The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 8

Vienna, Austria

Summer 2007

Nadine couldn't help but chuckle, a smile rising to her face of its own accord as the girl across the high-ceilinged room spun and danced along with the music playing through the studio.

Even before she had left her life in that place far behind, Nadine had vowed she would never dance again once she left the Red Room, and that no one would ever force her to again. She'd had enough of it. At first she'd stuck to that vow, the thought of ballet and ballerinas and dancing making her feel physically ill.

But as time passed and she got deeper into constructing the identity and life of Nadine Ryker, it began to edge its way back into her thoughts.

Nearly a year after she stopped dismissing the idea out of hand, after years of moving, of running, she had opened her Ballet Studio.

And in the handful of years that had passed since, she had grown to appreciate the art as she never had during her days in the Red Room. Strangely enough, it allowed her distance from her life before. While discipline was still valued in her Studio as it had been then in the Red Room, it was encouraged to very different ends. Where once dancing had been a facet of being molded into a killer, in her Studio, girls who danced under her tutelage were being molded into artists. Her dancers danced for the sake of dancing, not for the sake of becoming 'unbreakable'. They didn't dance to weed out the weak or to break the spirits of those not strong-willed enough or to hone bodies destined to become the ultimate weapons. Her girls danced to create beauty, to embody the music with every breath and gesture and to hone their bodies into living works of art. These girls were everything the girls Nadine had once known were not.

But Nadine never had to dance herself. Eventually she did try, turning on the music with the volume down low, dancing late at night in the private emptiness of the Studio she ran. And she knew as she did that she never had to again unless she wanted to.

It actually made her...happy.

For the first time, it had made her feel like her life was truly her own. To know as she spun and swayed and dipped that she never had to do it again if she didn't want to was profoundly calming and oddly wonderful.

She hadn't felt the need to dance again since that night.

And for some equally odd reason that she couldn't explain, that knowledge had made the mantle of The Ghost easier to bear.

That the skills she possessed proved valuable outside the framework she'd been raised within became readily apparent almost as soon as she'd abandoned the Red Room. As a result she'd fallen into that life almost immediately. Spying and killing had been all she'd known and all she knew how to do. She'd needed to make a living, to survive, and utilizing what the Red Room had taught her was a way to do it, unpleasant as it felt. She'd moved quickly from small hits to trickier, harder to track targets, building a reputation as an assassin who always found their mark. She never missed.

As her reputation grew the offers grew as well, as did the challenge inherent in each mission.

And then she had been offered a contract to take out another assassin, one she'd known. She'd remembered him from the Red Room; he'd been brought in to test them. Nadya had passed; seven others hadn't. To take out a contract on another assassin was a massive gamble. To even offer the contract was sometimes suicide, since some assassins took such things personally. Few hired guns would agree to go after one of their own. It was harder, more dangerous, and the chances of it failing or simply going wrong were exponential if the target could even be found. Attempts backfiring completely were not uncommon to hear about. After all, assassins didn't stay in the business long if they were easy to track down or kill. When Nadine had finally tracked Andrei Azarov down in eastern Moldova, she hadn't hesitated.