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Ilsa dies for the first time in deep water, off a remote coast in northern England, and she doesn't even get to be there to see it. She's already back in London, meeting with her new boss (and mission target)—Solomon Lane, former MI6.
"Welcome to the Syndicate," Lane tells her, but his eyes say I'll be watching your every move...I'm not convinced you've actually turned your back on our mutual ex-employer...you're on thin ice, watch your back.
"We'll start you with an easy assignment," he adds, and Ilsa knows what that means, too: half of the new recruits don't survive their first job, so you're not worth wasting time on until you've proved you have at least some value.
As welcomes go, it's not a warm one, but it's not as bad as Ilsa had feared. And at least now the first step (of an untold many that still stretch before her into the unknown) is complete.
She wonders how cold the water was, there in the North Sea where her coworkers think she took her last breaths. (Her parents won't even be told that much—they'll probably hear that she died in a car accident or something. Even though Ilsa hasn't been close with them in a long time, she feels a brief pang of guilt that the last thing they'll know about her will be a lie.) She wonders if anyone searched for her body or if Atlee stopped them, told them she was dead and that was all there was to it.
And so she's dead now, and outside of her new gang of criminal compatriots there's only one person in the world who knows that's not true. She only wishes she trusted Chief Atlee more than she does. He's her boss (her real one, for all that she's about to spend a lot more time answering to Lane than she ever has to Atlee): it would be nice if she could feel comfortable leaving her life in his hands.
But she doesn't. The only person she can ever fully trust with her life is herself. That's the way it's always been, and it's the way it always will be.
Ilsa dies for the second time in the sands of Abu Dhabi, this time by fire instead of by water. She watches the body burn in her place, flames traveling too fast over the skin of something that could have been her.
Or it could have been Ethan. He, too, came too close to dying in this place, something he doesn't seem inclined to acknowledge any more than all of the previous times she's nearly caused his death. (She still hasn't quite recovered from the horror of realizing who it was lying beneath her saying her name over and over again as she tried desperately to stab him. She'd stopped as soon as she recognized him, scrambling to turn over and stare into his eyes, to let him hold her in the first moment of true peace she's felt in months—but if he'd been any less skillful it could have all gone terribly wrong before she even realized who she was killing, and she never would have forgiven herself if she had.)
"You're dead," Ethan tells her, and he means please stay safe...take care of yourself...I don't want anything to happen to you.
"You stay dead," he adds, and means I wish you would get out of the game and we've both cheated death too many times, maybe next time is the time our luck runs out.
And in the end all they have together is a few stolen moments and then they're both going their separate ways again, the same as they always do. But Ilsa already knows she isn't going to do as Ethan told her: she isn't going to lie low and play dead because that's not what he's going to do, and she has no intention of leaving him to go it alone.
Wherever this key and this mission lead Ethan, Ilsa knows she needs to be there with him. What's the point of keeping herself safe if the only way she can do it is by hiding away from everything that needs doing?
Ethan would argue that point (as long as it was about her; she knows if their positions were reversed he'd ignore his own safety just as blithely as she's doing). But Ethan isn't here. He's already left, trusting her to be competent enough to take care of herself from here. Which she is: she knows how to handle herself perfectly well, and she's already got a good idea of where she's going to go from here and how she'll get out of the Emirates without any more bounty hunters picking up her trail—but still, she wishes he could have stayed a little longer. Maybe they could have even traveled together for a time. (They could have held hands. She could have leaned her head on his shoulder and maybe he would have run his fingers through her hair.) It would be nice, to be able to depend on someone else for a change, instead of always fending for herself and holding her life solely in her own two hands.
Sometimes she thinks she'd trust Ethan with her life even more than she trusts herself.
Ilsa dies for the third time (and shoe hopes it's the last time for many years to come) on a bridge in Venice. Fire and water have taken her before, but this time it's blood that seems to be everywhere, clouding her vision with spots that merge until she can't see anything at all. As she sinks into darkness she thinks that this time she must finally be dying for real, and she knows Ethan's on his way but she wishes he could have run a little faster because she would like to have seen him again, one last time.
She doesn't remember anything after that for a long, long while.
She wakes up some immeasurable amount of time later in a dingy hospital—or maybe it's merely a clinic—somewhere in German-speaking Europe. Probably Austria, since it's one of the closest countries to Venice. (Austria is also where she saw Ethan for the second time, and she lets those memories—clinging to him as they flew through the air; leaning into his touch as he searched her in the car—lull her back to sleep.)
The next time she wakes up, she still isn't really sure where this place is, but it doesn't take her long to figure out the most important thing about it: there's no security cameras, and all the records are on paper. She's as safe from the Entity as it's possible for her to be right now.
Obviously her friends put plenty of thought into choosing this place for her, but they don't seem to have left any information about what happened, nor instructions on what she ought to do when she wakes up. Even her current name and biography are unknowns that Ilsa has to piece together over the course of a few days, nodding along to whatever the nurses say while pretending to still be even more dazed than she feels. (It turns out that her name is supposed to be Anna Schmidt and that a good Samaritan—she's pretty sure from the description that it was Ethan and that only makes her miss him more—brought her here after she was supposedly mugged.)
She can't stay here forever. Her instincts tell her it's not safe to stop moving, that she shouldn't have held still even this long. But right now Ilsa has nowhere to go and nothing to do except heal. She needs to heal if she's going to be able to help Ethan and not just be another liability pulling him down. So she stays in the bed and does everything the doctors and nurses tell her, and she wills herself to heal as fast as possible.
It's almost a week before anything changes. Maybe she was asleep or maybe she was only trying to sleep, she's not quite sure, but one moment she's alone in her cold bed in her lonely hospital room, and the next moment she's dreaming of Ethan as she so often does, except that this time when he takes her hand it's not just her imagination. She blinks a few times, just to be sure, but that doesn't make him disappear, so she lets him thread his fingers in between hers and she holds on to him as tight as she dares.
"Ilsa," he says, and somehow the look in his eyes means both I've missed you (I didn't want to leave you so far away) and I won't let anything happen to you (there's no distance that could ever truly separate us) at the same time.
"Are you okay?" he asks, and means I never stop thinking about you...I care about what happens to you...and she's beginning to think that it means I love you as well.
"Yes, thanks to you," she says, and hopes he can see that she means I love you too.
Ethan keeps his fingers laced through hers as he leans briefly to the side to steal her medical chart from the foot of the bed. He flips through it with one hand but only clings harder to her with his other hand, and Ilsa holds on just as tightly, because if all they'll ever have together is stolen moments, then she intends to steal this one for all it's worth.
And so she's dead now—third time's the charm, or so she hopes—but that hardly matters as long as the one person in the world who matters most knows that's not true. She trusts Ethan more than anything, and even though she ought to feel insecure being stuck here, immobile in a bed when they have so many enemies out there, she can't help but feel comfortable knowing her life is safe in Ethan's hands.
She pulls his hand closer, presses it against her cheek. He pretends to still be reading her chart but she knows he's looking at her, a soft smile on his face.
She'd never imagined that she could trust anyone this much, or that she could ever feel this safe and secure in the dangerous life she's chosen for herself. But she knows without a doubt that she's safe with Ethan. It feels as if that's the way it's always been, and she's certain it's the way it always will be.