Black Widow: Forever Red Read online

  Dante snorted in disgust.

  Alex ignored him. “Thank you, Montclair Junior High, thank you very much.” Alex waved at his adoring fans—some real, some imaginary—like a Tony Stark in the making. “You’re all off my naughty list.” They cheered. “Drinks are on me.”

  “They’re actually on me,” said Dante from the floor, strewn with red plastic cups, next to the food table. “Or maybe it just feels that way because I’m lying in a puddle.”

  “Technically speaking, you’re on them.” Alex smiled, searching the mostly empty pizza boxes for a spare slice. He found one—pepperoni—and dunked it into the sauce from the hot wings. As usual, the worse something was for him, the more he liked it, and at the moment this pizza was doing the trick just fine.

  Dante groaned. “Seriously? You’re disgusting.”

  Alex shrugged. “Whatever.”

  His mouth was still full when a sound in the distance caught his attention. He looked out into the darkness of the backyard, beyond the strands of colored lights hanging from the roof, and even beyond the flock of reindeer pulling the fake sled across the lawn. It sounded like a snapping branch or maybe an animal.

  “Did you hear that?” For a second, it looked like something fluttered in the shadows of the far hedge. Alex narrowed his eyes. Something’s back there.

  “You got a dog now, D?”

  “Yeah, my sister.” Dante winked. He was still lying on the floor. “Why?”

  Alex frowned. “Nothing. Just heard a stray, I guess.”

  “Nah, she’s ours,” Dante said with a smile.

  Dante’s sister Sofi—a pretty, younger girl in a vintage Planet Thor T-shirt—stepped up over her brother, jabbing at his ribs with her high-wedge sandal. “Did you just call me a dog? Really? Which one of us used to eat kibble for money, Dante Cruz?”

  “You did?” Alex was already laughing.

  Dante rolled over. “I was eight.”

  Sofi looked at the broken Ping-Pong table. “Dad’s gonna freak. He’s still mad from when you smashed up all his rakes for your stupid game.” Sofi shook her head.

  “Rakes? You mean our broadswords?” Dante was insulted. “And it’s called LARPing, you pest. It’s a sport.” He grabbed her ankle from below. “Go back to bothering the middle school elves.”

  “Shut up, Rudolph.” Sofi grabbed a bottle of soda from the wobbly card table and poured a new drink. “Why do you even hang out with my brother, Alex?”

  Alex wiped his greasy hands on his jeans. “Charity. Pity. Because I’m nice.”

  Dante scoffed. “Tell that to the broken table.”

  “So I’m a little…competitive.” Alex looked embarrassed. He was working on it, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself, not when his instincts took over.

  “A little? If I’m a dog, you’re a pit bull, man.” Dante pulled himself up on his elbows.

  Sofi wagged her cup. “At least you have each other. I don’t know why anyone else would hang out with you. Oh, wait—nobody does.” She poured soda down on her brother’s face.

  Dante lunged for his sister’s ankle as she stalked off.

  Alex saw the porch light from the next house brighten for a second, as if something had only just moved out of its way.

  Then he shook it off. You’re being paranoid. It’s probably just Santa and his flying reindeer.

  But he found his eyes lingering on the dark back of the hedge. What if something really is out there?

  Over at the far end of the yard, well beyond the shadows, a black-gloved hand pushed the hedge back into place. Distant laughter drifted above the muted holiday music—all the sounds of someone else’s party.

  It was the sound of strangers having a good time, of the holidays proceeding as they should, at least for the average, everyday sort of people.

  But not for everyone.

  A face ducked back into the darkness, leaving the world of hedges and yards and red cups behind. Because Alex Manor was right; something was out there, even if it had more to do with destiny than flying reindeer.

  S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY

  CLEARANCE LEVEL X

  LINE-OF-DUTY DEATH [LODD] INVESTIGATION

  REF: S.H.I.E.L.D. CASE 121A415

  AGENT IN COMMAND [AIC]: PHILLIP COULSON

  RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW, A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA

  TRANSCRIPT: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, LODD INQUIRY HEARINGS

  DOD: The boy. Let’s start with the boy.

