Anyone who told Adonia that wealth didn't buy happiness could go fuck himself. Take it from him, he'd been poor and he'd been rich, and he'd choose rich every fucking time. There was no nobility in poverty, no secret spiritual enlightenment waiting at the bottom of an empty bank account. Misery came for everyone eventually. Rich men got their hearts broken, poor men got their hearts broken, everyone occasionally woke up wondering what the fuck they were doing with their life. That's just life.
However there is a huge difference between crying on a park bench because the rent is due and suffering an existential crisis in a marble bathtub while someone brings you strawberries. Money might never cure the human condition, but Christ, did it give him a magnificent selection of ways to distract himself from it.
He stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows, swirling a glass of wine in one hand, his reflection swallowed by the darkness beyond the glass as he looked down upon the sprawling lights of Manhattan. The city that never slept was especially beautiful from this height. Thousands upon thousands of people moved through its illuminated arteries far below, every one of them carrying some private little tragedy or ambition that seemed terribly important from street level. From up here, they looked like insects.
Adonai eventually turned from the view and looked at the reason he was here. Maya Hansen sat stiffly on the edge of a luxurious armchair, her clothes slightly disheveled and her eyes moving warily around the suite before settling upon him with considerably less appreciation for the accommodations than he might have hoped.
"This is a less-than-stellar first meeting, I admit," Adonai said with a smile. "Not quite how I envisioned it."
In fact, Adonai had expected things to go considerably worse than this. He gave Rogue, seated nearby, a subtle nod of approval for a job well done. Whatever the questionable methods involved, Maya was here and unharmed.
"Really?" Maya stared at him incredulously. "How exactly did you envision kidnapping a woman going?"
"Let's not call it that," Adonai said with a soft smile. "I prefer aggressively expedited recruitment. My security personnel can be a little… overenthusiastic when entrusted with delicate assignments. If the hood was uncomfortable, the van lacked sufficient legroom, or being abruptly liberated from A.I.M. caused you any distress, then you have my sincerest apologies. I'll make sure your complaint reaches management."
"Your management?"
"Me, unfortunately. Terrible system. Absolutely no accountability whatsoever."
Maya glared at him, her arms crossing tightly over her chest. "They dragged me out of my private lab, threw a hood over my head, and shoved me into an unmarked van. That's a federal crime."
Adonai crossed to the side table, where an absurd selection of liquor had been arranged beneath the warm light of a crystal lamp, and set down his glass.
"An unfortunate necessity," he conceded with only halfhearted defensiveness. "If I'd sent you a formal invitation, Aldrich Killian's hounds would have intercepted it before it ever reached your desk."
"So you bring me to a five-star hotel room instead of a ditch?" Maya's eyes narrowed. "Am I supposed to feel flattered? Let's cut this bullshit. Why am I here? What could the Father of the Information Age possibly want with a molecular biologist from a fringe think tank?"
Adonai paused, studying her for a moment before chuckling, which naturally did nothing to put his guest at ease. He poured another glass of wine and offered it to her. She refused, so he set it down with an easy grace. Maya Hansen was going to become one of the foundational pillars of his rise from eccentric billionaire to the most powerful man on Earth, which made this particular conversation rather important.
Convincing a woman to hear out your business proposal after having her kidnapped required a delicate touch. Fortunately, he had planned several approaches based on what he remembered of her from the films. Maya was a very different creature from Valentina, and the methods he had used on that woman would serve him poorly here.
"You know, Maya, history has a rather perverse sense of humor when it comes to scientists." Adonai lifted his glass and watched the wine turn crimson against the light. "Fritz Haber is perhaps my favorite example. Before he became an architect of chemical warfare in the Great War, the brilliant Fritz Haber was a savior. He almost achieved a secular transubstantiation. In the early twentieth century, he discovered how to fix nitrogen from the very air we breathe, laying the foundation for synthetic fertilizer and helping save billions from famine. The man practically pulled bread from the sky. Do you know what he said when his country asked him to weaponize that same brilliant mind? 'During peace, a scientist belongs to the world, but during war, he belongs to his country.' He thought himself a patriot. Then came Ypres, chlorine rolling across the trenches like the breath of Hades, and his wife Clara, herself a chemist and horrified by what her husband had made of his genius, put a bullet through her heart… and the bread had turned to ash. There is something almost poetic about it, don't you think?
"See, we all begin wide-eyed, don't we?" Adonai continued. "Pure science. A romantic dance with the mysteries of creation. We want to heal the world. And then the vultures arrive. The ego steps in, the obsession to see your life's work validated by anyone with a checkbook, the military contracts are signed... and suddenly, you look up, and your beautiful child is holding a rifle and realize you are a long way from shore."
The easiest way to reach someone like Maya Hansen was to become an echo of her own conscience. Adonai knew she already carried doubts about what she had done in pursuit of perfecting Extremis. He was merely giving voice to thoughts she would eventually confess to Pepper herself, assuming events followed anything resembling the future he remembered. He could already see the words taking root. Maya was a scientist rather than a professional intriguer, and her face betrayed what Valentina's would have concealed.
She stared at him with defensive anger at first, almost as though she stood before a jury, until irritation slowly curdled into uncomfortable recognition. She was far too intelligent to misunderstand what Aldrich Killian ultimately wanted from her research, or what the military would want if Extremis ever proved viable.
Fortunately, A.I.M. had yet to secure meaningful military backing, leaving it vulnerable to exactly the sort of hostile acquisition Adonai specialized in. So he had sent Rogue with a small team to deal with A.I.M. and bring Maya to him. The crude part was finished. Now came the difficult part: persuading Maya Hansen that being kidnapped by Adonai Ezra might prove the best thing that had ever happened to her.
"What do you want from me?" Maya finally asked, her voice quiet.
"Your work, Maya. Extremis." He sat down across from her. "Right now, your creation is a tightrope walker balancing on a frayed wire in the absolute dead-center of a category-five hurricane. It's a breathtakingly fragile position to be in. If you lose your footing on one side, you fall into the abyss - become a footnote in a history book about humanity's limitless capacity for self-destruction. But…" He met her eyes and gave her a genuine smile. "If you make it to the other side of that wire, if you steady your hand and finish the code, you step off that rope and become the Pioneer of Eden on Earth."
Maya froze. The blood drained from her face as she slowly rose from the chair, her voice suddenly unsteady. "How do you… how do you know about Extremis? The project is completely off-the-books. The server towers are isolated. Killian hasn't even–"
That caught Adonai somewhat off guard. Did she honestly think he had kidnapped her on a whim? Still, she had handed him a perfect opportunity to Aurafarm, and he was hardly going to complain.
