Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,4

second thought, and who would probably, sooner or later, kill me.

I wiped my nose with my sleeve, and sniffed. A heartbeat later I felt Villanelle shift. She molded herself against me, her knees behind mine, her breasts against my back. Nudging my hair out of the way with her nose, she pressed her face against my neck. Then she folded her arm over mine and arranged her fingers around my wrist. I was still shivering, and she moved more closely against me.

Finally, as the warmth of her body possessed me, I was still. Silence enclosed us, and I imagined the snow beating at the container’s walls and roof. My arm twitched, as it sometimes does at night, and Villanelle’s hand closed around mine, her thumb firm in my palm. Taking a tress of my hair between her teeth she gently tweaked it, then licked the nape of my neck as if she were a lioness. And bit me, hard.

I arched away from her, gasping, but she grabbed my shoulders, swung me onto my back, and pulled herself on top of me so that we were face to face in the darkness, her breath beer-sour, her nose cold against my cheek. Then her tongue was in my mouth, snaking and probing. I twisted my head away. “Stop.”

“Why?”

“Just… talk to me.”

She rolled onto her side. “What about?”

“Have you ever really cared, really felt anything, for another person?”

“You think I can’t feel?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

“I feel like you feel, Eve. I’m not some freak.” She took my hand and pulled it into her panties. “Feel my pussy. Wet.”

It was. I left my hand there for a single, dizzying heartbeat. “That’s not the same as caring about someone,” I heard myself say.

“It’s a good start.”

I steadied my breath. “So have you ever been in love?”

“Mmm… Sort of. Once.”

“And?”

“She didn’t want me.”

“How did you feel?”

“I wanted to kill myself. To show her.”

“So where am I, in all of this?”

“You’re here, dumbass. With me.” Her fingers found my hair. “And if you don’t kiss me right now, I really am going to kill you.” She started to pull me toward her, but I was already there, searching for her mouth with mine.

Then we were all over each other, bumping noses, smearing lips, and blindly, desperately kissing. I felt her fingers hook into the waistbands of my thermal leggings and panties and drag them over my ankles, and as she moved back up my body I tried to pull her sweater off, but the neck was so tight that she fell on top of me, laughing and whispering that I was choking her. Sitting astride me, she inched the sweater forwards over her head. It brushed my face—warm wool, stale sweat—and then it was gone, and her undershirt and bra after it. She pulled mine off and I shuddered as the cold seized me. “We need to toughen you up, pupsik,” she whispered, wriggling out of her own leggings and panties.

All was rapt discovery. Her skin and my skin, her smell and my smell, her mouth and my mouth. Villanelle took charge, as I needed her to, and I felt her hand reach confidently between my thighs. She’d killed a man with a knife-thrust through the femoral artery. A strike so delicate, so surgically precise, that her victim was probably not immediately aware that he’d been stabbed. Could she feel the throbbing of my femoral artery? When she slid those fingers inside me, was she remembering other, bloodier penetrations? Did the warm explorations of her tongue recall more lethal partings of flesh?

Afterward we pulled our sweaters and jackets on top of us, and I folded into her back, spoonwise. For several minutes I lay there in the dark, overwhelmed, my lips touching the soft hair on her neck, which stirred as I breathed.

“It’s weird,” she said. “I can’t remember what you look like.”

“Not at all?”

“No. You could be anyone.”

I raised myself on one elbow. “Why do you like me? Truthfully?”

“Who says I like you?”

“Don’t you?”

“Maybe. Maybe I just wanted to get into your pants. Which, by the way, are not pretty.”

“Ah.”

She wriggled her bottom against me. “Truthfully, I have a thing for dorky women. Especially in glasses.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Pozhaluysta. I need to pee.”

She did so, noisily, into the bucket, which she’d lodged in the clothing bales in one corner. I followed her there and did the same, not easy in the dark, then we dressed ourselves—it was just too cold not to—and I curled up