  ROMANOFF: Yes, sir.

  DOD: It seems, if we go back to this mountain of paperwork S.H.I.E.L.D. has so thoughtfully provided, that he had nothing to do with any of this.

  ROMANOFF: It seems that way, yes.

  DOD: Was that the case?

  ROMANOFF: [pausing] That would be classified intel, sir.

  DOD: And this would be a classified DOD/LODD hearing, Agent, would it not?

  ROMANOFF: [sits back from mic]

  DOD: Agent Romanoff? I want to remind you that you’re under oath.

  ROMANOFF: Look, let’s cut the crap, sir. I know what I did, and I know why I’m responsible. If you want to know where things really went south, it all started with Ava and me. Is that what you wanted to hear?

  DOD: What I want to hear, Agent, is why.

  ROMANOFF: That’s so--American.

  DOD: I’m waiting.

  FORT GREENE YWCA BASEMENT

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  When Ava Orlova opened her eyes in the mornings, all she could hear was Swan Lake. Her mother had hummed Tchaikovsky as she had rocked Ava to sleep as a baby—then later, when she’d tucked her in at night as a little girl.

  It was all Ava had left of her now. She didn’t know what had happened to her mother, or even her father. She only knew that they were gone, and that by the time she left Odessa, all those years ago, she no longer had any reason to stay.

  Ava could feel the hard floor beneath her thin, lumpy, and distinctly non-swanlike mattress. It radiated cold, and she pulled her sleeping bag (the one she’d stolen from the Auburn homeless shelter) up to her shoulders and shivered. Except for one scrawny kitten with an equally scrawny belly—Sasha Cat—Ava was alone in her nondescript room.

  And possibly in the world.

  A single lightbulb hung from her bedroom ceiling, if you could call the room a bedroom. The high, small windows were the first clue that her makeshift room was actually a basement. The second clue was the damp puddle on the concrete floor, the recycled newspapers stacked along the walls, and the bags of old cans and bottles.

  It looked like a prison cell, but Ava wasn’t a prisoner. Not technically, and not in anything resembling a jail. Not anymore. When S.H.I.E.L.D. had first brought her to this country, they’d taken her to three places: a baseball game (to experience America), a big-box store (to buy off-label American clothes), and 7B (a decommissioned American military bunker that still felt like a jail). The classified safe house had no name, so Ava thought of it as 7B—the numbers on her steel-reinforced bedroom door. For five years, her only companions were a dull rotation of tutors and security guards, an old television stuck on C-SPAN, and an endless supply of microwave macaroni and cheese.

  Never again.

  Ava had been on her own for three years now, and she’d never looked back. Not since her fourteenth birthday, when she’d ditched her handler and left 7B with only what she could steal and stuff into an old field bag. Ava didn’t think of it as stealing so much as surviving. Aside from that, she’d been pilfering petty cash from the guards’ jackets for years and found she had more than enough to get a one-way ticket to New York City, where she bounced from shelter to shelter until she found a place where she could come and go as she pleased. The benefit of living in the drafty basement of a YWCA was that nobody noticed when she left or cared when she came home. Freedom and independence were the perks of being a runaway.

  Ava was seventeen years old now and nearly as scrawny as Sasha Cat, who had been in the basement when she’d discove
red it. Ava’s hair was still the same cinnamon color it had been when she was a child in Odessa, but now the freezing showers upstairs in the public locker rooms meant little time for things like conditioner. And combs. These days, her red curls were loose and twisting into wild knots. Ava would kill for a hot bath, not that she’d had that many since leaving S.H.I.E.L.D. custody. (Not that she’d had that many before, either; hot water wasn’t much more reliable in Ukraine than it was at the Fort Greene Y.)

  Sasha meowed, and Ava rolled over. She pulled a worn notebook from beneath her mattress and slipped her pencil from the spine. She began to sketch rapidly, without moving her eyes from the page; she had made a habit of drawing out her dreams the moment she woke up, if she could. If she had a bed and paper and a bit of charcoal or pencil. Which wasn’t always.

