Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,21

see, because you’re too fucking lazy to see. You hide behind your psycho label because it gets you off the hook. But you’re not just some walking mental health disorder, and you know it.”

“So what am I?” she sneers. “When you’ve finished choking me. Which I’m enjoying, by the way.”

“Someone who can’t deal with the fact that you have, within your reach, a real living, breathing person who has given up everything for you. Everything.”

Almost casually, Oxana drives her knuckles into my extended elbow, so that the nerve-shock jolts to my fingertips. I release her neck. Then she grabs one of my ears and a hank of my hair in each of her hands and pulls my face to hers, so that we’re eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. “So what do you want in return, Eve?” she whispers.

In response, I take her lower lip between my teeth, and bite it. Oxana exhales softly, and I taste her blood. “I want you,” I tell her. “I want to be yours, and I want you to be mine.”

We stand there for a moment, neither of us moving, just breathing.

“All the way?” she asks.

“All the way.”

She pulls her head back so that she can look at me, and slowly traces my face with her forefinger. Across my eyebrow, down my cheekbone and between my lips, which are glued together with her blood. It dries fast.

“OK,” she says. “OK.” Taking my glasses from the bedside table, she fits them carefully over my face. “There, now you can see me properly.”

“You’re still a bitch,” I whisper, taking her hands in mine.

“I know, pupsik. I’m sorry.” She looks at me gravely. “Tomorrow, we sit down and plan. Together. Dasha is getting us passports and money, but I have to do something for her. We have to do something for her.”

“What’s that?”

“Can we talk about it tomorrow?” She pulls me toward her. “Because right now I have other things in mind.”

“Really? What sort of things?”

“Just… things.”

“I’m quite drunk.”

“I noticed. Me too. But not that drunk.”

An hour later, I’m almost asleep when a thought occurs to me. “Sweetie?”

“Mmm?”

“Why did everyone laugh at me at dinner? When I said that I spent the whole week shivering. What was so funny? They all, like, pissed themselves.”

“It was your Russian. Shivering is drozhala, and you said drochila.”

“What does drochila mean?”

“Masturbating.”

“Sweetie?”

“Eve please, shut the fuck up and let me sleep.”

“What did Dasha ask you to do?”

“You really need to know right this second?”

“I really do.”

“She asked me to kill the Pakhan.”

5

The next fortnight passes swiftly, and for the first time since we left London, Oxana seems calm and focused. She’s naturally secretive, an archetypal lone wolf, and planning an assassination with me is not easy for her. It isn’t easy for me, either; murder is murder after all, even if the intended victim is a horrible person like the Pakhan. But we’ve both kept going. Oxana has begun to share her thoughts with me, and I’ve managed to ignore what she dismissively refers to as my “civilian guilt,” and concentrate on practicalities and logistics. I’ve always been good at that.

I’m touched by how hard she’s trying to make our collaboration work, and more than that, to make our relationship work. She has no instinct directing her here. She knows how to excite, manipulate and hurt me, but despite the fact that we’ve lived in each other’s pockets for the best part of a month, she still finds my feelings impossible to read. I catch her sometimes, gazing at me with her sea-gray eyes, trying to access my emotions. I find this so heart-rending. I can’t imagine how lonely it must be to have your nose forever pressed against the glass separating you from other people. To be eternally out in the cold, trying to look in.

I’ll make her feel my love, even if it kills me.

Asmat Dzabrati, the Pakhan, is sixty-nine years old. He lives in an apartment in a massive, gray seventeen-story building on Malaya Balkanskaya Ulitsa, near Kupchino Metro station. He owns several apartments there, which are occupied by, among others, his four bodyguards, his ex-wife Yelena, and his sister Rushana and her husband. He also leases a small apartment behind the Fruzensky department store, a short drive away, where he keeps his “sugar baby,” a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian woman named Zoya whom he met through an introduction agency. His family and Yelena disapprove of this relationship, and refuse to acknowledge Zoya, so she never visits the