OOM: Paris, December 1955

She takes the long way home.

Nancy, as she'd confessed to Amanda, had once had a boyfriend. A beautiful boy called Nicholas, who'd been drafted to the war and had written her letters, and had died there. A boyfriend is not a husband, but Nancy had offered her grief as an understanding to...

Well.

To her target.

And Amanda - shaken, stricken, ever crying - keeps buying it. And why shouldn't she?

Nikolai had been a beautiful boy from the Urals. A no-good boy, her mama would have said, but by then her mama had been dead for two years and besides, even then, Natasha knew that Kolya wasn't the kind of boy who stuck around. But still she'd cried, a little, when he died.

With Lyosha, she couldn't even speak for two days. And she'd used that just as much as the memory of the bright-eyed Kolya. More, really, to understand and then manipulate the grief of another widow.

She doesn't give a damn about Amanda. Or the memory of Kolya. It was necessary for the mission. But Lyosha...








Natasha adjusts her scarf, and keeps walking. Alex would be back at their apartment by now, and so the best way for her to be alone is to stay in the streets just a little bit longer.