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Nice to meet you.
She stumbles on the second last step, almost falling forwards.
One hand clutching her side, she manages to get a hold of the handrail with the other, just barely sparing herself the painful crash into the marble stairs.
A sharp pain shoots through her shoulder, and she grimaces in an attempt to contain the wince that’s threatening to fall from her lips. The breath she lets out through gritted teeth echoes through the empty stairway.
For a second she stays unmoving, hanging somehow against the handrail in a weird state between falling and catching herself, listening for signs of somebody else in the stairwell. Little dots cloud her vision and she takes a few shuddering breaths. Then, she wills her brain to remember how to move her legs and arms and drags herself over the last step.
She winces when she leans against the wall beside the old mahagony door, her hand shaking as it reaches inside her pocket on their search for her keys.
None.
Fear courses through her bones then, and curses, this time loudly.
“You looking for those?” A smooth voice asks behind her and the sound of keys clattering follows, both disrupting the silence.
She freezes.
She had never heard the voice before but immediately knows it belongs to the man on the roof.
The archer.
Her posture strengthens on instinct despite the pain and the blood loss. But doesn’t turn around.
Even after living with the certainty that she’d eventually meet her fate, that every new day would be bringing her closer to her death, she doesn’t want to see it coming.
There would be better places to die, she figures. Maybe she had hoped for somewhere warmer with a nice view or simply a cooler way to die than in a stairwell in this godforsaken city.
And still, she doesn’t want to see it coming - the end. Because this way she can close her eyes and just let go. She can pretend and finally be free from this life she had never chosen.
But the archer doesn’t move. He’s still a landing below her, his breathing calm and even.
For an American, he’s surprisingly quiet in his movements. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen him anywhere since the roof. But he must’ve followed her and what bothers her even more: he must’ve been really close to get her keys.
Her mind drifts back to the journey here, to the hours it had taken to get rid of the men chasing her. The noisy streets she had taken, filled with people enjoying Havanna’s nightlife, and the shady alleys with dumpsters and rats where she had caught a bullet. She can’t pinpoint when he had been within an arms‘s length, close enough to stab her without her even noticing.
“I’m not here to kill you,” he says quietly and in the most horrible russian she has ever heard.
She snorts at the statement.
“But if you don’t get that treated soon, you’ll bleed out right here.”
She knows that.
She... damn it.
“Hey, I’m half decent at patching up. You can still kill me after. But I’d really appreciate it if we’d both live after this night.”
That’s a new one. She weighs her options, but she has seen him move. He might be able to beat her. Her blood loss, her shoulder, the sheer exhaustion from running for her life half of the night...
And his voice sounds honest and sincere. He’d probably make it quick, at least quicker than her own people. All in all it wouldn’t be the most horrible scenario and the risk might be worth it.
She turns around.
He’s shorter than she had thought. His posture doesn’t scream military, like she had been sure he is from the skills she has both seen and not actually seen. He has both hands raised and empty, but he would have an arrow in her heart before she would be able to make two steps in his direction, that much she knows.
What an odd choice of a weapon. Quiet. But effective.
“That’s a start,” he comments with a grin, but unable to mask the tension radiating off of him in waves. “So this is new to me too, but how about that. I toss you the keys and we get in there before someone sees us?”
She shakes her head. No tossing and catching anything for the next days.
„Fine. Then please don’t kill me. I have a family,“ he says, his eyes squinting at her before he walks towards her with heavy steps.
She doesn’t plan to but she’s ready to do it if she has to. Kill or be killed, that’s what she has been taught since the young age of six.
She allows him to pass her and watches as he unlocks the door with one swift movement. Key in. Turn. Open.
„Your aim is excellent,“ she tells him in perfect American English.
He narrows his eyes but doesn’t say anything.
They venture inside and check the rooms on both sides, the archer the ones on the left while she makes sure her weapons are still in place on the right side.
Eventually, they meet in the middle of the living room that only holds a chair and a mattress - and now two assassins, coming from two completely different lives.
The archer stares at her unmoving for a long time, like he’s waiting for something.
She makes a mental note of all the knives that he keeps hidden underneath his black hoodie jacket and in his military combat boots, while she tries to assess the situation. He could’ve killed her twice already. Why didn’t he?
