don't blame me (love made me crazy) - PoeticallyIrritating, gaylorswift (2024)

Chapter 1: Prologue

Chapter Text

Villanelle looks good in a parka, she thinks, as she admires herself in the dusty window of a convenience store. The store is made to look like a log cabin, and signs outside advertise the sale of SODA – CIGARETTES – BAIT. The whole town smells like fish. Villanelle is sure she smells like fish too, the scent mingling with her perfume.

Fish, it turns out, is the only source of protein she can get in this town due to the cost of importing meat from warmer climates, so she’s sporting a grocery bag full of every type of salmon imaginable (fresh, cured, smoked, etc.), all purchased from the little market next to the convenience store. (She stops short of salmon jerky, though; it’s too tough and it gets stuck in her teeth.) She has developed a pleasant acquaintanceship with the elderly Iñupiat woman who runs the market, and they go through the same routine each time Villanelle visits.

“Take another fillet, Sasha,” Sylvia says. “You’re too thin!”

“And I’ll stay thin, too, eating fish for every meal. When are you going to get me a nice steak, hmm?” Villanelle puts her hands on her hips and co*cks her head to the side.

Sylvia shakes her head. “Are you going to shoot a moose for me?” And she waves Villanelle away. “Get out of here,” she says, and Villanelle does.

She’s staying a ways outside the town. It’s two miles on foot, which is not so bad during good weather, with a pair of good boots. During bad weather she stays indoors; she has no desire to relive the snow-covered treks of her childhood. If she gets too hungry she can call the local pizza joint and, as long as the roads are not closed, the owner’s son will bring her a small and expensive pepperoni pizza in exchange for a generous tip.

When she reaches her temporary home, she stamps the snow from her boots and takes them off. Salmon in the fridge, wool socks on the linoleum. She is renting the cabin from a man who lives in Florida for nine months out of the year. He doesn’t bother her except to send receipt notices for her monthly wire transfers, of which there have been two so far. From the elk heads above the bed and mantelpiece, he must be a hunter.

Villanelle thinks she would like hunting, but she does not think she would like the tedious task of skinning and preparing the creatures.

She sits cross-legged on the living room rug and peers under the TV stand. Mouse droppings. The trap she set has somehow been sprung without capturing an actual mouse, and the bait is gone. “You are a wily one,” she says to the air. She resets the trap and baits it with a dollop of peanut butter.

She turns on the TV and flips channels until she finds a true crime documentary where she can yell at the criminals for leaving evidence and the police for fumbling their investigation.

She is being normal.

She’s good at not thinking about things while she is awake. It’s when she’s asleep that the trouble starts: She closes her eyes and Eve is lying in the snow, blood staining it vivid red. She stands with the shuffle of a movie zombie and kisses Villanelle and their blood mingles on their skin, in their mouths. Or Eve is in her bed, the one in Paris but slightly off, and Eve’s hands and mouth are on her. She cries out and shudders and at the moment of climax Eve plunges a knife into her gut.

She wakes flushed and sweaty, struggling to catch her breath.

—

The mousetrap has been sprung again.

Villanelle sits cross-legged on the floor, chewing on a bagel and squinting at the growing pile of mouse droppings. She may need to come up with a new strategy.

After breakfast, she has a shower and returns to town along the now-familiar path, so recently trod that she can see her own footprints in the snow.

From the general store she purchases a five-gallon plastic bucket and a bottle of wine. Upon returning to the cabin, she realizes that she does not own a corkscrew and she does not know how to open this bottle without one.

She thinks, absurdly, that Eve would know what to do.

She places the bottle down on the countertop—a future problem—and sets to work. A steak knife from the kitchen serves to cut a jagged hole in the side of the bucket, three quarters of the way up. A length of twine stretches from the hole to the opposite end of the bucket, stuck in place at either end with superglue. She fetches the broom that she has not used from its place beside the refrigerator, and leans it so that the handle makes a walkway from the floor to the hole in the bucket. She smears peanut butter on the far end of the twine bridge. Finally, she pours the bucket half full of water.

There is nothing on TV, so she sits and watches her new trap from the bed, lying on her stomach with her chin in her hands.

The mouse must smell her. It does not show up.

She is so bored.

—

The next morning, she can see faint teeth marks in the dollop of peanut butter, but the mouse must be some kind of tightrope walker because the water is clear of mouse corpses.

While eating a piece of toast (well, bread with jam), Villanelle scours the cabin for something to make the mouse’s walk more treacherous. She finally settles on a near-empty cylindrical container of Quaker oats. She dumps the dusty oats into the trash can, and her steak knife serves to poke holes in thetop and bottom of the can. She strings it along her length of twine, and baits the trap again.

