“And what do you have to be proud of, Dimitri? A traitor to your people, to your country, to your blood. You abandoned your only FAMILY. I’m with mine, finally. I’m home.” She hates that he called her Scarlett. That name should not be near his lips, not his. She hates herself. She hates her words. She hates her body and her tongue and her lips and her eyes. She hates every inch and every fiber, every syllable and everything. She hates that place, she hates Thomas, she hates Phillip, she hates America, she hates that room, she hates Audrey, she hates Dim— but that’s not true, is it? Not always, anyway, not when Phillip talks with his disgusting tongue, in his atrocious language. Not when Phillip threatens Melody and then him, not when she’s alone in her bed and it’s cold and she feels like she could cry and—–she doesn’t hate him always, but she thinks sh hates him now and chooses to hold onto that as tightly as she can. 

             Something in her body burns. She’s not sure what it is, but it hurts more than the recent gunshot in her shoulder. Perhaps is her inner thigh, the lazily stitched cut. Perhaps it’s her waist, the bruise that doesn’t fade, no matter how much she tries to hide it. ( They don’t give her time to rest. She might be the greatest that has ever been, she might be the BLACK WIDOW, but even she has her   l i m i t a t i o n s.  ). She looks at him in the eye, taking in a deep breath with every word that he says. She is not weak. She is not soft. She is made of marble. She is indestructible. She is a legend. She tightens her jaw before using her free hand to hit him in the neck (an attempt to destabilize him). She takes her leg off of him, and, very swiftly, uses her knee to kick him in the groin. Anna looks into his eyes again, her name being called before she grits her teeth (show no emotion). “Anyone is replaceable.”