  Sasha bit the edge of the paper, and Ava pushed her off without looking up. She was already roughing out a picture of the boy she had seen when she’d closed her eyes. It was the same boy as always, the one with the dark eyes and the tattoo on his arm. Tattoo Boy. That was what Ava called him, at least to Sasha Cat, and sometimes to Oksana, when she talked about him. She’d never shown Oksana the sketches, though she was really the only friend Ava had made in this country. She didn’t know how she could explain it—dreaming so often about a person she only felt like she knew—and anyway, Oksana had stayed on at the Auburn shelter when Ava left, so she didn’t often see her sketching in the mornings.

  Ava’s hand curved across the page, and the graphite details took shape. The curve of his nose. The broad lines of his pronounced jaw, his cheekbones. His dark, wide-set eyes. The way his hair curled into unruly waves, almost hiding his face.

  She drew him standing at the back of a crowded yard, staring straight at her.

  My Alexei.

  Alexei Manorovsky.

  That was his name, at least in Russian, which was still the language of Ava’s dreams. She heard someone call him Alex, which Ava found strange and short, like it was missing something. Tonight he was raising his arms in victory, playing some kind of game, she thought. It had looked like he was having fun just being with his friends, and it only made her lonelier to watch him.

  You don’t need friends, Ava. You need your brain. You need to stay strong like an ox and sharp like a razor. Promise me that much.

  Her mother’s last words to her whispered their way into Ava’s mind as she stared at the page. As one of Eastern Europe’s most important quantum physicists, Dr. Orlova had learned the hard way how to fight for everything she’d achieved.

  Then another voice spoke up, though Ava tried to ignore it, just as she always did.

  If I can do it, Ava, you can do it….We’re the same.

  Tot zhe samoye. The same.

  It was what the woman in black had said to her before she’d disappeared. But Ava wasn’t the same as anyone—especially not her—and she knew that now. She was alone, and she always would be. She would stay strong and sharp.

  Because my mother was right.

  She sighed and added a final detail—the boy’s Father Christmas hat. “Happy holidays, Sash.” Sasha meowed back, nudging the paper gingerly with one paw.

  Ava scratched beneath Sasha Cat’s chin with one hand and flipped through her sketchbook with the other. The book was the only record of her crazy dreams, just as it had been for years. If she hadn’t drawn it all herself, she wouldn’t have believed it. There was an Alexei on almost every page. Fencing, kickboxing, riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle. Staring out a classroom window. Playing with a brown-eyed puppy. Ava rubbed the charcoal with her finger, blurring the smooth lines.

  Who are you, Alexei Manorovsky?

  Why do I only see you in my dreams?

  And what do you have to do with me?

  She turned the page without answering the question. There was home. Odessa and before that, Moscow, what she could remember of them.

  Her mother’s face above the collar of her lab coat.

  Baked apples.

  Her beloved old ballerina doll, the one with the ceramic head. Karolina. The doll had been a present from her parents, long lost now.

  These were the scarce, salvaged moments of her childhood—so many scattered beads of a broken necklace come unstrung.

  She wished she knew more.

  She moved to a new drawing, to darker memories.

  The Odessa warehouse where she’d lost everything, years ago.

  The bald man with the barbed-wire pattern inked around his neck—the monster who had taken her whole world away. She always drew him with vacant black eyes, like a demon.

  Which is what he was.

  She couldn’t remember much, but she remembered the black eyes taunting her. No one will come for you, little ptenets. No one wants you. No one cares.

  Not even your precious mamotchka.

  Ava turned more pages, forcing her mind to move on to other things.

  Like the ghost words.

  Beyond the sketches, she had scribbled strange words everywhere in the margins. Some appeared over and over, like the only pieces remaining from a missing puzzle. She no longer knew what they meant, aside from invoking her dreams, her memories, her past. Her head ached when she saw the familiar arrangement of letters, she’d stared at them so often.

  KRASNAYA KOMNATA.

  OPUS.

  LUXPORT.

  It was always the same. She remembered nothing more about the words, other than that they had something vaguely to do with the night S.H.I.E.L.D. had found her on the docks at Odessa. She remembered little else about them, nothing that made sense. And aside from those four words, she had only one other thing.