The mouse still will not come out when she is in the room, even if she pretends that she is not looking.

Villanelle opens the cosmetics bag in the bathroom and takes out dark red nail polish. She sits on the floor, leaning against a pillow against the wall, and paints her toenails. It’s a shame that nobody will get to see her burgundy nails.

—

This mouse is going to turn her hair gray.

Despite the spinning of the oatmeal can, the peanut butter has been snatched once again, with no rodents trapped in the water.

Villanelle re-baits the trap. She is running out of smoked salmon; she will have to go see Sylvia. She puts on her boots and coat and ventures out into the snowy world again.

“Hello, Sylvia,” she says pleasantly, and Sylvia greets her in return. She is wearing a long dress today over her fleece-lined leggings. They haggle over the price of salmon for a bit, Sylvia offers her trout, and Villanelle leaves with a healthy portion of both fishes.

She stops into the general store next door seeking a pack of cigarettes. She does not like to smoke, but she likes to hold them while they smolder. There is a woman in line in front of her, and the woman’s hips make her feel sick with how familiar they look. She looks away.

Her eyes snap up again when she hears the woman speak to the cashier in an unmistakable voice. Her heart thuds in her chest, and when the woman turns, she is face to face with the person she has been trying not to think about for weeks.

It is as if she has been struck by lightning.

“Hi,” says Eve.

Chapter 2: Two Months Earlier

Chapter Text

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

The gunshot rings out like an adrenaline-fueled heartbeat, loud and strong and powerful against her back. The transition to the ground happens in slow motion; not like the last half-hour, which has passed so quickly that it feels like she’s letting out the same gasp of air she took in when she sunk the axe into Raymond’s skull.

She lies there with her body splayed on the cool stone ground, and she waits. Her ears are ringing; she can’t hear Villanelle’s footsteps echoing through the ruins, can’t tell if she’s alone yet, can’t decide if it’s safe to move. She’s not playing dead, really. If Villanelle had meant to kill her, Eve would already be gone. Instead, she is acutely aware that she’s alone in remote Roman ruins in a pool of her own blood.

She takes a quick inventory of her body. She can wiggle her fingers and toes, but her pulse is beyond high, her breathing is heavy, and her head throbs like she might have hit it when she fell. She presses her hands gingerly against her wound, allowing her own blood to mix with the blood already on her hands. The flow is steady, warm, wet. It won’t stop on its own.

She takes a slow, deep breath and pushes herself into a sitting position.

The pain amplifies as she sits up, one hand putting pressure on the wound, the other holding her body upright. She wants to rest, but she has to keep going or she’ll stay on the ground until she bleeds out. With a monumental effort, she pulls herself to her feet—too quickly. White stars speckle her vision, her body sways, and she almost falls back down. She closes her eyes, willing the world to stop spinning.

It doesn’t.

She moves forward anyway. Clutching her bleeding gut with both hands, she staggers across the ruins in the same direction Villanelle went only a few minutes ago; she has a better chance of getting help if she doesn’t pass out in an abandoned underground tunnel. Walking is almost impossible with the burning pain radiating from the wound, but if Villanelle can conquer a mortal wound on her own, then she can, too.

The crumbling architecture around her seems to stretch wider, each pillar farther away than the last as she stumbles through, dizzier with every step. When she finally reaches the end, she’s surprised to see that the structure isn’t as remote as she thought; the entrance opens onto a quiet cobblestone side street. There’s a blue bicycle leaning against the side of a building across the way. She sets her sights on the promise of civilization and pushes forward. The end of the narrow street opens into a small village square that’s nearly deserted but for a full-size black sedan parked next to a closed bakery. The car’s headlights are on.

“Help!” she yells as loudly as she can. Her voice echoes through the village, but if there’s someone in the car, they give no indication that they can hear her. As her vision fades, she limps across the abandoned square to the car, crying out and waving her hands over her head.

Still, silence. Desperate, she presses her face against the tinted passenger side window and slaps her open hands on the glass, leaving sticky, bloody handprints behind. After a moment, the back window rolls down. She steps over to look through it and barely makes out the outline of a human figure she thinks she recognizes. Something in her screams that it’s not safe, and there’s a split second where she thinks it over, her crimson hands gripping the side of the car, ruined legs shaking beneath her.

Does she have a choice? Maybe. She reaches for the door handle.

When in Rome, she thinks nonsensically, and then she is gone.