"When you build the digital highways that the entire modern world uses to communicate, Maya, you leave yourself a master key." He gave her a playful wink. "What do you think 'Father of the Information Age' means? I'm the spider sitting at the center of a globe-spanning web, and everything eventually passes through me. Your Extremis is a work of genius. But you're letting a small man suffocate a grand design. Aldrich Killian has the vision of a subterranean mole. He looks at a biological miracle - a technology capable of rewriting the evolutionary trajectory of Homo sapiens - and what does he do with it?
"He wants to sell it to the Pentagon and create better soldiers. It's a grotesque misuse of your genius. Look me in the eye and tell me: Did you decode the very fabric of human DNA just so some fat generals could march un-killable teenagers into a desert to die for oil? To bring about death? A.I.M. will use you, take the patents, and leave you behind once the scientist has delivered her magnum opus. Corporations have been doing it for a century."
His voice was made to be exceptionally pleasant to hear, especially when he deliberately turned on the charm and tried to sell someone on his vision. The power of Nen was bullshit like that. Someone like Maya, whose work had once been casually dismissed by Tony Stark, suddenly being love-bombed by a man the public considered Stark's equal, with a voice practically designed to make every word sound convincing? She never really stood a chance.
He stepped closer and extended a hand toward her. "Work for me. Perfect Extremis under my umbrella. Help me create a world where disease becomes an archaic concept. I have the capital, the infrastructure, and, unlike Killian, I actually understand the weight of what you've created. Let's build Eden together. What do you say?"
Maya studied his hand without taking it, her expression turning speculative. That surprised him. There was a little steel buried beneath all that talent after all.
"You regale me with warnings about how powerful men will corrupt my work, and you expect me to believe you're different because you're handsome?" Maya asked, though there was little heat left in her voice. "What happened to A.I.M.? What happened to Aldrich Killian? Did your 'security personnel' leave him in a ditch too?"
"Men like Killian are a recurring plague upon human potential, Maya," Adonai said with theatrical disdain. "They're the sort of man who would joyfully orchestrate the apocalypse simply to stand atop the ashes and scream, 'Look at me now!' He is a malignancy. A necrotic, creeping rot festering at the base of your brilliant work. What does a master gardener do when black knot disease starts strangling a blossoming orchid? He cuts it before the necrosis can seep into the roots and turn the entire greenhouse into a graveyard."
"I see." Maya tried admirably to hide the sudden flicker of fear in her eyes. "So what's the subtext here? Work for you and build your paradise, or I become another piece of 'necrotic rot' that needs amputating? What choice do I really have in a room like this?"
When attempting to recruit someone foundational to your grand design, threatening them into employment was generally a poor strategy. It tended to inspire betrayal or that particularly irritating art of malicious compliance. Above all, one had to know whom one was dealing with. Blackmail worked wonderfully on some people; others responded rather poorly to having a gun metaphorically pressed against their skull. Whenever he had the choice, Adonai preferred the more pleasant option. It was amazing how much could be accomplished by simply sitting down, offering someone everything they wanted, and talking.
"Of course not," Adonai denied vehemently. "Don't confuse my intolerance for weeds with a desire to cage the flower. I believe in you, Maya. You are no disease. Your mind is an exquisite tapestry spun from pure starlight and curiosity. I would no more destroy your beautiful brain than a connoisseur would burn a canvas by Da Vinci. If you wish to walk out of that door right now, you are entirely free to go. The elevator is unlocked. The choice is yours."
Maya fell silent, contemplating his offer, or at least pretending to. Adonai already knew her answer. She was a terrible actress.
"If this research were public, and I were completely independent…" Maya began, strangely hesitant now. "Would I have been invited to your Symposium?"
…Huh?
Of all the questions she might have asked, that one genuinely caught him off guard. Did she actually want an invitation to his Symposium? The thought was strangely amusing. He hadn't realized his little festival of human excellence had already accumulated enough prestige that a mind like Maya Hansen would care whether she made the guest list.
"Your work is a promethean leap that could carry medicine forward by a century." His smile slowly faded into a frown. A little theater was essential in these things. "But to answer your question honestly - no. As long as you were willingly shackling yourself to the military-industrial complex, as long as you chose to share a bed with men like Killian, the invitation would never have come. It's the exact same reason Tony Stark was not invited. Both of you allow your genius to be weaponized by bureaucrats whose sole agenda is subjugation, dominion, and bloodletting. I can't endorse that. I demand a certain level of moral integrity from the titans I choose to celebrate."
Maya winced slightly, the criticism finding a raw and exposed nerve. Truthfully, Adonai the man didn't give a flying fuck what Stark did with his inventions. Adonai the public figure, however, strongly disapproved of brilliant minds turning their creations toward slaughter. It was excellent PR.
"Moral integrity?" Maya retorted defensively. "That's rich coming from a man who built his fortune strip-mining and selling the private data of half the human population."
Her temper surprised him, but he supposed he should have expected it. The Maya sitting before him had yet to make military deals or help conceal exploding human experiments as terrorist attacks. There was still a moral backbone beneath all that ambition. Good to know.
"Fair enough," he conceded with a soft chuckle. "But that, my dear, is precisely why I am the host of the event, and never its guest. I'm not a good man, Maya. I have never claimed to be. The world as it stands today is a cruel, chaotic, fractured wilderness - it's not yet ready for 'good' people to lead it. The soil of the future must be brutally fertilized, plowed, and prepared by people like me. I've spent years wading through the mud to build a foundation strong enough to support a better tomorrow." He extended his hand again, his smile returning. "Will you help me fertilize this broken world, Maya?"
Maya stared at his open palm. Silence settled over the room as her eyes moved from his hand to his face, and somewhere within his expression she seemed to recognize the same terrible ambition that burned within herself. Her hesitation slowly faded.
Then Maya placed her hand in his.
"Show me the lab."
Rogue was, as a rule, not a jealous woman. She couldn't afford to be, considering the peculiar nature of whatever the hell she and Adonai were supposed to be. They slept in the same bed more nights than they slept apart, fucked often enough that calling casual would sound ridiclous, ate breakfast together when his schedule allowed it, argued over films, traveled together, and had accumulated all the small domestic habits that usually came attached to a word Adonai conspicuously refused to use.
None of that came with exclusivity. He had been clear about that from the beginning, and Rogue had accepted it because the alternative was having less of him, which had seemed intolerable at the time and occasionally struck her as pathetic now. She had known exactly what she was agreeing to. Knowing the rules did precious little to stop her from wanting to break a wine bottle over his head after watching him spend twenty minutes gazing into Maya Hansen's eyes as though the woman had personally hung the moon.
