You are sitting at your small, wooden kitchen table. A burner phone, prepaid and untraceable, sits in the center. Next to it, a single photograph, creased and faded: three little girls in matching grey dresses, arms wrapped around each other in a frozen moment before the world tore them apart.

On the floor by the door is a duffel bag, packed and ready. The lock on your front door is newly reinforced, but you know better than anyone that locks are only suggestions to people like the one who’s been following you for the past seventy-two hours.

The burner phone screen is dark. You’ve had the number memorized for years. A relic from a different life, dug up from a dead drop in Prague. Natasha Romanoff’s private line.

Outside, a scooter backfires on the cobblestone street. You don’t flinch. Your breathing is even. Your hands are perfectly steady. That’s the problem. The calm is back. The operational stillness. You thought you’d buried her, the Red Widow, under library books and student essays and the quiet rhythm of a normal life.

But she’s here. Sitting at the table. Waiting for you to make the call.