A man named Yuri with explosives
wired to his body and a gun has barricade himself in a Berling hotel room as
police wait outside the building. A mystery woman informs him she has been
hired by his employers to extract him from the situation. To assure him of her
identity, she relates her life as a dangerous criminal, murdering her parents,
her cheating gangster husband, and starting a career as a killer for hire. Yuri
admits her and she neutralizes the explosive, shoots out the window and ties up
Yuri to deliver to the police below. She admits she lied all the way through
their conversation. Black Widow removes her disguise and returns to America….
Natasha meets with her
lawyer/business manager Isaiah Ross, in Central Park. From their conversation
we learn that she takes these jobs to atone for her past, not as a means of
making herself rich. Isaiah wishes she would as she doesn’t have the money to fund
her trusts. So he shows her a new job, a hit in Dubai and she accepts….
In Dubai, a shady businessman named
Lucas occupies a well-guarded penthouse. Natasha infiltrates the building as a
maid then goes through all of Lucas’ bodyguards, taking them down non-lethally,
ending up facing Lucas. Then she puts a Kevlar vest on Lucas, informing him
that she wasn’t hired to kill him but his assassin. She pushes him in front of
a window, a bullet hits his protected chest, and Nat fires a rocket into the
assassin’s hotel room, blowing him up. He threatens to expose her tactics to the
Avengers, SHIELD, the US government—she just tells him she doesn’t play by
anybody’s rules….
At her apartment in Little Ukraine,
NYC, she tells Liho, a stray cat, that she doesn’t want to adopt a cat formally
just hang out together. Then she broods on how many more jobs she must take
before she can forgive herself. And even if she could forgive herself, this is
what she is now, no one will ever know what she was before….