"My date?" I repeated stupidly, turning around in my chair to see Clint Barton striding through the tables toward me, strong and handsome, wearing a tuxedo strikingly similar to the one from our last night together, as if no time had passed between then and now.

I felt my breath catch somewhere between my throat and stomach, right around where my heart might have been.

I watched him walk around the small square table and take a seat in the empty chair across from me, accepting the menu the waiter was offering him with a dazzling smile.

"Good evening, Tasha," he said once the waiter had darted away, opening the menu and looking through it with interest. His nickname cut through me like a knife. How many times had I dreamt it, heard him calling it desperately for me?

I still couldn't manage to swallow the knot in my throat so I opened my menu and hid behind it until I managed to choke out, "Good evening."

I blinked hard, willing myself to wake up. This had to be a dream. It had to. And any moment, someone would swoop down on Clint, and I'd be forced to watch him die once again.

"Your hair's shorter," he commented without emotion, strongly reminiscent of how he'd commented on my hair's length when he'd appeared after my graduation. "And blonde."

His tone made me look up, but he still appeared to be looking through the menu intently. Even so, I could see a poorly-disguised intensity in his eyes, like faraway thunder, that I was sure wasn't aimed at the risotto.

I swallowed, realizing he didn't like it, the hair. And I felt foolish when a burning embarrassment colored my cheeks, suddenly ashamed of my rash decision to color my hair just because he was displeased. I shook it off, suddenly angry. It was always easier to just be angry at him. I'd learned that the first time I met him.

"So it is," I said with cool pride, but my eyes still inadvertently flitted down to my own menu when I felt his flick to me. He looked back to his menu after a moment, and I chanced another look at him. If this was a dream, I really did remember everything about him. From his strong frame all the way down to the light freckles on his nose. His hair was neatly cut, parted on the side and brushed like he always did for special occasions. It made him look like an adorable grown-up boy scout in a suit.

"Why are you here?" I blurted out at him before I could stop myself. He closed his menu and finally looked up at me. And I could see it wasn't just faraway thunder in his eyes. It was a storm, a tempest, a hurricane of anger and rage and betrayal and hurt.

"Why did you leave?" he countered, his voice shaking, no longer the practiced tone of mild politeness. And that shut me right up. I almost felt myself pressed into the cushion of my seat by the force of his gaze. I looked away.

"I had to."

"You had to?" he repeated incredulously. "You had to disappear overnight, literally overnight, without a word?"

"You did, didn't you?" I answered fiercely, suddenly defensive.

"I had no choice," he replied through gritted teeth. And again, I found myself speechless. Because he was right. No one twisted my arm, no one's life was depending on my choice. I just… left. I floundered for something to say, anything, but nothing seemed to be making sense right now.

"Did Maria tell you I was here?" I asked, suddenly feeling like I was being attacked from all sides. He scoffed.

"Maria. I don't know what you told her, but it worked, because she didn't tell me a thing," he said bitterly. "But I had a few favors to call in here and there. It took me a while, but I finally got it. Got your mission file and saw you'd ran off to Budapest. And then I show up here, and I see you walk in, tall and beautiful and blonde—of all things!"

I looked away, feeling my cheeks flame and not being able to decide if it was because of the trouble he'd gone to find me or because he'd just called me beautiful. I let my eyes wander, looking anywhere except at his eyes, and settling on Gaspár's table—which was now entirely empty!

"God damn it!" I yelled, throwing my napkin on the table and springing up. Clint turned, obviously also noticing they were gone and following behind me.

So much for dinner.

We ran out into the busy street just as Gaspár's car turned a corner.

"Fuck!" I yelled loudly, making a few elderly women nearby start with indignation.

"Come on, this way!" Clint said, taking my hand as he pulled up behind me, and pulling me across the street and then into an alley. He let me go immediately when we made it into the darkness of the alley. He ran to the other end of it and I paused only long enough to remove my heels before following him. He scanned the street before darting across into another alley. I followed without questioning. We were not halfway through the other alley before we heard several gunshots and the deafening sound of scraping metal. Clint and I looked at each other for only a moment before breaking into sprints. At the mouth of the alley, we were greeted with the sight of Gaspár's shiny black car crashed against the side of a brick building, a crowd already gathering around it. We pushed through the people to find the chauffeur shot dead, hanging limply on the steering wheel, the rest of the car completely empty. A decoy. Gaspár must be really paranoid because he was taking all the precautions he could.