What she knows about the Americans isn’t free of prejudice and political propaganda, that’s a matter of fact. She would lie if she said she wouldn’t want to see through all the trauma inflicted truths they made her believe to see what’s really true.
But nevertheless she can’t shut her instincts off. The instinct to flee, followed by the one to use and kill him. If they knew her priorities are still wrong, she would meet her fate before she has a chance to explain. But they don’t know and she’s still here. Alive. This night is becoming more and more unexpected as it progresses.
“Alright,” the archer announces, “Let’s get you patched up, that one looks nasty. First aid kit?”
She points at the bag by the door. It also contains two passports, some money and a gun, but she still has enough weapons on her, she figures she doesn’t need it. It’s a good opportunity to test him, too.
He walks over to the door without hesitation, turning his back to her while he rummages in her stuff like she isn’t number four on their Most Wanted List.
Her hand tightens its hold around her gun, one finger on the trigger.
But he turns around slowly, hands raised with just some medical gases, tapes and some utensils to suture her wounds. “Alcohol or something?“
“Kitchen cabinet,“ she replies while stripping out of her shirt.
By now she has narrowed down her options to exactly two situations. One: her death - either from an infection if the blood loss doesn’t to its job or by the hand of the archer or by her own people because she hasn’t finished her job. She doesn’t really want to die, so she prefers option two: trust him long enough to get her wounds treated and then leave the city and her life behind in hopes of getting a few days or maybe week to see what life really looks like before the Red Room catches her.
“Get on that chair, I don’t think we have much time,“ the archer orders, his voice warm and friendly.
She does as told, her hand still holding her gun.
The archer chuckles as he kneels beside her. “Trust isn’t your thing huh?”
She doesn’t reply. She lets him look at the bullet wound to her side that luckily just grazed her and watches his face closely.
“Your shoulder is dislocated, can I set it back?” His question sounds so gentle, it catches her off guard.
Without thinking twice, she sets it back herself, cursing loudly in Russian when the pain shoots through her whole spine.
The archer waits until her face no longer contorts in pain before drowning the gases in vodka. “This should do for now, but I have to warn you, it’s going to burn like-“
She presses the gase to the wound herself, quietly hissing before the pain yields to a familiar feeling of relief.
“Fine. You go clean yourself up then, Superwoman, I’ll check our ammunition because something tells me neither your boss nor mine will like our situation here.“
So he definitely knows who she is. And his boss doesn’t know what he’s doing. Interesting.
She does as told, quietly wiping the blood from her skin. Making sure, her other scratches are clean too, she watches as the American moves from window to window, stealing glances at the street below and the roofs across the street.
“I think we need to postpone the stitching,“ he announces after a moment, his eyes squeezed together so tightly that she doubts he sees anything.
Still, she moves. With quick steps she‘s by the window, right behind him, adrenaline already pumping through her blood. She doesn’t know which enemy she’d rather meet - his partners or her old boss.
Well. No. The latter definitely not. Dreykov wants her dead since she failed her mission approximately five hours ago.
The mission had been easy. Infiltrate the scene, get close to the man, join him on his way to his room. Kill him. Evacuate herself from the balcony onto the roof. But the man being faithful to his wife hadn’t been part of the mission plan, so that had been where the mission had started to go wrong. She had drugged him instead of luring him into her web with her charms. But bringing him to his room she had found his little daughter sleeping in his bed.
It hadn’t been a conscious decision. After years of killing, it probably had become just one too much. She couldn‘t. Not a little girl. Not her father.
So she had found herself on the roof, for the first time with an unfinished mission. Leaving the man alive had signed her fate, she had known that much. So she had looked up at the stars, waiting for the unavoidable.
And there he was. The archer. His arrow pointed at her.
She remembers turning towards him, ready to face the end, eyes wide open and directed at the stars.
But the archer hadn’t moved.
“They’re not mine,“ the archer tells her, pulling her back to the current moment.
No, they’re widows. Two of them creeping down the alley. Which means at least two more on the other side, probably already by the front door of the building.
She laughs tonelessly. Not enough to kill her when she‘s unharmed, but now?
“Come. We need to-“
Whatever he thinks they need to do, she thinks differently. Instead of waiting for him to finish his sentence, she steals his bow and two arrows, quietly opens the window and aims.