"Exquisite tapestry spun from pure starlight?" Rogue said mockingly after Maya left. "Do you always have to flirt with every woman you recruit, or was Doctor Hansen gettin' the premium package?"
"You're jealous," he said, sounding far too pleased with himself. "This is adorable, actually. I should kidnap brilliant women more often if this is the reaction I get afterward."
Rogue gave him a long look. "Careful, sugar. A man can only congratulate himself so much before somebody has to introduce his face to a wall. And I'm not jealous, exactly. I'm simply fascinated by how quickly your vocabulary improves whenever there's a beautiful woman in front of you and something you want from her."
"That's an outrageous accusation against my character, and I resent how thoroughly supported it is by evidence," Adonai said in mock offense. "Besides, persuasion is an art. Maya needed someone who truly saw her brilliance and a little intellectual seduction. You, on the other hand, usually respond best when I insult you until you threaten bodily harm."
"Funny how that works." Rogue's smile held, though her eyes betrayed her for half a heartbeat. "Maybe that's because you save all the pretty words for people you're trying to win. Once somebody's already standing beside you, I guess they stop needing the sales pitch."
Adonai turned toward her, and the confusion on his face was so genuine that Rogue hated him a little more for it.
"I was persuading her, Rogue. Maya Hansen has spent years being intellectually neglected by people too stupid or self-absorbed to recognize what she has created, so admiration was the obvious weak point. That's all there is to it. Besides, the tapestry line was excellent, and I refuse to apologize for good rhetoric merely because you were sitting there keeping score."
"Oh, I wasn't keeping score." Rogue smiled sweetly enough that anyone unfamiliar with her might have believed it. "Keeping score would imply there was a competition, and competitions usually have rules. I was merely sitting here wondering whether you've ever looked at me and thought my mind was an exquisite tapestry of starlight, because the nicest thing you told me in a while was that my ass was distracting you from answering emails."
"That was an entirely sincere compliment," Adonai said. "And way more honest than anything I told Hansen tonight. Maya got the theatrical version because I wanted something from her and you get the unfiltered contents of my mind, which… should probably concern you more than it comforts you."
It should be a sin, that effortless way he had of saying something that could almost sound tender if Rogue allowed herself to turn it over too many times. A sentence here, a hand settling around her waist there, the sleepy way he sometimes pulled her closer without waking, all those meaningless little scraps that her traitorous heart kept sewing into a promise he had never made.
"Well, aren't I lucky," she said, rising from the chair and wandering toward him. "Maya gets compared to Leonardo da Vinci and Prometheus, while I get informed that my ass is interfering with global commerce. Someday historians are gonna write about our great romance, and I hope they preserve the poetry accurately."
"Our great romance?" His mouth curled with amusement as she stopped before him. "That sounds almost official. I seem to remember a certain Southern woman agreeing that labels were tedious inventions designed by insecure people who needed words to validate perfectly enjoyable arrangements."
"Yeah, well, that Southern woman was tryin' very hard to look cool in front of a handsome billionaire." Rogue reached up and straightened his collar despite there being absolutely nothing wrong with it. "She was also younger, stupider, and under the impression she'd never get jealous. Turns out she occasionally wants to throw brilliant molecular biologists through hotel windows when they start staring at her man like he personally invented sunlight, so clearly her judgment wasn't flawless."
Adonai's amusement softened. "For what it's worth, I wasn't interested in Maya that way. I wanted Extremis, and she happens to be the only person alive who can give it to me. Tonight was business."
Tonight was business. Tomorrow might not be. There would always be another Maya, another actress at a gala, another heiress with beautiful legs and poor judgment. He wanted everything beautiful within reach, and Rogue had committed the elementary mistake of wanting one beautiful thing entirely for herself.
Still, she slipped her arms around his neck and leaned against him, smiling with mischief - dignity could survive many things if one knew how to dress heartbreak in a joke.
"Good. Because if I ever hear you tell another woman her mind is woven from starlight while I'm in the room, I'm charging you for emotional damages. And considering how obscenely rich you are, sugar, I intend to be very emotionally damaged."
Adonai laughed and settled his hands naturally at her waist, familiar and warm and devastatingly easy. "Send the invoice to accounting. I'll have them classify it as the cost of maintaining dangerous personnel."
"See, that right there is why I put up with you." Rogue rested her forehead briefly against his, close enough to feel his breath. "Every girl dreams of being classified as an operating expense by the man she sleeps with. Keep this up and you might even make me feel special."
He kissed her forehead almost absently. "You are special, Rogue. I thought that was obvious."
"Yeah," Rogue murmured, tightening her arms around him for just a moment before letting go. "I know, sugar. That's the problem… You know what bothers me? It's the way you looked at her when you talked about what she could become. You get this look sometimes, like you're already seeing ten years ahead and arranging everybody exactly where they belong."
Adonai's smile thinned slightly. "Occupational hazard of being annoyingly visionary."
"Yeah, well, maybe someday you ought to try looking at the people already standing beside you." Rogue folded her arms, then softened the words with a crooked smile that arrived just a fraction too late. "Might save you the trouble of kidnapping new ones."
Adonai's expression softened just enough to make everything worse. "Rogue…" he began, but she could tell he didn't quite know what to say, only that he had to say something. Which rarely happened to Adonai Ezra.
"Relax, sugar." Rogue stepped away and brushed an imaginary crease from her coat. "I'm messing with you. You get this adorable little look whenever someone drags you within ten feet of a genuine emotion, like you've just discovered a software bug in reality and you're waiting for engineering to patch it. Besides, I know what tonight was about, and Doctor Hansen is going to build you your miracle, so congratulations."
Adonai looked up at her and smiled softly. "Couldn't have done it without you."
"Yeah," Rogue murmured, returning the smile with effortless sweetness. "You say that a lot."
A Month Later,
POV: Black Widow
Florence had survived several centuries of wealthy foreigners arriving to explain Renaissance art to Italians, so Natasha Romanoff supposed the city would survive Adonai Ezra. The Red Room had taught her never to grant a target the mystique he cultivated around himself. Natasha had therefore developed the private habit of making fun of Adonai Ezra whenever his file became particularly absurd.
Fury had called him a motherfucking headache, which Natasha had initially taken for the ordinary profanity of an impatient superior until she saw the intelligence package and decided the description was very accuracte. Adonai Ezra came out of nowhere, and within five years he had accumulated enough money, cultural prestige, and suspiciously superhuman employees to make several departments inside SHIELD deeply unhappy.
