Black Widow (2014 series) #3

As she leaves for her next job, Black Widow encounters her neighbor Ana, spotting her black eye. Nat advises Ana to leave her abusive husband but she can’t as this is home….

In a prison in Argentina, Natasha infiltrates the place disguised as a guard and contacts a prisoner, Angelo, imprisoned for crimes he did not commit, telling him she is there to break him out. She clobbers some guards, takes him out of the building, cutting through the fence into the jungle. She did not bring guns as the guards are only doing their jobs and do not deserve to die. The guards catch up with them so Nat adopts guerilla tactics, taking down the guards one by one, even persuading a big dog to leave her alone. When she returns to Angelo on the edge of the river, he tells her that a guard fell in as Angelo was defending himself—but we see a knife in the man’s chest. After sunrise, they meet up with their contact, Vincente, with a helicopter. He calls Angelo Lobo Blanco (white wolf) which rings a bell with Nat but she can’t place it. After they take off it comes to her: he is the nation’s former dictator, responsible for mass murders. So she grabs him and dives out of the copter into the river. She stabs him and swims off, leaving him for the crocodiles. She makes her way to a safe house in Buenos Aires and calls Isaiah for an extraction. He is upset that the job failed and they won’t get paid while Nat’s expenses for the international web of safe houses are pretty high though he notes that she made the right call….

She is picked up by a SHIELD jet where Maria Hill informs her that someone in the Ukrainian Embassy in Paris is being targeted and need her to go in to find out who and why. An intercepted transmission mentions “protect[ing] ourselves from chaos.”

Nat returns to her apartment and knocks on Ana’s door. She sees new bruises on her friend so she enters and beats up her husband, telling him that if he hits her again, she will break his spine. As she goes, she again advises Ana to leave. Upstairs she tells the cat she will be there only for a short time. Home, perhaps, but only until the pain subsides.