Shooting an arrow is different than pulling a trigger. It’s silent. And that makes it even more disturbing.
But her aim is effortless. Both arrows slither through the night right into their goals. She hits one in the stomach and the other a little higher in her chest. It‘s not deadly, but enough to take them out of the game for the night.
“Now we need to move.“
The archer is quiet for once, watching how she pulls her bloody shirt back on, how she checks the stairwell and finally pushes a finger into her open wound to spread some bloody handprints on the handrail, hopefully leading the remaining widows to the next level.
She stuffs the nurturing material back into her backpack, as well as two more guns, and as they both listen with their ears pressed against the door how the widows indeed follow her wrong track, the archer looks her in they eye and says the most unexpected thing.
“You could come with me to the States. We can take them down, you know?“
Before she can think about his offer, let alone reply to it, bullets sieve through the door, bursting splinters of mahogany through the hallway like shrapnels.
The pain in her body becomes all consuming, blurring her vision, but never her instincts.
She pushes the archer to the ground, taking the brunt of the fall to her left hand, the crack in her bone not audible in all the noise, but she still hears it resonating in her body. She shields him with her body as the bullets and splinters transform the hallway into a deadly trap.
Then, there is silence.
And if she has to name one thing, just one, that everything she has ever learned has in common, then it is this: silence is deadly.
So she fires back, blindly, while dragging the archer to his feet and pushing him into the kitchen.
She pushes the bag into his hands, hoping he gets what she means.
Thankfully, his thoughts work faster than his other reflexes, because then they both fire shots into the stairwell, and a moment later there‘s a sharp cry followed by hushed whispers in russian.
“You’re hit,” the archer tells her, his hands almost reaching out as if he actually cared for her.
She shrugs his worried statement off and steals a glance into the hallway while poorly wrapping her injured hand with a towel. One injured means he could might make it out if she takes the other one. That would at least be a better way to die than the other option of facing Dreykov´s wrath.
“You should go,“ she tells him, firing another magazine through the leftovers of the door.
“Yeah, not happening. You saved my life.“
“Then I really hope you have a plan.“
He rummages in his cargo pants for a moment and tosses her a roll of tape. “Fix your hand properly. I’ll take care of this.“
Unable to do much more than watch, she tears a piece of that tape off with her teeth and wraps her wrist tightly to avoid further damage.
The archer creeps over to the other side of the room in the meantime, his movement surprisingly graceful as he avoids the splinters and bullets, careful not to make a sound and draw unwanted attention to his change of position.
So she waits for his sign. And fires.
The other widow shoots back immediately, and the archer uses the perfect opportunity to hit his target.
Untrained ears might not have heard the bullet hit a body. It’s more the lack of another sound, of a bullet against concrete, that tells her he aimed well. All she can do is wait for the sound of a body falling to the floor.
It’s a characteristic sound. Growing up with it, it has become as natural as the bird’s chirping or a car honking in the streets. It sounds different when they’re dead before impact, too.
She waits some more, with her ears still ringing. The longer it takes, the higher the chances are that their backup will arrive. It also lets the adrenaline fade and makes it harder to block the pain out.
Then she hears it. A quiet thump, like the widow’s back falls against the wall, and then a sliding sound, like the body slides down to the floor.
The other injured widow flees with unsteady steps. She must be young, because no widow would ever run - knowing that they only run towards their definite end.
“Well,“ the archer starts, his eyes still wide from the adrenaline, “that‘s one way to get to know each other. I‘m Clint.“ He hold out his hand for her to shake, but the one she caught their fall with hurts so horribly and the other one is still holding onto the gun with only one bullet left.
“Nice to meet you,“ she replies instead, sending him a soft yet unsure smile.
“What, I don’t get a name?“
“Earlier, you asked me to come with you,“ she says instead, her eyes scanning his face. “Did you mean that?“
“Well. I don’t have a plan. And I was sent to kill you. So that makes things difficult,“ he starts babbling, “But if you’re willing to take that chance, I know a place where we could get you properly patched up.“
She doesn’t know what makes her trust him. Is it the fact that she has nothing to lose but everything to gain? Are his kind eyes to blame for it? Or is it his sudden decision to spare her life?
“Lead the way then.”
…