Chapter 26
The day after finds Yelena once again with BARF. Shuri hums as she sets up for the next session. It’s a song that Yelena had never heard before but likes the sound of.
“Right,” Shuri clasped her hands together when she finished. “Today, we are targeting specific memories associated with the trigger words. Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Yelena probably wasn’t ever going to be fully ready but she just wanted to get this over with.
“Broken. Broken.” Shuri repeats the first word over and over. “Broken. Broken. Broken.”
Broken.
She isn’t sure at what point that they specifically broke her.
It isn’t until she’s looking down at her hands soaked in red before her eyes flicker up to look at her trainer and there’s approval.
She used to throw up at the sight of blood. She violently emptied her stomach after her first kill and will continue to do so for the next four.
So before her next kill, they starve her so she heaves up nothing but bile and stomach acid next time.
Yelena Belova kills people and somewhere along the way the red coating her hands doesn’t bother her anymore.
Somewhere along the way, they take the little part that made Yelena, Yelena. They took away the way she used to wear her heart on her sleeve and how she wanted nothing more than to help others.
She doesn’t know when they broke her until she stares down at her hands and realizes that “this isn’t me.”
Ballet.
Yelena watched her older sister do ballet sometimes in Ohio. Yelena never understood why dancing made her big sister cry or why every time their mama caught her dancing she would dance with Natasha before holding her.
It isn’t until Yelena is six and all alone in the world that they strap her into a chair in front of a television along with dozens of other little girls and play tapes of women doing ballet.
Later that night, they ask the girls to mimic what they saw. Yelena remembers what her older sister used to do and does that.
There are empty chairs the next morning and the little girls that were in them the previous day were gone.
Yelena doesn’t want to disappear too. She focuses on screen and watches and mimics again.
She gets her own pair of ballet slippers and nobody ever teachers her how to tie them but she gets punished for tying them wrong anyway.
She gets hit with this long and thin piece of bamboo that leaves scarlet stripes behind on her skin until one of the older Widows grabs Yelena by her shirt and teaches her how, mumbling quietly about how Yelena will get scars if she keeps getting hit.
“Mimic,” The girl tells Yelena in a harsh whisper as she does her own slippers up.
Yelena does. She mimics the best she can until she gets it right and she suddenly doesn’t feel like crying each time she sits down for dinner and her tender flesh meets the hard plastic chair.
Six.
She’s six when her whole world ends.
The summer is creeping to an end and Yelena is so very excited because she’s going to start big girl school with her older sister in the fall.
Yelena spent like what seemed forever picking out the perfect backpack for her first day of school and doesn’t settle until she knows that she picked the best one.
Yelena likes summer because her older sister has more time to play with her. And during the summer after her first year in big girl school, her daddy had promised to buy her a bike with no training wheels, just like Natasha, and he would teach her how to ride it.
The day never comes. Yelena never makes it to the first grade and the perfect backpack that she picked out was never used.
She’s six when her life ends and Yelena learns that monsters aren’t what lives under her bed but in the faces of people you’d never suspect.
Handcuff.
Each night the Widows are handcuffed to the bed to keep them from escaping. Even after they’re taught how to break their thumb to get out of cuffs that hold them in place, nobody dare tries to escape.
Yelena’s eight and catches the worst flu she’s ever had before and she tries to hide it because she knows what happens to girls that get sick.
Madame’s face will get all soft and she’s coo and fuss as she corrals them to the infirmary but the little girls never return.
Madame tries to coo and fuss over her and Yelena denies that she’s unwell and insists on her lesson even though she’s being offered a break. A luxury.
Madame’s face pinches when Yelena denies it but Yelena pushes herself until she faints in the middle of ballet.
She wakes up with a mask strapped to her face and handcuffs securing her to the bed.
“You have done well,” Madame tells her and it frightens Yelena because Madame never compliments anyone.
Yelena is the first to return from the infirmary and the other girls whisper about how she is the favorite.
Madame handcuffs Yelena’s other wrist to the headboard as well now and Yelena’s neck and back hurt in the morning but she never once dares to complain like she knows Madame is waiting for.
Star.
When Yelena was really little and couldn’t sleep, her mama would hold her close and open the blinds in her nursery and point up at the stars.
“They’re shining so brightly just for you,” Mama whispers into Yelena’s hair and Yelena felt so special that the stars shone brightly each night.
Yelena never sees the stars again when she’s taken by the Red Room. Not until it rains outside and the girls are shoved out for survival training for the night.
Yelena tilts her head up as rain plasters her hair to her face and stares up at the stars and feels so betrayed because they shined each night and Yelena didn’t get to see.
Looking at the stars just makes Yelena think of her mama and sometimes, after a bad night, she’ll stare up at the sky and remember better times.
Three.
She’s three when she’s taken from her home. When she goes from sharing a room with other toddlers that also have no parents to having her own room and her own mommy and daddy.
Yelena gets a mama and a daddy and a big sister. She’s happy and safe but she still asks her mama about the other little children that used to wail mournfully at night.
Her mama will kiss the top of her head and tell her that those other little children got mommies and daddies too.
But when Yelena, fifteen and lost in the world, looks up her birth certificate, she finds out that the Red Room burned the orphanage to the ground along with all the little children they didn’t abduct inside.
Firefly.
Fireflies were Yelena’s favorite thing about summer in Ohio. She’d get a jar with holes poked in the top and her sister and they’d run around the backyard clasping bugs carefully between their hands and release them into the jar.
Her daddy laughs heartily when he sees what they’re doing and scoops them up into the air so they can catch ones that fly too high for them.
The first time Yelena sees a firefly after she gets out, she reaches out and captures it carefully in her cupped hands. She stands in the yard of her safehouse with a firefly clasped between her palms and it’s the first time since she was nine that she cried.
Yelena releases the firefly and watches as it flutters away and becomes freer than Yelena will ever get to be.
Fourteen.
Widows went by numbers instead of names. Yelena was named number fourteen.
And as the numbers dwindled and other little girls died, Yelena was still number fourteen.
It’s not until Yelena is the last one left from her age group that Dreykov grins and tells her that she’s number one now.
Venus.
The Roman god Venus was the goddess of victory.
She’s also the goddess of love, sex, and fertility. There must be a joke somewhere in all of that.
Love is for children and they ensured that Yelena would never have any of her own.
When Yelena comes back to consciousness, she looks up at the face of her big sister.
She remembers bits of Ohio that they tried to take for her. There are now memories filling in previous blank spots in her head.
Yelena remembers when her mama and her daddy were kind and gentle and Yelena had never dared to dream that any of them would hurt her.
Yelena outstretches her arms toward Natasha, needing the familiar and comforting feeling of her sister. Natasha wraps her up in her arms and kisses her forehead and Yelena just sinks into the comfort.
“You did well,” Shuri says as she pulls BARF from Yelena’s head. “We should be able to get rid of those pesky triggers now.
Yelena gives her a weak smile and murmurs her thanks.
Even though BARF is working it doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard. Yelena’s so tired. Physically, mentally, and emotionally.
But she has Natasha, who will hold her up when she needs to and hold her close when she doesn’t.
She has her people waiting for her and rooting her on.
Even if some tiny part of Yelena yearns for nothing more than her mama and her daddy.