As a child, she was indoctrinated into the Red Room by General Dreykov , and briefly lived as the surrogate daughter of Alexei Shostakov and Melina Vostokoff while they were undercover in the United States of America. After the Destruction of the North Institute , she underwent extensive psychological conditioning, before graduating from the Red Room as a Widow.
Working as an operative for the KGB , she was targeted by S. Romanoff succeeded, although having to use his daughter Antonia Dreykov 's life as collateral damage would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Having extensive mastery in martial arts and armed with her Widow's Bite , Romanoff became one of S. During one mission, she was sent undercover into Stark Industries as Natalie Rushman to watch Tony Stark due to the fear that he was dying. During this mission, Romanoff assisted Stark with defeating Ivan Vanko 's terrorist plots against him. Romanoff assisted in recruiting Stark and Bruce Banner into the team while they tracked down and attempted to capture Loki, eventually saving Barton from his grasp.
Once Loki's entire plan had been uncovered, Romanoff joined the team during the Battle of New York and was instrumental in destroying the portal over the city which had been created by the Tesseract , effectively ending the entire invasion while Loki was defeated and deported back to his homeworld by his brother Thor. In the wake of the Avengers successfully defeating Loki, Romanoff continued her work with S.
While working together, Romanoff and Rogers uncovered a conspiracy following an assassination attempt on Nick Fury , which had eventually led to them discovering that HYDRA had been infiltrating their entire organization since its foundation. Despite the efforts of the Winter Soldier to stop them, Romanoff helped expose Alexander Pierce 's evil schemes to the world, which also resulted in all of her own morally dubious history being revealed.
