Broken Glass | Natasha Romanoff

save me, san francisco.

Lin's feet hurt. After her meeting with Chomiki, she hadn't been able to make herself return to her apartment.

Her thoughts had been running and in an effort to still them, she'd set her feet to running. She'd been all over San Francisco; she'd walked on beaches with her toes in the icy water and wandered through the dark corners of the town people stayed away from if they knew what was good for them.

But despite all of the walking she'd done, and every desperate effort she'd made to distract herself, her mind was still spilling over. A familiar pair of grey eyes kept flashing through her vision and she was desperate to shake his accusing gaze off.

Pulling herself harshly from her spiderweb of thoughts, she took a deep, slow breath.

It had stopped raining a while ago and the only remaining tell was Madeleine's hair, which was still dripping with water despite her hood. The sky, she noticed, was now painted a beautiful shade of orange. It was a pleasant change from the clouds of shadow that had filled the world not too long ago.

Lin sighed contentedly, sunset had always been her favourite time of day; the view never ceased to be breathtaking.

To avoid flashing back, Lin started a list in her head. Once she got back to her apartment, she had to come up with the beginnings of a plan. She had her crazy-person wall in her closet, where she created the plans for her assignments and collected information she thought was key. She'd start there, with basic intel on her target.

The sky continued to darken as she walked along the lonely, quiet street a couple blocks away from her apartment. The world always felt quieter right after sunset, and Lin found that she didn't mind in the slightest.

Almost too soon, she found herself in front of her apartment door, with it's chipped red paint and tarnished bronze door knob. She sighed, rifling through her pockets until her fingers curled around the familiar cold metal ring that held her keys.

She unlocked her locks one by one, starting with the ones on the bottom of the door and working her way up to the top.

She'd suffered a break-in only once in her life, and the idea that a stranger had been in her space and gone through her stuff had made her so uncomfortable that she'd promised herself to never let it happen again. Besides, it wasn't as if her neighbors would mind her strange amount of locks. Honestly, they could use one or two themselves.

She jiggled her door knob until the door popped open. Everything in her apartment was the way she'd left it early that morning, which was to say, a disaster.

There were five empty cups of coffee on the table, a stack of newspapers precariously balanced on an even taller and more hazardous tower of books, and her open laptop.

And this was just the beginning of the disaster that was her apartment. The only remotely clean space was the kitchen, and that was saying something.

Madeleine heaved a sigh, rolled her eyes at herself, and sat down on her couch, moving books, newspapers, and other documents haphazardly to the floor. She then grabbed her laptop and began the long, painstaking process that was logging into her account. She typed in her 10 passcodes and disabled the alarm that was triggered on her phone when someone attempted to log in.

      She'd made herself a cup of tea to prepare herself for slow, painstaking hours of research. If she wanted to find anything remotely useful in the blackmail department, she was going to have to do some digging.