The first thing they teach you in the Red Room isn't how to kill.
It's how not to care.
Care gets you killed. Empathy gets you manipulated. Attachment gets you punished.
I learned that lesson early—the hard way, like everything else in my life. I still remember the sting of the cold floor under my cheek, the taste of blood in my mouth, and the weight of a handler's boot on my ribs. I was six.
"Kaley," the instructor said, holding a clipboard, not even looking at me. "Designation 05-67."
No last name. No history. Just a number and a name scribbled into a ledger of stolen children.
But I had a name once. A family, too. Before they took me.
I was Kaley Stark.
Younger sister to Tony Stark—yes, that Tony. Genius. Billionaire. Future Iron Man.
He was seventeen the day I disappeared. Still mourning our parents. Still figuring out how to be more than the reckless heir to a weapons empire.
We were in Switzerland. A retreat. Tony was speaking at some think tank summit, giving a presentation no one expected him to take seriously. I stayed behind at the hotel with one of our private nannies. She'd been with us for almost a year. Trusted. Reliable.
Or so we thought.
The last thing I remember clearly is the taste of apple juice on my tongue. Then the dizziness. Then the cold.
When I woke up, I was in a cargo container. Dim light. Metal walls. The faint sound of sobbing from somewhere else inside. My wrists were bound. My legs, too. Something throbbed at the base of my skull. Not pain. Not quite.
They moved us through checkpoints like cattle. Language changed every time we stopped—Russian, Mandarin, something Slavic I couldn't place. I heard the word "program" more than once. Heard "Stark" whispered with disbelief.
They knew who I was.
And they took me anyway.
I didn't cry. Not because I was brave, but because even then, something inside me refused to give them that piece. Like a lock they couldn't pick.
They tried. Oh, they tried.
That was the first week.
The indoctrination was brutal. They didn't call it that. They called it conditioning. As if reducing children to obedient weapons was clinical. Normal. Efficient.
The lights were never off for more than three hours. Sleep was a luxury earned through flawless drills. Food was rationed, discipline was absolute, and punishments were swift. Electroshock. Isolation. Ice baths. You learned faster when your body learned what pain meant.
By the end of the second month, I could disassemble a Makarov under supervision.
By the fourth, I could do it blindfolded. It took longer than they wanted. They punished me for that too. But I never forgot the way the parts felt in my hands—cold, precise, inevitable.
There were others, of course. Girls with numbers for names, bruises like ink tattoos. One of them always stood out. Red hair. Green eyes. Moved like water, sharp as glass.
Her name was Natalia Alianovna Romanova. She was maybe two, three years older than me—twelve to my nine. Already composed, already dangerous.
But to the instructors, she was just Subject 03.
They pit us against each other early.
"Romanova. Kaley. Ring three. No restraints."
We fought. Not out of hate, but because it was all we knew.
The bell rang and the circle closed. Bare feet on cold mat. No weapons. Just instinct, training, and the weight of every bruised hour we'd spent earning the right to survive.
Natalia struck first—she always did. A spinning back kick meant to test, not finish. I ducked low, feeling the wind slice past my braid. My counter was a sweep meant to take her legs, but she flipped out of reach, graceful and untouchable.
She smiled. I didn't.
A jab caught me in the ribs. Not hard enough to drop me—but enough to sting. I pivoted, blocked the next strike with my forearm, and elbowed her in the side. We moved like shadows, sharp and fast, trading blows in perfect silence. No one watching dared speak.
The instructors observed with clinical interest. One even whispered, "Two prodigies. Let's see which one breaks first."
She came at me again, a blur of red hair and trained violence. Her foot connected with my shoulder and spun me off-balance—until I let it happen. Used the momentum. Rolled. Came up under her guard.
My fist stopped a breath away from her throat.
She didn't blink.
Neither did I.
She was faster.
I was... something else.
There was a moment—just a second—when our eyes met mid-clash. And I knew she saw it. Saw me.
Because no matter how perfect my form was, or how many moves I memorized, there was something in me the Red Room hadn't put there. Something they couldn't take away.
Void.
It wasn't visible. Not yet. But it hummed beneath my skin like a promise waiting to break.
I saw something flicker behind her eyes, just for a second. Not fear. Not admiration.
Recognition.
She knew what it was to fight against the leash they tied around our necks. To smile in front of mirrors cracked by orders we had no say in. To want something more—without knowing what more even meant.
We were tools. But we were also girls. And that was dangerous.
Eight years old.
"Her cognitive metrics are irregular," one of the doctors said as I sat strapped to a cold metal chair, blinking through a haze of sleep deprivation. "She resists chemical influence. Hypnosis inconsistencies."
"And yet she's still outperforming every metric," another voice answered, clipped and unimpressed.
"She's not stable."
"She doesn't need to be."
The ballet lessons were never about grace. The etiquette classes weren't about refinement. Everything had a purpose. Posture translated into balance. Expression turned into deception.
And pain? Pain turned into obedience.
Romanova and I stopped speaking after our first year. Not by choice. Speech was a privilege. But we shared glances across the dormitory. When someone didn't come back from a training session, we never asked why. We just waited for the empty bed to be filled again.
Ten years old.
"She's a ghost," one of the handlers muttered, thinking I couldn't hear. "She doesn't blink when the others scream. Doesn't even flinch."
They said I didn't follow orders. That I hesitated before the kill.
They were wrong. I didn't hesitate.
I chose.
There's a difference. One they never understood.
The day Natalia "graduated," the dormitory felt colder.
We weren't allowed to say goodbye. But she left something behind: a hairpin, small, silver, hidden beneath my pillow. A gesture. A risk.
I kept it. Still do.
They thought they erased everything from us. That conditioning would override the rest. But even among broken things, pieces remain.
Fragments of defiance. Of identity.
Of memory.
That was the beginning.
Not of freedom. Not yet.
But of me.
Kaley.
A whisper in the dark that never quite stopped saying her name.