Investments scattered through industries whose strategic importance became obvious approximately six months after Ezra entered them, and a patent portfolio so comprehensive that one analyst had written in the margin of a report, either this bastard can see the future or God personally gives him quarterly projections.
Natasha had laughed when she read that. Then she had reached the classified section concerning his security personnel and stopped laughing. Mutants swarmed around Ezra like flies around shit, including several whose public records had been scrubbed with enough skill to interest SHIELD. all by itself. Fury wanted to know why. Natasha wanted to know everything else.
She had spent nineteen days constructing the woman who would find out, and tonight that woman was Elena Volkov, thirty years old according to documents that had existed for twelve, Russian-born, educated partly in Paris, author of two moderately successful novels and a collection of essays on political mythology, and the peculiar human appetite for turning historical criminals into romantic figures once enough centuries had passed. SHIELD had built Elena years before Natasha ever needed her, complete with tax records, publishing contracts, a university paper sufficiently mediocre to feel authentic, and three former lovers who existed only in databases.
The red dress had cost SHIELD considerably more than Fury would have approved if Fury had ever developed the suicidal habit of personally auditing her expenses, but she considered it money well spent. Ezra liked beautiful women. He also liked confidence, provocation, literature, history, philosophy, science, football, obscure jokes, and apparently the entire accumulated intellectual output of Homo sapiens. Seducing a normal billionaire required cleavage and patience. Seducing this one apparently required a reading list.
The exhibition occupied a restored palazzo overlooking the Arno, its inner courtyard illuminated by hundreds of candles beneath Renaissance arches while chamber music drifted through rooms filled with people of profession and those peculiar wealthy people whose principal occupation consisted of being photographed near things those peoples of profession had made.
Natasha saw Ezra within eleven seconds of entering. He stood before a seventeenth-century Artemisia Gentileschi with six people gathered loosely around him, one hand resting in his pocket while the other held a glass of wine he seemed to have forgotten to drink.
He looked younger in person. That was the first thing she disliked about him. Photographs made it easier to forget his age and imagine someone older behind everything he had accomplished, while the man standing before her was twenty-three and casually discussing Caravaggio with an elderly professor who had probably studied the painter longer than Ezra had been alive.
Natasha circulated for forty minutes before approaching. She laughed twice, allowed herself to be introduced to a Florentine publisher, and eventually let the current of the room carry Elena Volkov toward Ezra's circle without once appearing to have chosen the direction. The conversation had moved to the question of whether great art required suffering, which struck Natasha as exactly the sort of question wealthy people enjoyed discussing beneath frescoed ceilings while servants refilled their champagne.
"There was some truth in it," said Professor Bellandi, a narrow old man with magnificent white eyebrows. "Look at Artemisia herself. Look at Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Goya, Dostoevsky. There has to be some relationship between torment and artistic greatness, perhaps because suffering forces an individual into forms of introspection that ordinary happiness never demands."
"That theory is convenient for everyone except the artist," Natasha said, allowing the faintest Russian cadence to remain beneath Elena's polished French-inflected English. Six faces turned toward her, including Ezra's, and she gave Bellandi an apologetic smile that carried no apology whatsoever. "People adore the idea of the tortured genius because it converts somebody else's misery into part of the admission price. Van Gogh suffers, we receive sunflowers, and suddenly the ear becomes an aesthetically necessary sacrifice. Dostoevsky spends years in Siberia, develops epilepsy and a gambling addiction, and generations of comfortable readers get to say how wonderfully all that suffering deepened him. Perhaps he would have written equally brilliant novels with a warm house and a functional nervous system. We have no control Dostoevsky available for comparison."
Bellandi laughed, and Natasha saw Ezra's mouth twitch around the rim of his glass.
"You're making suffering sound entirely parasitic," Ezra said. His voice carried the cultivated ease she had heard in interviews, but there was greater playfulness in person, as if conversation were a game whose rules he enjoyed discovering while playing it. "Surely experience furnishes an artist with material, and painful experience has a peculiar talent for remaining vivid. Paradise has produced less literature compared with hell. Dante spends thirty-four cantos downstairs, climbs through Purgatory for another thirty-three, and by the time he reaches Heaven the average reader begins wondering when Lucifer is coming back."
"Dante also had the tremendous artistic advantage of being a vindictive little Florentine with a list of enemies," Natasha replied. "Give any intelligent exile permission to design Hell and you will find extraordinary reserves of creativity. I suspect half the Inferno exists because Dante lacked access to Twitter. Had you been born seven centuries earlier, Mr. Ezra, Western literature might have lost a masterpiece."
That earned her the laugh she had wanted. Ezra looked at her properly then, and Natasha felt the tiny internal click that came whenever a plan crossed from preparation into execution. His eyes lingered on her face, descended briefly enough to acknowledge the Risque dress without becoming crude, then returned to her eyes. Good manners, subtle appreciation, or simply plenty of experience with beautiful women. She filed it away.
"I'll add saving the Divine Comedy to my list of contributions to civilization," Adonai said. "It has become embarrassingly long lately, so one additional item should do little damage. Still, you have evaded the underlying question. If suffering contributes nothing special, why does the correlation appear so frequently among great artists?"
"We remember the miserable geniuses because misery makes an excellent biography," Natasha said. "Nobody wants to hear that an immortal painter slept eight hours, loved his mother and spent ten thousand boring hours learning his craft. We prefer genius when it resembles possession by some divine lunatic."
A woman beside Ezra, introduced earlier as Contessa Orsini, tilted her head. "Hostile to romanticism, Signora Volkov, are we? Which is rather strange for a novelist."
"I am Russian, Contessa. We industrialized romantic misery centuries ago and have been exporting it ever since. Somewhere in Moscow there is probably a ministry responsible for alcoholism, doomed love affairs, and men staring tragically through windows. But I despise it when suffering receives the credit for work performed by talent and hard work."
Ezra laughed again, openly this time, and Natasha allowed herself a sip of champagne. Attraction was useful, amusement was better, and curiosity was the thing she actually needed. A beautiful woman could occupy a man for an evening. A puzzle could occupy him afterward.
"You've read Nietzsche, I assume," Ezra said. "He would accuse you of trying to separate creation from the conditions that produced the creator. One can't extract Dostoevsky's suffering cleanly from Dostoevsky and preserve everything else. The underground, guilt, humiliation, feverish obsession with freedom, all of it comes from a particular life."
