Natalia Romanov is an agent of the Russian FSB.
The first detail we are given about her appearance deals with her "smooth long legs", "flawless in shape, marble to the eye and silken to the graze" of the fingertips of the man she was seductively showing them to. We are then told that she was a tall woman with blonde hair and to the man enjoying her company, she is said to have "the attributes of a noblewoman". That man, named Yuri, was amazed that she was not earning her living "in a ridiculously lavish modeling career" or married to some very rich man. Instead she was training with Yuri to "become a sleek operative, a death trader of the highest order".
It is not long into the first "episode" that we learn the reason she chose her path. Her parents and her younger brother had been murdered by a family friend who "betrayed them to the Russian Mafia" and now she was old enough to get her revenge, to become "the same brand of devil he was". "As an FSB trainee, she would learn all he knew "and she could become his prettiest and deadliest nightmare before she was twenty four years old".
As part of her training she is forced to endure a sexual invasion she had never imagined and then, in a stunning test to make sure she would do whatever she was ordered out in the field, she had to walk into a room and shoot to kill the person she found there. She was stunned to see that victim was Yuri. "When she came out, the woman [her boss and trainer] had sent in had disappeared. Forever".
The revenge she seeks for the murder of her family will comprise all of the short adventures we have of hers.
Good Lines:
- About a particularly nasty former gangster and now FSB 'advisor', it is said he had "a bank account bigger than his ego".