Die for Me (Killing Eve #3) - Luke Jennings Page 0,50

and say that stranger things have happened.

Physically, Charlie would make a good superhero, with their broad, sculpted features, muscled arms and statuesque body. And it may well be that audiences would overlook the homicide charge, the jail time, and the bizarre English accent. The problem, I suspect, would be the actual acting. Subtlety is not Charlie’s forte. Witness the way that they’re staring with frank, open-mouthed lust at Oxana, who’s licking the last of the curry sauce from her paper plate.

“Charlie,” I say. “It’s not going to happen.”

Their gaze doesn’t flicker. “You really don’t know her at all, do you?”

The next morning I wake at dawn, my anger dissipated, and make my way to the deck. Around me the sea heaves itself into blue-black peaks and furrows, marbled with foam. The sky is a soft gray, the wind sighs. At the westward end of the platform Nobby and Ginge are having a smoke, roll-ups cupped in their hands.

I’ve grown cautiously fond of our desolate outpost. Its physical boundaries are hard and unambiguous. For as long as we’re here, we’re alive. In the unlikely event that we stay that way, do Oxana and I have a future together?

Most relationships with psychopaths come to an end when the psychopath knows that their latest victim has succumbed, and so is no longer of interest. That’s not how it is with us. We play with the notion of Oxana as the predator and me as her prey, but that’s a game, and both of us know it. Right from the start, when she first looked into my eyes as Villanelle, Oxana recognized something that it would take time for me to understand. That we were fundamentally the same, and that in consequence neither of us could ever fully possess or control the other.

I think that this is why she acts up so obnoxiously, demanding my attention at the same time as rejecting it. She knows that I love her, but she also knows that the usual psychopathic love narrative, the one ending in my obliteration and her savage triumph, will not play out. Instead, it seems, we’re moving toward a tentative equilibrium. I know that there’s a place where I can’t follow her. Where she has always been alone, and always will be. I tell myself that I can live with that. That all I have to do is be patient. Be waiting there with open arms when she returns.

This fragile optimism endures precisely until the moment when I walk into the canteen and see Charlie and Oxana sitting there, side by side. They have the sated, sleepy-eyed smugness of people who’ve been fucking all night. Charlie’s fingers are splayed nonchalantly across Oxana’s upper thigh, and Oxana’s head is tilted proprietorially toward Charlie’s.

The whole thing is so flagrant, so bare-faced and unapologetic, that for a moment I just stand there. How have I never noticed Charlie’s fingers? Meaty, pink and spatulate, like the artisanal pork chipolatas Niko used to buy, and probably still does, from the West Hampstead farmers’ market.

“Tea, detka?” Charlie asks Oxana, fixing me with eyes the color of wet slate, and I feel my guts churn and my fists bunch uselessly at my side. I want, so badly, to hit them. No, let me amend that. Looking at those big chipolata fingers, and thinking of where they’ve been, I want to kill them. I want to kill them both.

Oxana shakes her head. She’s got her blasé, what’s-the-big-deal face on, and watches unblinking as I approach. “Eve,” she says. “Hi.”

“Fuck you,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice steady. “Fuck you both.”

“Perhaps chill?” Charlie suggests, and without even thinking about it I reach for the nearest hard object, which turns out to be an unopened can of baked beans, and hurl it straight at them. The can catches Charlie right between the eyes. They collapse sideways off their chair, slide to the floor, and stay there.

Oxana stares at me speechlessly, her gray eyes wide. “We’re finished,” I tell her, picking up the dented can, slipping a finger through the ring-pull, and shaking the beans into a saucepan. “Don’t speak to me. And I hope the two of you are as happy together as pigs in shit.”

Anton walks in, and seeing Charlie slumped on the floor, stops dead. “What the fuck’s going on?” he asks, incredulous. “You been fighting?”

I bang the saucepan down onto the Calor stove, and light the gas. “You know how emotional we women get.”

On the floor Charlie stirs