"Nietzsche also spent most of his life sick, lonely and writing books almost nobody bought, so I'd hesitate to appoint him chairman of healthy artistic development," Natasha said. "Still, I agree with the narrower point. Experience changes the person who creates, and removing one wound changes whatever grew around it. But I object to causation. We see the flower growing through concrete and decide the concrete deserves gratitude. Human beings are wonderfully stubborn organisms. Sometimes they create beautifully while suffering because creation is one of the things keeping them alive."
There came a small silence, comfortable enough to suggest she had earned it, and Natasha watched Ezra over the edge of her glass while appearing interested in the Gentileschi. His file contained seventeen psychological assessments, four of which contradicted one another so completely that she wondered whether their authors had studied the same human being. Narcissistic traits appeared in twelve. High sensation-seeking appeared in nine. Hedonism appeared everywhere, but carefully hidden from the public.
Natasha had found that particularly interesting. Failure told intelligence officers a great deal about people because it showed how they behaved when things went wrong. Adonai Ezra had failed publicly so rarely that SHIELD had almost nothing to study. Nearly everything they knew about him came from his victories, and Natasha wondered what kind of man would emerge when he finally lost.
"I'm beginning to suspect there's some personal experience behind that argument," Ezra said.
"I'm a novelist," she shrugged. "We're professional thieves of other people's trauma, followed by professional liars about how much of it was autobiographical. You can ask a writer where an idea came from and watch them manufacture an answer because 'I have absolutely no idea' sounds insufficiently mystical at literary festivals."
Bellandi smiled. "And where do your ideas come from, Signora Volkov?"
"Usually from envy, irritation, overheard conversations, and the conviction that somebody else handled an interesting premise badly. I find spite wonderfully productive in moderate doses. It has probably financed half of European culture."
"That," Adonai said, "may be the first convincing theory of artistic production I have heard tonight. Florence itself becomes considerably easier to explain if one treats the Renaissance as several rich families attempting to humiliate one another through architecture."
"You joke, but competitive patronage did accomplish extraordinary things," Natasha replied. "Human civilization has this charming habit of laundering vice into achievement. Pride gives you cathedrals. Greed gives you trade routes. Paranoia gives you fortifications that tourists photograph five centuries later. Even lust has financed an astonishing amount of portraiture."
Ezra's gaze sharpened with pleasure. "Now you're speaking my language."
"That should concern both of us."
"It concerns me considerably less than it should. Civilization as the magnificent accident produced when human appetites acquire sufficient organization. Moralists spend centuries demanding that mankind conquer desire, and mankind spends those same centuries building cities because somebody wants money, sex, God's approval, or a larger palace than his cousin. I find the second group much more interesting."
"You'd have gotten along splendidly with Bernard Mandeville," Natasha said. "Private vices, public benefits, except I imagine you would've complained that his bees lacked adequate venture capital."
"You know Mandeville?" Adonai looked delighted. "That's unfair. Beautiful women are supposed to give me at least twenty minutes before introducing obscure eighteenth-century economic satire."
"I was informed billionaires enjoyed artificial scarcity, so I ration my Adam Smith until the second meeting."
The Contessa laughed loudly enough to draw glances from another group, and Natasha caught the instant in which Ezra decided something about her. She could not know what, which irritated her, because reading decisions had once been a matter of survival and uncertainty still scratched at instincts trained in rooms far uglier than this one. The Red Room had taught her to become whatever a target desired, but its instructors had a crude conception of desire. Men wanted beauty, admiration, sex, obedience, or some tailored mixture thereof. Adonai's dossier suggested appetite on a broader scale.
He collected experiences with the same voracity with which his companies collected data. Art, women, books, wine, people… Perhaps acquisition itself was the appetite. Fury wanted Natasha to find out whether the mutants surrounding him were soldiers, experiments, friends, or the beginnings of something SHIELD. had failed to imagine.
Find out why mutants keep orbiting around this motherfucking headache, had been Fury's exact words. She would need months to answer that, and months required a reason for Adonai to remember Elena Volkov tomorrow morning.
Bellandi had begun discussing the exhibition's centerpiece, a privately held allegorical painting whose disputed attribution had generated exactly the sort of controversy that made collectors ecstatic, and the conversation drifted toward authenticity. One dealer argued that authorship determined value because art carried the hand and intention of its creator. Natasha listened until Ezra asked whether a perfect forgery had less beauty once its fraudulence became known, and there it was, a door opening precisely where she needed one.
"Of course it does," Natasha said. "Beauty is contaminated by knowledge because human beings never experience art as pure sensory information. If I showed you two physically identical canvases and told you one was painted by Vermeer while the other was manufactured yesterday by an extraordinarily talented forger, your eyes would receive the same arrangement of pigment while your mind experienced two entirely different objects. One carries the Dutch Golden Age and the delicious knowledge that other people desperately want what you're looking at. The other carries some poor bastard in a basement trying to pay his mortgage."
"So beauty depends upon metadata?" Ezra asked, and Natasha suspected the word had been chosen because of who he was.
"Everything depends upon metadata when human beings are involved. A bottle of wine tastes better when you are told it costs five hundred dollars. A mediocre man becomes fascinating after somebody whispers that he is a prince. A dress becomes desirable because an actress wore it. You built an empire on essentially the same principle, Mr. Ezra. A photograph means little by itself. Add a name, relationships, preferences, history, reactions, and suddenly you have something valuable."
The atmosphere changed by a degree so small nobody outside intelligence work would have noticed it. Ezra continued smiling, but Natasha saw his attention settle completely upon her.
"That sounds almost like a criticism."
"Admiration with enough arsenic to improve the flavor," she corrected with a grin. "You understood very early that information about relationships would become as valuable as information about individuals. A true visionary. I find that both impressive and vaguely horrifying, which is usually a sign that somebody has invented something important."
"Vaguely horrifying is an exageration," Adonai said. "People voluntarily tell us what films they watch, whom they know and which football club ruins their weekend. I merely provide the platform for their exhibitionism."
"You provide the mirror, arrange the lighting, record where their eyes move, catalogue which reflection keeps them staring longest, and sell somebody a chair beside the mirror. Calling that a platform is wonderfully modest."
Ezra laughed, and Natasha knew she had him now, because everyone else in the circle had begun watching the two of them with the subtle resignation of people who realized a group conversation had developed a private center of gravity.
"You're dangerous, Miss Volkov. I have spent years cultivating the public impression that I am a harmless young man who occasionally wants to build rockets and reorganize human communication between painting pictures."
"Your PR department deserves a raise."
"I tell them that constantly, usually after giving them another reason to drink. You seem to have studied me with unusual diligence for someone I have never met."