Clint pulled me away from the crowd. "They know this a decoy. They'll be chasing all the possible cars he could have gone in. He could have gone anywhere."

The sudden sound of screeching tires made us turn in time to see a car make a haphazard u-turn, followed by three more black cars. Clint and I looked at each other.

"That's a start," I said.

The crowd had thickened enough to stop traffic and Clint ran to the first car, a tiny European thing. He opened the door and pulled out the driver with a hurried "We need your car." The man promptly started cursing as I dropped into the passenger seat, but his voice was soon lost over the sound of Clint revving the engine, putting the car in reverse, and backing all the way out of the street, causing much yelling and a commotion of honking.

Traffic was dense and it didn't help that streets in Europe were much smaller than American ones. With a lot of dodging, and a whole lot more honking, we managed to get behind the chase as it wove farther and farther out of the main city, into the smaller and quieter side streets of the old city. With one hand still on the wheel, Clint lowered the window on my side. Without asking, I immediately pulled a gun from the small purse I'd been carrying and leaned out the window. I heard a few shots clang off metal but one was answered with the satisfying sound of a popped tire, causing one of the cars to swerve off and crash. I aimed for the other but a sharp turn made the shot go wide.

Ahead of us, we saw another large black car pull in front of the street opening, Gaspár's car crashing into it before it had time to brake. Clint pulled into an alley at the last moment, the sound of more crashing telling us the car in front of us hadn't been so lucky.

"Here," he said, handing me a gun from one of his side holsters. I readily took it and jumped out of the car. We ran into the street in time to see dark figures darting every which way. We shot a few, but the rest disappeared.

"Lovely night for a dinner date, huh?" he muttered, running to collect whatever arms the men we'd shot down had. He threw another gun at me before ducking into a side street. It was quiet, suddenly. Extremely quiet.

As we inched across a wall, I idly thought how it easy it felt to be around him again. Time hadn't seemed to change that. I knew he was furious, and I was a corpse of who I'd been before, but we still fit together like two parts of a well-oiled machine.

"You didn't have to come," I heard myself whispering in the quiet, and not really knowing why I was saying it. That made him look back at me, an eyebrow raised. He shook his head.

"Yes, I did."

I wanted to ask why, but bullets seemed to rain down on us suddenly from nowhere, sending us ducking behind a dumpster. Clint took out a man that had decided to poke around a corner at the wrong time and I shot a figure that had been hiding on the building beside us.

"How about no more talking?" Clint said after, his voice uncharacteristically cold. Fired shots echoed from a few blocks down, and then some more on the opposite side. I started running down one way while Clint started scaling a building. I didn't ask. He always liked a view from above.

A man in a suit ran into the street from an alley, almost crashing into me. He seemed surprised by my presence but didn't hesitate to start throwing punches, knocking me pretty hard on the head before I tripped him and shot him in the head. Poor bastard.

Yells in Hungarian suddenly filled the air, more shots fired. Then out of nowhere, the ground shook, an explosion echoing from nearby. Grenades, probably. These guys must be desperate for a kill. Mobsters usually weren't so messy.

"Hawkeye?" I yelled out, wary of using our code names while enemies were nearby. No answer. Instead, three men burst out from another side street and another behind. Fuck. I shot wildly, backing against a wall. One fell just as another burst into the scene. This one, however, seemed to be one of Gaspár's guards, because he started shooting the men around me. When faced with me, he hesitated, obviously confused at the sight of a blonde in a dress pressed up against a wall. But it was enough of a hesitation for me to fire. His mistake.

I ran the opposite way from which the men came, taking sharp turns when yells told me more were nearby. I was low on bullets and wasn't about to pick a fight I wasn't sure I could win. I rounded a corner and heard Hungarian murmuring. I ran across just as one of the four men looked up and yelled out in surprise. I shot him squarely in the forehead, but the other three had already started running after me. I weaved across the street, hearing bullets whiz by.

"Hawkeye!" I yelled, louder this time. I turned long enough to shoot one down, his body falling in front of another and making him face plant into the concrete. The resounding crunch was not pleasant. I turned a corner and felt my stomach drop. A dead end. A perfect brick wall. I turned as the other man ran in behind me, a grin spreading across his face. I shot at him and the gun clicked empty. I figured I had nothing to do with it so I threw it at him, hitting him in the forehead. He cursed loudly, steadying his gun, and I knew I wouldn't have enough time to reach for my knife.

