Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,31

the reception room, fearfully hugging the wall, and edge toward the open door and the entrance hall beyond. This is also dark, but I can make out the main features. Just meters in front of me, a marble-topped table has been pushed on its side, spilling a pair of heavy onyx lamps onto the floor, and behind the tabletop, in profile, crouch two men dressed in street clothes and armed with submachine guns. Beyond this pair, his body slumped over the vertical tabletop as if arrested in the course of a dive, is a third man. I can’t see who is facing them at the other end of the hall but I pray that one of them is Oxana.

Buried in darkness, breathing air sharp with gun smoke, I attempt to take stock. I don’t recognize the man nearest me; he could be one of Dasha’s soldiers. Then I see the pale chevrons of impacted snow on the treads of his combat boots. He’s just come in from the street. He’s an attacker and I decide to kill him, or try to. “… if we’re going to survive, you’re going to have to be a bit more like me.”

Very slowly, I raise the Glock, lining up foresight, backsight and the man’s ear.

And the second guy? It’s as if she’s whispering in my ear.

I’ll deal with him next, I promise her, and squeeze the Glock’s trigger.

I don’t kill him. The 9mm round smashes a hank of hair and bone from the back of his head, and as he whips round to face me, submachine gun leveled, Oxana rises into view on the far side of the room and fires two shots in fast succession. Both rounds punch through the man’s throat and he sinks to the floor, choking.

The second man returns fire but Oxana has vanished. He turns to me, and I squeeze off a round that tears through his cheek and rips one ear from his face. There’s a flare of orange at his gun barrel, and a fiery whiplash streaks across my back. I’m dimly aware of the crack of a third weapon—Dasha’s Makarov—and watch detachedly as his knees fold and a slew of brain matter pours from the side of his head.

Dasha and Oxana rise to their feet, and Oxana races across to where I’m lying. “You dumbass!” she screams. “You fucking idiot.”

“My back. I’ve been hit.”

“Sit up. Let me look.” She switches on the reception room lights, pulls off my leather jacket, and wrenches my blood-sodden sweater over my head. Sprawled in front of me in the unlit hall, just a few meters away, the three attackers lie in twisted, grotesque repose. The second attacker is still alive, and his eyes follow Dasha as she walks over to him, slaps a fresh magazine into her pistol, and fires a single shot through the base of his nose. Then she heads for the front door. “I’m going to check the stairs. See if any of my people are still alive.”

“OK,” Oxana says.

I’m so sick with guilt I can’t even look at Dasha, let alone respond. I think of Kris, lying lifeless in their bedroom.

Oxana walks away, returning with a military-issue first-aid box and a wet bath towel. It’s very cold, and as she cleans up my back I feel savage waves of pain. “You were lucky,” she murmurs. “A centimeter deeper and you’d have been paralyzed. Dasha saved your life. What the fuck were you thinking? We told you to—”

“I know you did. I wanted to help.”

“And I guess you did help. But Jesus, Eve.”

“I know. Everything’s fucked.”

“Just don’t move.” She presses the towel hard against my back. “I thought I’d lost you, you stupid bitch.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeat.

“You will be, because I’m going to stitch you.” She kneels beside me and sets to work with a suturing needle. It hurts a lot, but I’m glad of the pain. It means I don’t have to think.

“Have you done this before?” I murmur.

“No, but we did sewing at school. I made a crocodile. It had teeth and everything.”

Dasha walks back into the flat, her face wiped of all expression. She’s accompanied by two men and a woman, and she’s no longer holding the Makarov. That’s now in the right hand of a strongly built young woman with cropped blond hair, broad features, and eyes the color of slate.

I recognize her instantly from a CCTV clip that we had on file in Goodge Street. Lara Farmanyants, Oxana’s former lover and companion