Suspicion this early might have worried a lesser operative. But Natasha was the Black Widow. Brilliant or otherwise, Adonai Ezra was still a target, and she had spent her life teaching dangerous men to mistake carefully engineered reactions for their own decisions. Watching him dance exactly where she wanted him in the palm of her hand was beginning to be enjoyable.
"You're twenty-three years old," she began playfully. "obscenely wealthy, paint well enough to irritate professional artists, own companies that appear in newspapers every week, and arrived tonight surrounded by enough security to invade Luxembourg. Studying you requires approximately the same diligence as noticing the Duomo. Florence keeps putting you in the line of sight."
"That explanation would satisfy me considerably more if you had not dissected the true purpose of my companies."
"I'm an author. Watching people is the only socially acceptable form of stalking available to me."
"That's a compelling defense. I may steal it."
"You already own enough intellectual property."
His laughter came easily now, and Natasha allowed Elena to smile with the satisfaction of a woman enjoying herself because, inconveniently, Natasha was enjoying herself too. She needs to be careful. Missions became dangerous when the mask began receiving pleasures of its own. She had learned that lesson in rooms she preferred to leave unnamed, and Fury had chosen her because she could live beside a target for months without forgetting why she was there. Adonai Ezra remained a target. The charm, the youth, the absurd breadth of his conversation, and the amused intelligence in his eyes were data.
The conversation survived another twenty minutes, passing through Florentine banking, the psychology of collecting, whether patronage corrupted artists, and eventually football after Ezra discovered Elena supported Arsenal largely because Natasha had calculated that supporting Manchester United would make her too agreeable. She argued that football clubs were among the last socially respectable forms of hereditary tribalism and deliberately allowed herself to lose one argument concerning Hegel because perfect brilliance smelled manufactured.
By the time Bellandi excused himself and the Contessa departed toward another gallery, the original circle had dissolved into smaller conversations. Natasha had engineered nothing visible. That pleased her most. Ezra glanced toward a doorway leading onto the palazzo's terrace, where the lights of Florence shimmered beyond the dark ribbon of the Arno, then returned his attention to her.
"I have a bottle of Château Margaux upstairs that has been waiting all evening for someone sufficiently interesting to justify opening it," Adonai said. "Everyone here has disappointed me terribly so far, and I'm beginning to fear the wine will develop abandonment issues. Would you care to save it?"
Natasha smiled, letting Elena consider him for several seconds longer than politeness required. Three weeks of dossiers, behavioral models, literary research, and Fury's charming instructions had finally purchased her an invitation beyond the crowd. The Red Room would have called that success. SHIELD would call it access.
Natasha found that redemption contained a great deal of familiar work under unfamiliar management, but she still wanted to believe the purpose mattered, because without that belief the ledger remained exactly as red as it had always been.
"That depends," she said. "Are you going to spend the entire bottle explaining your own paintings to me? I should warn you that I become cruel after the second glass, and your ego appears expensive to repair."
Adonai grinned. "Miss Volkov, if you manage to injure my ego, I will buy you the vineyard."
"Then lead the way, Mr. Ezra. I suddenly find myself very thirsty."
They went upstairs together, leaving the exhibition's chatter to dissolve beneath them as Adonai guided Natasha through the palazzo's labyrinth of shadowed corridors, his hand resting lightly at the small of her back while gilt-framed ancestors watched them pass with the solemn disapproval of dead aristocrats.
His touch should have registered as another detail to catalogue, but the warmth of his palm produced an irritating little shiver that had nothing to do with fear. Elena was supposed to find him attractive, to relish being desired by the most influential man alive, and Natasha had played enough women to understand how easily the body could begin cooperating with the fiction. She was Elena. She was desired. She was wet, which was operationally convenient and personally none of SHIELD's fucking business.
At the top waited a private suite whose extravagance felt distinctly Adonai Ezra. A four-poster bed dominated the room beneath midnight-blue silk, while books occupied an antique writing desk beside a half-finished bottle of wine and a bronze replica of Bernini's David. A decanter glowed garnet beneath the amber light of a single lamp, and the room smelled faintly of bergamot and wine.
Natasha let her fingers trail along the walnut credenza as she wandered farther inside, keeping her movements leisurely while her eyes catalogued possible safes and anything else Fury might eventually care about.
"You travel with your own museum, Mr. Ezra," she said, glancing over her shoulder with an amused smile.
Adonai closed the door behind them with a soft click and regarded her with the same placid amusement he had worn downstairs. "Only the things I can't live without."
She turned, meeting his gaze, and let Elena's confidence bloom in her eyes. "And what can't you live without tonight?"
He crossed the room and approached her slowly, almost predatorily. His fingers brushed the strap of her dress, tracing the line of her collarbone before sliding down to the zipper at her spine. Natasha held her breath as the fabric loosened, pooling at her feet like a puddle of liquid crimson. She stood before him in nothing but black lace, her skin flushed, nipples already hard beneath the delicate fabric.
"This," he murmured, brushing his thumb over the lace covering her breast while his other hand settled against her hip. "And this." His hand slid lower, fingers curling around the waistband of her thong, tugging gently. "And the sound you're about to make when I make you beg."
Natasha exhaled sharply, her body arching into his touch. "You're awfully confident for a man who hasn't even kissed me yet."
"I don't need to kiss you to know what you taste like," he said.
His mouth captured hers before she could retort, and Natasha melted into the kiss, her lips parting eagerly. His tongue swept inside, exploring her with the confidence of a man who knew exactly what he wanted. She moaned against his mouth and gripped his shoulders, her nails biting through the fine fabric of his tailored shirt.
He tasted faintly of wine, the lingering sweetness still warm on his tongue. She could feel his cock pressing insistently against her thigh, and her pussy throbbed in response. She wanted to worship it, to take it deep into her throat and feel it pulse against her tongue. Or at least played the wanting so convincingly that the difference was becoming dangerously difficult to find. Natasha had spent years turning desire into a weapon, manufacturing hunger from glances and touches until men believed whatever she needed them to believe. Tonight, her body seemed determined to blur the line between performance and appetite.
He broke the kiss, his breathing rough. "On your knees."
Natasha obeyed without hesitation, sinking onto the plush rug as her pulse hammered in her throat. She looked up at him, lips parted and still glistening from their kiss, and let a deliberately provocative smile curl across them. "Only if you promise to fuck my mouth properly."
Adonai groaned, his hand tangling in her auburn hair as he guided her forward. "Such filthy words from such a pretty mouth."
