Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,41
need me because you need my girlfriend. Cheers.”
He smiles. “But is she? Your girlfriend, I mean. She seems to be getting on very well with Lara, or whatever she’s calling herself these days.”
I see what he means. On the other side of the table, Oxana is playing with Charlie’s hand, holding their gaze and nipping their fingertips between her teeth.
“If that was her trigger finger I’d be worried,” Richard says, but I’m already out of my chair and moving unsteadily round the table.
“I need a word,” I say to Oxana.
“Maybe she’s busy.”
“Fuck off, Charlie. Oxana, you heard me.”
She follows me. More out of curiosity, I’m guessing, than anything else.
Slamming the bedroom door behind me I slap Oxana’s face so hard that, for a moment, she’s shocked into wide-eyed immobility. “Enough, OK? Enough of your stupid sulking, enough of this shit with Charlie, enough of you being such a complete and utter bitch.”
My hand stings and it feels like the stitches in my back have torn open. Oxana recovers herself and flicks me a sly half-smile. “You knew what you were getting into with me. You knew better than anyone.”
“Fuck you, Oxana. That’s not good enough. You can’t go through your life saying I am what I am and that’s the end of it. You’re worth more than that. We’re worth more than that.”
“Really? Well perhaps I like how I am. Perhaps I don’t want to be what you want me to be, has that thought ever crossed your mind?”
“Yes, every day. Every single day since—”
“Since you gave up everything to be with me? Are you going to drag that one out again? Because I tell you, Polastri, it’s not very fucking sexy, OK?”
“Whatever. I really don’t care anymore.”
“Oh boohoo, you pussy.”
Walking over to the window, I look down at the figures on the pavement below, braced against the driving snow. “Listen to me,” I tell her. “The only reason I’m here, the only reason I’m even alive, is that Richard and Anton think that you care what happens to me. They need you, so they keep me around. But you know what? I think I’d rather tell them that they’re wrong, that you don’t actually give a shit about me. Then they can just put a bullet through the back of my head and get it over with. I’ve had enough.”
“Eve, I never said I didn’t care about you. Last night—”
“What about last night?”
“You heard what I said.”
“You said you loved me.”
“I meant it.”
“And then you panicked. You thought you’d given me something, some kind of power, that I’d use against you. You didn’t trust me to love you back, so you turned on me, like you always do.”
“You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you? Got all the theories. But you know something? That doesn’t make you someone who cares. It just makes you the latest in a long line of assholes who’ve been poking at my mind ever since I was a child.”
“I’m just trying to understand you.”
“Don’t. You understood me better before you met me, when I was just the worst fucking person you could imagine. A monster you had to hunt down. Think of me like that and you won’t go far wrong.”
I turn round to face her. “Oxana.”
“What?”
“We have one more night here. Two at the most. Then God knows what.” I walk toward her, and place my hands on her arms. Her muscles twitch through her thin sweater, and her depthless gray eyes hold mine. I touch a finger to the ridge of scar tissue on her lip and hear the faint shiver of her breath. “Like you said, now’s all there is. And you’re all that I have and all that I want.”
She frowns, as if trying to recall a distant memory. “I don’t feel all the things that other people do. I have to fake some of them. But I do have my own kind of love. It’s probably not the same as…” She shrugs faintly. “But it’s real.”
“I know it is.”
She looks away and I catch the flash of tears. I taste them when I kiss her.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m a mess. Just fuck me, OK?”
8
The clothes arrive the next morning. Boxes of weatherproof jackets and parkas, winter hats, trousers, thermal underwear and boots. None of it ostentatious, but all designer-branded and clearly expensive. Then a cabin suitcase for each of us, and folders containing used Russian international passports, driving licenses, credit cards and other identifying papers in the same names.
“Where