The Boss had sacrificed more than any file in Langley or the Kremlin would ever record. She was a woman of strategic silences; she found no utility in the past, and rarely did she find an ear she trusted enough to hold the weight of it. Even if she had, the "Joy" she once was had been buried under decades of grey ops and black-inked redacted lines.

"It is not a usual scar, the kind you’d see from a standard emergency C-section," she remarked, her voice cutting through the hum of the overhead lights. She noticed the way your hands hesitated, the subtle pull of your brow as you puzzled over the jagged, serpentine geometry of the mark.

"I barely had a chance to hold my son. I lost him to the Philosophers before I ever truly had him. This snake I bear... it is a boundary line. A reminder of the woman who ceased to exist on the sands of Normandy."

With a quiet, rhythmic grace, she laid back on the examination table, offering herself up to the sterile lights. To the rest of Groznyj Grad, she was a defector, a traitor, a blunt instrument in Volgin’s mad hand. She played her part perfectly, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a man she considered the personification of evil, all for the sake of a country that would soon demand her head on a silver platter. This was her final mission: to be the villain so the world could stay whole.

"Do not fear to touch it," she said, her voice softening as you reached for the antiseptic. "The nerves died long ago. It stopped hurting in the physical sense decades ago. Now, the only ache it brings is... psychological. The heavy weight of the burdens I've been carrying and that will be passed onto the next person who will wield the title of 'Boss'."

A ghost of a smile touched her lips then — not one of joy, but of a weary, maternal irony. She looked up at you, her blue eyes piercing through the sterile air.

"Soon, you will find yourself acting against your own conscience. Your morals will become a luxury you cannot afford, and your country will ask you to do the unthinkable. You must find a way to live with that ghost," she warned, her stare boring into yours, "or it will kill the person inside you long before your heart actually stops beating."