Natasha didn't wait for permission. She reached for his belt, her fingers trembling slightly with anticipation, and unbuckled it slowly before unzipping his trousers and freeing his cock. It was magnificent, thick and long, already leaking at the tip, the head flushed a deep, angry red. She wrapped her fingers around the shaft and stroked him once, then twice, watching his expression before leaning forward and pressing a wet kiss to the tip.
Adonai hissed, his hips jerking involuntarily. "Fuck, Elena."
Natasha grinned up at him and flicked her tongue across the bead of pre-cum glistening at the slit. "You like that?"
"You have no idea."
She didn't waste another second. She took him deep into her mouth, sealing her lips around the base of his cock as she hollowed her cheeks and swallowed around his length. Adonai cursed, his fingers tightening in her hair while she worked him with slow movements of her tongue. She could feel him hitting the back of her throat, but she didn't gag. Instead, she relaxed her throat, taking him deeper, her nose pressing against the soft skin of his balls.
"Jesus Christ," he growled, his hips beginning to thrust shallowly. "Your mouth is fucking perfect."
Natasha hollowed her cheeks again, sucking hard as she pulled back, then took him all the way down again. She could feel his cock twitching against her tongue, his breath coming in ragged gasps. She reached up with one hand, cupping his balls and rolling them gently in her palm, her fingers teasing the sensitive skin behind them.
Adonai's cock jerked in her mouth, and she knew he was close. She pulled back just enough to murmur, "Cum for me, baby. I want to taste it."
That was all it took. With a guttural groan, he came, thick ropes of hot cum spilling down her throat. Natasha swallowed every drop, her throat working as she milked him through his orgasm. When he finally pulled back, his cock glistening with her saliva, she licked her lips and looked up at him with a satisfied smirk.
"You are …a virtuoso cocksucker!" Adonai said as he stared down at her, his chest heaving, his eyes full of lust.
Natasha stood, pressing her body against his, her breasts flattening against his chest. "Flatterer!"
His hands slid down to grip her ass, squeezing hard. "Get on the bed. Now."
Natasha didn't argue. She crawled onto the mattress, her ass high in the air, her pussy already dripping with need. She could feel his gaze burning into her, drinking in the sight of her exposed, wet cunt.
Adonai followed her onto the bed, his hands gripping her hips as he positioned himself behind her. Natasha moaned as she felt the thick head of his cock press against her entrance, already wet and ready for him. He teased her for a moment, rubbing the tip against her clit, making her whimper with frustration.
"Are you going to wait for my permission?" she said sultry, her voice thick with need. "I didn't think the great Adonai Ezra would need any more invitations."
Adonai chuckled, though he didn't make her wait. With one hard thrust, he buried himself inside her, filling her completely. Natasha cried out and arched beneath him as pleasure ripped through her. He was big, almost painfully so, stretching her until the initial shock dissolved into something delicious, every movement hitting that spot inside her that made her see stars.
"Fuck, you're tight," he growled, gripping her hips as he began to move. "And so fucking wet."
Natasha pushed back against him, meeting every thrust with shameless enthusiasm. "I've been waiting for this dick all day!" she gasped.
Adonai obliged her. His hips slammed into her with punishing force, the bed creaking beneath them as the wet slap of their bodies filled the room between Natasha's breathless moans and his guttural curses. Pleasure gathered low in her belly, winding tighter with every thrust while her body clenched helplessly around him.
He drew back and drove into her again hard enough to wrench another cry from her. "You like that?" he grunted, his voice rough with exertion. "You like my cock stretching that tight little pussy?"
"Yes, just like that," she moaned, already breathless. "Don't stop. Don't you fucking dare stop!"
Adonai reached around and found her clit, rubbing tight, rapid circles that made her entire body jerk against him. "Damn, woman, you're squeezing me like you're trying to keep it."
"Your dick feels so fucking good!" Natasha half moaned, half screamed, whatever composure she had possessed rapidly disintegrating. "Oh fuck, I'm gonna come all over your dick!"
"Then come for me, darling," he growled, his fingers digging into her hips as he drove into her harder. "Let me feel that tight cunt clench around my cock."
That was all it took. Natasha's orgasm crashed through her with enough force to empty her mind, her body shaking as wave after wave of pleasure tore through her. She screamed his name and clenched helplessly around him while Adonai groaned above her, his rhythm growing increasingly erratic.
Fuck, she normally didn't come before her targets, but there was a first time for everything, she supposed. He kept moving through her climax, each thrust striking nerves already rendered unbearably sensitive and dragging another shuddering release from her before the first had properly faded. Apparently she had a sexual deviant on her hands. Somewhere through the haze, however, training stubbornly survived pleasure, and Natasha caught the subtle twitch that betrayed him.
"You're about to come, huh?" she gasped, immediately pouncing on it. "I know you are… i-it's going to feel soooo good!"
"Fuck, I'm gonna…" he growled, and with one final, deep thrust, he buried himself fully inside her and came. Natasha felt the sudden heat of his release and moaned at the sensation, her body still trembling from the aftershocks of her own orgasm.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Adonai remained buried inside her, his breath hot against the back of her neck. Natasha could feel his cock softening, but she didn't want him to pull out. She wanted to feel him inside her for as long as possible.
Finally, he pulled out, and Natasha collapsed onto the bed, her body limp with satisfaction. Adonai lay down beside her, his fingers tracing lazy circles on her skin.
"You're incredible," he murmured, pressing a kiss to her shoulder.
Natasha turned her head, meeting his gaze with a satisfied smile. "And you're not half bad yourself, Mr. Ezra."
He grinned, pulling her closer. "I think this calls for another glass of Margaux."
Natasha laughed, her body still humming from the aftershocks of her orgasm. "Only if you promise to open it properly this time."
Adonai kissed her again, slow and deep, his tongue exploring her mouth with lazy precision. "Oh, I intend to open you properly," he murmured against her lips. "Again. And again. And again."
Natasha moaned into the kiss, her body already responding to the promise in his words. She could feel his cock stirring against her thigh, already hardening again. She knew this night was far from over.
And she couldn't wait.
A knock came at the door, catching Natasha by surprise, and Adonai casually pulled on an expensive white bathrobe. Watching him cover himself made her abruptly conscious of how much she had enjoyed the view. Adonai had the kind of body Renaissance sculptors would have considered an unreasonable commission, and her gaze lingered a heartbeat longer than professional necessity could justify.
A lesser woman might have fallen hopelessly in love with that face alone. Natasha considered herself fortunate that the Red Room had beaten such weaknesses out of her, although her body apparently had reservations about the curriculum.
Adonai opened the door, and a young woman stepped into view whose appearance Natasha recognized at once. She was beautiful, with auburn hair marked by its distinctive white streak, light grey eyes and a voluptuous figure that her professional clothes did very little to conceal beneath a fitted white blouse and black office skirt.