  One meaningless scrap of paper.

  Sasha Cat clawed at the edge of the page.

  There it was, on the very last page, where she’d put it when she’d stopped carrying it in her pocket. It was the only thing that remained from her life in Ukraine—aside from a faded photo or two—an old euro, ripped in half, scribbled with two more words and an image, drawn in the shape of an hourglass.

  BLACK WIDOW.

  The sign that meant Natasha Romanoff. The woman in black who had haunted her dreams even before Tattoo Boy had.

  The one who had rescued her from the madman who had murdered her mother—only to let her be tossed into custody, locked up, and forgotten about, one more unwanted refugee from an ocean away.

  The Black Widow had given her this life. This privilege. To be homeless and motherless and alone. Always a stranger in a strange land.

  Ava knew Natasha Romanoff was supposed to be a hero. She and her powerful friends were supposed to take care of humanity. Natasha Romanoff was supposed to take care of her.

  If you ask, I’ll come, sestrenka. I promise, little sister.

  Ava had asked. Ava had searched, clutching the faded euro with the hourglass symbol. But Natasha Romanoff had never come for her.

  And Natasha Romanoff was an Avenger. They were better than the rest of us. That’s what the world thought, anyway. Only Ava knew it wasn’t the truth.

  The Black Widow would never be a hero to Ava Orlova.

  She would only be a disappointment.

  Another one.

  Sasha Cat leaped up from the sketchbook, settling into her customary perch on Ava’s shoulders.

  People disappointed you, even heroes. It was a lesson Ava never forgot. Strong like an ox and sharp like a razor. That was who she was now.

  Her mother would have been proud.

  S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY

  CLEARANCE LEVEL X

  LINE-OF-DUTY DEATH [LODD] INVESTIGATION

  REF: S.H.I.E.L.D. CASE 121A415

  AGENT IN COMMAND [AIC]: PHILLIP COULSON

  RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW, A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA

  TRANSCRIPT: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, LODD INQUIRY HEARINGS.

  DOD: So you knew there was a problem, even before you made contact with the asset?

  ROMANOFF: No, sir. I did not.
<
br />   DOD: But she was having the dreams. She was re-creating memories. She was clearly symptomatic.

  ROMANOFF: I’m not a therapist, sir.

  DOD: [laughs] Really?

  ROMANOFF: Once the asset disappeared from the S.H.I.E.L.D. field office, we had no way of knowing how she was presenting, symptomatically. We didn’t even know where she was.

  DOD: What you’re saying is, a facility run by spies couldn’t hold this kid?

  ROMANOFF: Your words, sir.

  DOD: And the boy?

  ROMANOFF: As I said--

  DOD: I know, I know. It’s classified. Humor me.

  ROMANOFF: There’s no humor in the situation, sir.

  DOD: It’s not a hearing, Agent, unless you give me something to hear.

  ROMANOFF: You’re not going to like it.

  DOD: I rarely do.

  ALEX MANOR’S HOUSE

  MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY

  The next morning, the pounding on the door began before the alarm went off. The ancient clock radio played an old song, “Nobody Loves the Hulk,” by the Traits. It blared from the desk next to Alex’s bed, but he didn’t even flinch at the noise.

  In fact, he snored at it.

  Alex had stayed up late packing for his trip, which was why his room now rocked the tornado-swept look, with laundry everywhere (clean and dirty, as if those needed to be kept apart), stacks of comics and collectibles on all the shelves (but not in original packaging—Alex didn’t want to be that guy), and an off-kilter poster of Iron Man hanging by one corner. (It didn’t seem to matter to Alex that Taylor Swift’s head was pasted on Tony Stark’s body. Taylor Stark was Dante’s longest-running joke.)

  At the far end of the room, a row of fencing medals dangled from a curtain rod, and they began to sway now, as the pounding on the door grew louder than the radio.

  “Alex! Turn that off. You’re already late for the bus.” His mother’s voice was worse than a thousand alarms. It was an instant dream killer.

  Alex groaned. “Or I’m early for tomorrow’s bus. Think about it.” That only got him more pounding. He opened one eye and fumbled in his sheets.