The Widow's Daughter ✔︎

Chapter Nineteen

I woke up in a warm bed, which was weird, because I was pretty sure I was dead. I pulled the covers off myself and looked around my surroundings... I wasn't in the Avengers Tower, that's for sure, and I wasn't in Ivan's base. I was in a room that looked like it belonged to a teenage girl, kind of like my old room back in Chicago, dressed in hot pink pajamas and a woollen jumper... a vanity table and beanbag were in the right corner, and the walls were covered in posters of hot guys wearing boxers and carrying surfboards under their arms, from a TV show Ashley used to love called Baywatch... I shuddered.

"Not today, Zac Efron," I muttered, standing up and wincing as I put weight on my left leg. I looked down and swore when I saw that it was covered in a blood-soaked bandage. I frowned, looking out of the window. The spiralling, onion-shaped pillars of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour rose above the sprawling city metropolis that stretched as far as the eye could see, ending at a large forest and a mountain.

OK. So I was in Moscow.

The room's door was ajar, so I pushed it fully open and saw a set of stairs leading down to the bottom floor of the house I was staying in. The delicious, meaty smell of frying bacon wafted up into my nose and I hobbled down the stairs, frowning.

The bottom floor consisted of a modern, fancy kitchen and a large living room with a plush sofa and a massive TV playing the Russian news, telling of a military base on Mount Gestola - Ivan's base - having been recently destroyed. I gasped when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

It was a pretty woman, older than Natasha but not old, with ash blonde hair wrapped in a messy bun. She smiled a warm smile and said in a thick Russian accent, "hey, kiddo."

I swallowed. "Who are you?" I asked, not caring how rude I must sound. 

The woman laughed softly, pulling out a chair for me to sit down at the table. "My name's Tina," she said. "We found you on Mount Gestola after the explosion last night."

"We?" I breathed, looking around. "What happened?"

Tina placed a plate in front of me and piled bacon onto it. The delicious smell wafted up into my nose and I dug in ravenously. "Yes, we. My son and daughter, actually. And in response to your second question, I don't know. We found you unconscious lying in a snow drift at the bottom of the mountain. We took you to a hospital. You almost died."

At the mention of children, I whipped around to see two kids, a boy and a girl, looking at me. The boy, who looked about ten or eleven, had messy blonde hair, like Tina, and was wearing a baggy T-shirt with the words 'Lego Master' on, but the girl was different. Her hair was a deep red, like mine, her face petite and pretty. She reminded me of Wanda, and then Natasha, and that made me want to cry.

The boy grinned at me. "I'm Ben," he said, shaking my hand. "Are you a spy?"

He reminded me of Taiga. I smiled softly at him. "Something like that."

"Cool!" Ben plopped into the seat next to me and started to fidget with a little action figure in his pocket, his hyperactivity reminding me of... well, me. "You kinda look like my sister. She's adopted, by the way. That's why she doesn't have blonde hair, like me and mum and Captain America."

I almost choked on my bacon. "You a fan?" I croaked.

Ben nodded excitedly. "He's my hero," he gushed. "I'm gonna be an Avenger when I grow up, just like him."

The girl sat down next to him and ruffled his hair. "It's a weird obsession he has," she admitted. She smiled at me. "I'm Evie."

"Kira," I said. 

"Well, Kira," said Tina, pouring me a glass of orange juice, "you really gave us a fright there when we found you on the mountain. Evelina had been on a mountain-climbing camp, you see, and we were driving home when we saw the base explode. It was... really scary, to be honest."