Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,35
entire street.
We climb out and stretch cramped limbs. The building’s vast impersonality fills me with dread. Its towers are so tall that they vanish into the night sky. I’m standing next to Oxana, my back throbbing painfully, when there’s a whooshing crunch in front of me, and glittering slivers spatter my face. Grabbing my arm, Oxana drags me beneath one of the archways.
“What—”
“Falling icicle,” she says, and when I’ve wiped my glasses I see the shattered lumps in the snow, some the size of a baby’s head.
“Fucking hell.”
“Yes. You have to watch out for those.”
Lara saunters over from the Mercedes, grinning. “Another near miss?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. The idea of a spear of ice plummeting from the sky seems, at this moment, wholly unsurprising.
Anton jumps out of the driver’s seat, regards Oxana and me irritably, and locks the Mercedes.
“Take your things and follow Lara,” he orders us. “And no bullshit. Because I know for a fact that she’d love an excuse to shoot you.”
“They’d love an excuse.”
We follow Lara into a huge, dimly lit atrium from which passageways lead in multiple directions. There are marble pillars and classical details of the sort that you might find in an international railway station, but the overall effect is cheerless. A few people come and go, muffled against the winter weather, and no one seems perturbed by the fact that Lara is carrying a sniper’s rifle and an automatic pistol. There’s a shining trail of boot prints to the nearest lift, but Lara avoids this and leads us to a small alcove, and inputs a code into a wall panel. A door slides back, revealing a glass and steel lift, which whisks us with sickening speed to the twelfth floor.
We emerge into a softly illuminated space, neither hot nor cold, dominated by armored-glass windows and a huge Salvador Dalí painting of a tiger. There are doors to left and right, and a faintly ominous humming that might be the building’s climate control system or distant machinery. Beyond the windows, far below, the dark form of the Moscow river winds between snowy parks and windblown embankments.
Lara touches a button beside the right-hand door and we are admitted by a young man in paramilitary uniform, who leads us along a corridor hung with abstract paintings in hues of ivory, scarlet and vermilion, their slashing brushstrokes so exactly like knife wounds that the stitches in my back start to ache. Several other men and women in business suits pass us in the corridor, before Lara lets Oxana into one of the rooms and pointedly leads me to another. It’s painted dove gray, and undecorated except for a bronze statuette of a panther, which stands on a walnut side table.
“I’m afraid there’s no complimentary dressing gown or slippers,” Lara tells me sourly. “We weren’t expecting you to still be alive. I will collect you for dinner in one hour.”
I ease myself into a sitting position on the bed. My back is screaming now. “Can you get me a doctor?” I ask them.
“You have pain?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
In answer I ease my sweater over my head, pull up my T-shirt and turn my back to them.
“OK, looks sore.” They pause. “Why does she like you so much?”
“Oxana? I really don’t know.”
“All the time, even in bed, she was like Eve, Eve, Eve. So annoying. I’ve tried to kill you twice now.”
“I noticed.”
“Die Another Day. You saw that film?”
“No.”
“Rosamund Pike, super-cute. Pierce Brosnan, not so cute. You think I could be in a Bond film?”
“Definitely. There’s always some crazy Russian with a butch haircut and a big-ass gun.”
Lara looks at me uncertainly. “OK. I’ll find someone.”
The doctor arrives just ten minutes later. A businesslike young woman in the uniform of a Russian navy medic, with a case full of gear. She prods the stitches, feels my lymph nodes, and gives me a box of antibiotic tablets and another of painkillers. She doesn’t ask me how I came by an obvious gunshot wound, but she’s interested in the stitches. “Haven’t seen that before. Blanket-stitch suturing. Nice neat work, though.”
“My girlfriend,” I explain. “She hasn’t done much sewing since school.”
“And these marks on your neck. They look like bites.”
“They are.”
“Also your girlfriend?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Be careful, OK.”
I knock on Oxana’s door. When she answers she’s damp from the shower and wrapped in a white bathrobe. With her spiky haircut and moist pink skin she looks almost childlike.
“Do you know anything about this place?” I ask her. “Did