The sound of flapping fabric made us both look up just as Clint jumped from a roof, landing lithely in front of me, shooting the man in his moment of shock. He turned to me, his eyes urgent.

"We need to get out of here. They're everywhere," he said, not bothering to distinguish who "they" was. Whatever side they were on, they would both kill us. "Come on."

He turned and started running, dodging and weaving through streets the way I had. I was peeking around a corner as he leaned against a wall to catch his breath when he suddenly said, "You shouldn't have come here by yourself."

I knew he said it in regards to the situation we were in, how I wouldn't have survived by myself. I didn't bother to tell him it would not have turned out like this if I'd been alone tonight; we didn't have the time for it. Besides, it felt like a loaded statement, like a reprimand for leaving him more than a warning for my safety. It sounded more like, "You shouldn't have come here without me."

I knew what he wanted to hear. I really did. But I'd never been one for apologizing. Even if the remorse was literally eating me alive from the inside out.

"I was doing fine," I replied, though that was probably the biggest lie I'd said all year. And that was saying something. I heard him scoff and turned just in time to see a man peek around the corner behind us. I slammed Clint to the wall and pulled my blade in one motion, throwing it swiftly and watching it lodge in the man's chest. I didn't give Clint the chance to say anything before pulling him around the corner and starting to run again. We were just a few blocks away from where we'd left our little stolen car. I was still holding onto Clint when he pulled me up short.

"Sh, wait," he whispered, holding me close in the middle of the alley. We stood silent for a moment, but I heard nothing. "Do you have any weapons left?" he asked quietly. I shook my head. "Get behind me."

I did, his hand still gripping mine as we made our way up the last block, much slower than before. That heightened sense of awareness had returned. We were almost to the tiny car when a small rustle behind a dumpster made Clint twirl me around and press me behind him to the opposite wall, his gun already pointed.

"Don't shoot, don't shoot! It's me!" came a frantic voice in Hungarian. Clint was taller than me so I had to stand on tiptoes to see over his shoulder. Huddled in the trash bags next to the dumpster, his face dirty and scratched, was Gaspár. He started to get up, probably thinking Clint was one of his guards.

"It's me!" he repeated. Clint cocked his gun.

"So it is," Clint replied without emotion. The gunshot echoed in the lonely alley. Clint pulled me away. "Let's go."

We drove alertly at first, wary of pursuers, but the closer we got into the city, the more we realized we weren't being followed. I let myself sink into the car seat, exhausted, and only then did the silence in the car seem extremely forced. I didn't say anything. Neither did he. We dumped the car in some small street a few blocks from my hotel and began walking on foot. He fell back a few steps behind me but continued to follow, making me feel like chaperoned child.

"Where's your hotel, anyway?" I said, turning suddenly when we'd reached the entrance to my hotel and he still showed no signs of leaving. He gave me a grin, but it was without his usual friendliness.

"I don't have one," he said, shrugging. I scoffed.

"Well, you better go find one," I said, turning back around and stomping off. He grabbed my wrist and turned me brusquely.

"Don't you think you should be a little nicer to me? I'm the one who got ditched like a dog," he said. I wrenched myself from his grip, unable to think of anything to say. He stood there, just looking at me, and I just stared back, my arms crossed and my chest aching.

After a long silence, he finally said, "You could've just said something, you know! You didn't want to work together anymore, fine! I would have let you go! If you—if you didn't feel the same way, then—"

"Oh, my God!" I said, turning again and cutting him off. I couldn't believe he would bring this up now, here. I made my way to the hotel again, and heard him follow. I became vaguely aware of a few passerby turning to stare and imagined how odd we must look; a man in a tux, with a crooked bow tie and blood on his white collar, and a blonde woman in a lovely dress, barefoot and with ripped tights.

He said nothing else, following me through the lobby, into the elevator, and down the hall toward my room in silence. Just before I reached the door, I turned again. "Stop following me!" I yelled at him, a headache already starting to pound through my temples.