Anna Marie, codename Rogue. Natasha knew the file. A teenage runaway whose mutation had manifested disastrously before she eventually found her way into Magneto's Brotherhood, Rogue had subsequently vanished from the intelligence community's reliable surveillance. How she had ended up working security for Adonai Ezra was one of the many questions surrounding him that irritated Fury considerably.
"The perimeter is secure, sir," Rogue said before looking past him, her expression freezing as she registered Natasha's state of undress. "Wait, why is she naked? Seriously, you couldn't wait five damn minutes? You just had to sleep with her?"
"Relax. If things don't go according to plan, at least I can say I slept with a Black Widow," Adonai replied cheerfully. "There aren't many men alive who can put that on their résumé."
Natasha's smile almost died. Almost. Her pulse accelerated once, hard enough that she felt it beneath her ribs, while years of conditioning forced the shock behind a face that remained pleasantly blank.
He knew.
The impossibility of that fact mattered less than its implications. Her affiliation with the Black Widow program was compartmentalized information within SHIELD, and she had served under Fury for barely a year. Fury knew, Pierce knew, Clint knew, and a small number of personnel with sufficient clearance could conceivably reconstruct pieces of her history. Clint could be discarded immediately. Fury was absurd. Pierce was possible -she didn't know the man well enough - but accusing the Secretary of SHIELD without evidence would be idiotic.
A penetration somewhere inside SHIELD was therefore the likeliest explanation, whether human, electronic or institutional. Ezra had either compromised their databases, cultivated someone with extraordinary clearance, or had an intelligence network Fury had completely failed to detect.
None of those possibilities was comforting. The timing made matters worse. Ezra had known before tonight. His remark to Rogue wasn't the surprise of a man who had discovered an infiltrator halfway through seducing her. He had invited Natasha upstairs while knowing exactly who she was, which meant every apparent success of the evening had occurred because he had permitted it. Fury had sent her to determine whether Ezra represented a strategic threat, and within hours Ezra had demonstrated that he possessed intelligence concerning one of SHIELD's most closely guarded operatives while SHIELD remained unaware that its security had been compromised. That elevated him considerably beyond an eccentric billionaire with suspicious friends.
Whatever the reason, she was at a disadvantage, and being stark naked hardly improved the situation. Natasha made no unnecessary movement, keeping her expression composed as one hand drifted casually toward her handbag and slipped inside. Her fingers closed around the pistol concealed within. Getting the damned thing through security had been a monumental pain in the ass, but she was suddenly very glad she had gone to the trouble. She drew it carefully and held it behind her naked body, the cold metal pressed discreetly along the back of her thigh.
"Babe, who is it?" Natasha asked, her voice remaining relaxed and sultry.
Rogue stepped farther into the suite. Adonai closed the door behind her and leaned against it with an amused gaze.
"Now look at her," Rogue said with weary amusement. "You scared the poor girl half to death."
"What are you talking about?" Natasha asked, allowing genuine uncertainty to color Elena's voice.
"You're incredible," Adonai said, sounding genuinely impressed. "And I don't mean just in bed. Seriously, it's terrifying how perfectly you remade yourself into my type, from the dress and the attitude to every little eccentricity you knew would catch my interest. If I hadn't known who you were beforehand, I would've been completely clueless and probably fallen head over heels for you and congratulated myself for having good taste. I finally understand why Black Widows are considered the pinnacle of espionage."
Realizing her cover was completely blown, Natasha discarded the identity without hesitation. Natasha drew the pistol from behind her back and aimed at Anna Marie. Rogue was a confirmed mutant with abilities whose limits were uncertain, which made her the most immediate threat in the room. Natasha fired three shots in rapid succession without missing a beat, placing two rounds toward the heart and the third toward the forehead.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
"Straight to a Mozambique drill?" Adonai said with a chuckle. "Christ, woman, you're ruthless. Excellent grouping, though."
Natasha stared.
How in hell had he moved that fast?
A heartbeat ago Adonai had been standing several meters away from Rogue, and now he stood directly in front of her, his massive frame completely shielding the woman behind him. Natasha had seen no movement that her trained eyes had somehow failed to catch. One instant there had been empty space between them, and the next Adonai simply occupied it. Then she saw the bullet holes in his bathrobe, and for perhaps the first time in years her mind struggled to accept what her eyes were telling it.
Her aim had been perfect. Two rounds had struck directly over his heart and the third squarely in the center of his forehead, exactly where she had intended to put them. There should have been blood. Instead, the two bullets that struck his chest dropped harmlessly to the floor, leaving holes in the white fabric and not so much as a scratch upon the flesh beneath. The third had flattened against his forehead, leaving only a shallow dent in his skin before falling with a tiny metallic clink. Natasha stared at him as something cold crawled through her stomach.
What in God's name is he?
She knew mutants could violate almost every comfortable assumption humanity had about what a person could survive, but there was something uniquely horrifying about watching a man take three bullets at point-blank range with less concern than she would have shown for spilled wine. Her pistol suddenly felt absurd in her hand. If bullets could not hurt him, and he could move faster than her eyes could follow, then Natasha had walked naked and alone into a room with something she had absolutely no idea how to fight.
"You're a mutant too," Natasha said.
"Now that we're done with the charade," Adonai said, smiling at her like a man admiring a bird that had finally flown into his snare. "I think it's finally time we had a real conversation, Natasha Romanoff."
AN: I rewatched Black Widow recently, and honestly, it was ass. I went into it expecting a movie about spies and assassins to actually be about spies and assassins, something more like the first half of Captain America The Winter Soldier. You know, Natasha actually showing off her skills as a spy, her ability to manipulate people and slip into whatever role is necessary to accomplish her objective. Basically, showing just how fucking dangerous someone trained as a spy from childhood could actually be.
Your next line is: "Bullshit, Abel. We know you just used that as an excuse to write a long-ass pretentious philosophical discussion."
And to that I say: yes. But one thing doesn't exclude the other.
Anyway, I actually wanted to write a BDSM scene with Rogue, but unfortunately, the conversation took a very different direction from what I originally intended. One of the ideas I had when I started this was to make the harem somewhat realistic, including all the jealousy, baggage, and interpersonal complications that would come with it. Unfortunately, that sometimes gets in the way of the smut. I did manage to write one with Natasha, though.
As always, advanced chapters are available on my Patreon. If you want to read ahead, vote on which story gets updated each week, or simply support me, you can check it out here: patreon.com/abeltargaryen?