Tabula Rasa

Chapter 19

The moment the bathroom door closed behind Matthew, Calina exhaled a shaky breath. She still felt so disgustingly fragile, as if she was on the verge of collapsing into sobs again.

It hadn't been this bad the first time she'd been freed from the serum.

To be fair, she'd been falling through the sky on a disintegrating fortress, so she'd had other things to distract her from her mental state. But even after that, when she was safe in the house in South Carolina, she hadn't cried.

She'd been upset, of course. Sad, and furious and bewildered. But she'd never broken down like she had tonight. Looking back, all those emotions seemed muted compared to the depth of feeling she was experiencing now.

And maybe they had been. Maybe it had taken a while for her to fully regain all the humanity that had been stolen from her by the Red Room.

Which might explain why tonight felt like more of a violation.

She'd been out of that world.

Free.

A person again. One who was building a fledgeling life, and finding herself after two decades of being nothing but a weapon.

And someone had destroyed that. They'd torn down her house of cards and shown it to be nothing but an insubstantial fantasy.

She'd been kidding herself all this time. She'd been so fucking naive - there was no escaping a past like hers.

And maybe she didn't deserve to.

She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly chilled. She should go next door and change. Wash off the remnants of tonight, pack her things and leave with her sisters...

But she couldn't bear the thought of going next door. It didn't feel like her safe little haven anymore. It was no longer the home she was trying to create....it was the site of her failed dream.

And it was a crime scene. With a dead body on her bedroom floor.

Bile rose at the thought. She tilted her head back and breathed deep, trying to quell her sudden nausea. God, her trainers at the Red Room wouldn't recognise her in this state. She barely recognised herself.

She had killed before - many times.

Her first was at the age of 12. It was standard practice in the Red Room to weed out the weak by pitting the girls against each other in fights to the death. Olga had been her opponent, a scrawny blonde-haired girl who was never quite strong enough; never quite fast enough, or smart enough. The trainers knew it. The other Widows knew it. And Olga knew it. It made her mean and vicious. She always aimed to hurt others during sparring sessions, and would bully the younger girls.

Nobody liked her.

But she didn't deserve to die.

And when Calina had been forced to break her neck, she had spent the rest of the night throwing up and shaking on the dormitory floor. The other girls had tried to cover for her - in a rare show of compassion and solidarity - but the trainers had found out anyway. And she'd been starved for a week as punishment.

The serum stopped that reaction from happening again. When she killed during missions, she did so without remorse - the perfect, soulless weapon.

And when the Red Room had fallen, she had killed again. Free of the serum, she had made the conscious choice to help her sisters eliminate who they thought had been the last of the Red Room personnel. She had pulled the trigger that had ended the life of one of the more sadistic trainers when they'd discovered him hiding out in Bucharest.