"Then stop running from me!" he yelled back. "Stop acting like you don't need anyone! You're not okay like you say you are, and I can tell. You're not being brave, doing this! You're just running! You're running with nowhere to go and—"

My hand struck his face with a resounding clap, cutting his words short as his head whipped to one side. There was a moment where everything seemed to stand still before I saw him blink and I felt the sudden stinging in my hand. He turned slowly, my fingers printed clearly on his face in red. He looked at me almost disbelievingly, as if he wasn't sure that had just happened. I blinked quickly, willing him to just go, to say no more, because I didn't need him to tell me the truth. I already knew it.

"Just leave," I whispered hoarsely. He looked at me for only a moment.

"No."

He moved toward me, pushing me to the wall next to the room's door. Maybe it was that I didn't have the energy to fight him, or maybe it was just that I was so deprived, so hungry for closeness, his closeness, that I let him. He pinned me to the wall, his mouth on mine, and mine pushing insistently against his. My hands snaked around his neck and his slid from my shoulders to my waist.

I'm not entirely sure how I managed to open the room door without letting his lips leave mine, but we made it inside before he picked me up again, hiking up my dress and winding my legs around him. I worked furiously at his bow tie and buttons, but he unzipped the back of my dress easily, at his own leisurely pace, letting his fingers trace down my spine and making me shiver. I felt him grin against my lips, and I knew Clint, my Clint, was back, safe and solid and warm and real, right here in my arms.

There's something deliciously dangerous about falling to bed with an assassin. I'd found plenty of men to pleasure me in the last year that I'd been trying to replace the touch of Clint's hands. But there was nothing even close in comparison to the energy, the current of electricity running between us, the sheer power pulsing under our skin.

I ran my hands hungrily across his bare arms, savoring the ripple of muscle under my fingertips. His hands roved freely, exploring my body like a map he was determined to learn. I pulled him on top of me desperately, pining for his warmth, letting him cover me entirely like a blanket, and I realized just how much I'd missed him, how much I needed him, how no one else anywhere would have been able to replace the feel of his strong hands winding around me, stroking my smooth skin, slipping between my legs to the warmth within that was already aching for him.

I gasped sharply, my back arching, my fingers clawing desperately at his back. He kissed me forcefully, his strength exciting me. We were both dangerous people, and I liked that he knew he didn't have to be careful with me. I opened my lips to his, letting him breathe the life back into me. My hands drifted down his back, running smoothly over his muscle. He traced kisses down my neck, a low rumble vibrating in his throat, his hands running up my legs to settle on my breasts and tease my nipples to a point. He continued down to my navel and there he actually stopped to grin up at me before working his way lower, excruciatingly slowly. That bastard.

I writhed beneath him, my hands winding through his hair as his face fell between my legs. A loud moan escaped me when I felt his tongue flick in, twisting and turning, before being replaced with two fingers. I'm sure my grip on his hair was painful, but I didn't release him. He withdrew his hand slowly, finally placing his hips level with mine to enter me.

He pushed in slowly and I groaned loudly, my back arching dangerously high. He slipped his arms under me and held me to him, starting to work a slow rhythm. I wound my legs around him again, aching for his closeness, for him to fill the emptiness inside me.

He eagerly complied with my wishes, his pace slowly picking up until he was pounding inside me, all the way up his hilt. My breath was coming in ragged pants, and he was groaning loudly into my ear. I held onto him tightly, desperately, like he was my only lifeline as I mounted closer to my peak, my pulse pounding and my breath quickening. Each flick of his hips sent jabs of searing pleasure through my body, my spine feeling like it was being electrified.

"Tasha," I heard him whisper into my ear as though from very far away before one final desperate slam into me sent us both over and I was gone completely from this world. A wild cry escaped from me before my eyes glazed over, my toes curled, my hands clutched feebly at anything they could reach before I fell limp in his arms like a rag doll. I felt his weight fall on top of me and knew he was just as gone as I was. He was heavy on top of me, but I clutched at him to keep him there, comforted by his weight. My vision still seemed blurry but I shakily stroked his hair with an arm that felt like a noodle. He squeezed me suddenly, burying his face in my hair so that his breath tickled my neck. "I needed you," I heard him whisper, ever so faintly, and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to have heard or not.

I couldn't quite catch my breath from beneath him but I didn't care and held him in place, liking the feeling of being anchored to him. I continued to stroke his hair with shaky fingers, feeling like I'd never stop owing this man who kept appearing, again and again, to save me.