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Clever as the Devil and Twice as Pretty

Holly Black

2006, Red Room Academy

Natalia stared down at the small patch of brown dirt without speaking and without crying. Her hands were caked with mud from when she had pulled out the weeds that had littered the place a few minutes before. It was an unmarked grave, but she knew precisely who it belonged to. When she was still the young mourning girl who had just lost her child, she irrationally swore to herself that one day she would return and have someone put in a tombstone. Or, better yet, she would have someone carve out an angel to watch over her child. That somehow had felt better.

Her baby had laid six feet under her shoes for exactly five years now, but she would have sworn it was a hundred. She had lived so many different lives and had been so many different people that it might as well have been. She was Natalia Romanova, certainly, but she was also Tatiana Sokolova, Irina Zlataryova, Alion Vans, Marya Vonn, and so many, many others. She carried the weight of those women's souls as well. And, God, were those souls heavy with all of the sins that they had committed.

She kept her face marbled, hard and expressionless as she had learnt to ever since she was a child. The tall mansion of the academy towered behind her, but she was glad to have her back turned against it. It gave her some sense of privacy, even amidst her rage. Natalia was not born an angry child, but they had made her one. They had made her into so much.

She looked over her shoulder at the barren land. The wind tousled along the hard earth, making her red hair flick in her bitterly stinging eyes. She had not been back to the Red Room since her graduation ceremony. Even if it happened a mere month after her child was born and had died, she was glad to have the ceremony. She was frightened to lose another child and to not even be able to have one seemed like something she shouldn't fight. It made things easier as she graduated and earned another name: Black Widow. The Black Widow had a very particular skill set: seduce, interrogate, kill, assassinate, spy. It was not simply what she could do, it was who she was. Because of this, Natalia quickly found that a woman like her was needed all over the world, especially because there was no woman like her.

She was special.

Special.

It made her want to laugh.

She cleared her throat and she criss-crossed her legs as she lounged in the mix of mud and grass. She knew she had to leave soon, but she couldn't find it within herself to do it just yet. At the grave of her child, she felt something near to peace. It felt wrong to leave her baby here, especially since she was the only person Natalia had left, even if she was dead. James was gone; dead or as good as. Whatever it was that his superiors did to him was naturally kept from her. Whenever she was on missions, she sent out feelers and asked quiet questions, but, as the years passed, it was made clear: he was a ghost. He disappeared just as quickly as he had appeared.

And, God, that made her only angrier.

Natalia knew what it was like to lose people before. Her own parents had sold her away, making her an orphan, making her a person no one would ever look for. The Red Room had taught her to become other people, even within her own mind. She imagined up the idea that she was a person who her parents truly did love. She imagined them holding her between them as they swung her playfully by her hands. She came up with the thought that it was her own father that taught her how to use a gun so she would know how to protect herself. They were pretty images and they would become things she told others so often that sometimes even she began to believe it.