—

Eve wakes up in a hospital gown in a decidedly non-hospital room. There are some features that are reminiscent of a formal healthcare setting: machines flash and beep around her; there’s an IV in her right hand and a pulse reader clipped to her index finger, and a pink pitcher of fresh ice chips sits on her nightstand. Other than that, though, it’s a normal—nicer than average, actually—bedroom. She’s lying on a huge pillowtop mattress under soft, expensive-feeling sheets. A few firm but comfortable pillows prop up her head and shoulders, not unlike a hospital bed would. She’s groggy—a side effect of painkillers, she’s sure, because she doesn’t feel much of anything except for how dry her mouth is. She reaches for the ice chips, wincing at the sharp pain in her side that appears as she activates her abdominal muscles, and knocks the pitcher right off the nightstand.

“f*ck,” she breathes, defeated, and she lets her head fall back down onto the pillows. She rests there for a moment, mind fuzzy and buzzing and blank simultaneously. Then, abruptly, she kicks off the blankets and pulls her gown up to her chest so she can see her lower half. Her whole torso is wrapped in clean, white bandages. There are extra layers of gauze stacked over what must be the entry and exit wounds, though she can’t look at them without taking the whole dressing apart. It’s artful, almost, how neat and pristine everything looks over the holes ripped through her by—well.

She runs her fingers over the rough fabric, gritting her teeth and pressing down where she knows it will hurt. The pain washes over her, breaking through the haze of narcotics to drive her back onto this plane. She pulls her gown back down to her knees and swings her legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the annoying “you’ll tear your stitches out” voice in her head as she sits up. Her body feels heavy and uncoordinated, like it doesn’t belong to her. She is seconds from pulling the IV out of her hand when Carolyn Martens appears in the doorway.

“I wouldn’t do that,” she says.

The painkillers have removed any processing steps between Eve’s brain and her mouth. “Is that a threat?”

“Merely advice,” says Carolyn. She takes a few steps into the room and lets the door shut behind her, removing any opportunity Eve might have had to examine the hallway behind her.

Eve doesn’t lie down again, but she doesn’t move any farther. She sits and surveys Carolyn, who she hasn’t seen for—well—it depends on how long she was asleep. She looks tired, but as well-dressed as ever; a plain white blouse is buttoned up to her neck and tucked into her tweed slacks.

“It seems your choices caught up with you rather quickly, Eve.”

Eve huffs out a breath. “Looks like it.”

Until this moment, she has not thought of this as something that Villanelle did to her. It was something that happened to her, to be described in the passive voice. No one’s fault. She presses her fingers against the bandage again and winces.

Carolyn raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t call Eve a masoch*st or self-destructive or insane, but Eve can see the diagnosis in her gaze.

“What day is it?” Eve asks, and it’s not until Carolyn replies “Thursday” that she realizes that means absolutely nothing to her, since she hasn’t known what day it is for a long while. As if Villanelle knocked her out of the flow of time.

“Where am I?”

“I think it’s better if I keep that to myself for now,” says Carolyn. “The important thing is that you are entirely safe, and you will not be permitted to leave.” She glances around the medical equipment set up by the bed. “I wouldn’t recommend trying, particularly in your current state.”

“So I’m what—a prisoner now?”

Carolyn sighs. “I have no interest in holding anyone hostage, Eve. But given your propensity for running headlong into the most dangerous possible situations, I believe you will be safest under my care for now.”

Eve gapes at her. “Safe? Do you think I feel safe with you after what you just did to me? To Villanelle?”

“With all due respect, Eve, your feelings aren’t important right now. I’m telling you you’re safe here, and you can either take my word for it or… well, that’s your only option.”

“With all due respect, f*ck you.”

“Yes, I thought you’d feel that way.” Carolyn pauses. “You’re upset on Villanelle’s behalf when she almost killed you yesterday.” It’s a statement, not a question, but Eve feels compelled to respond anyway. She looks down.

“If she’d meant to kill me, I’d be dead,” Eve says to the floor. She makes eye contact again. “And what she did to me doesn’t change what you did to us.”

“Officially, I don’t know what you’re talking about; unofficially, I did more good than harm, and I won’t apologize for it.” She tilts her head. “Shame, really, that you got so tangled in the whole thing.”

You did the tangling, Eve thinks, but she doesn’t say anything. She keeps eye contact with Carolyn and shifts her weight forward, standing up slowly. She recognizes her mistake immediately; she’s unbalanced and lightheaded and high on morphine or something, and her legs are definitely not going to hold her up. There’s nothing to hold onto to steady herself, so she tries to master her swaying body by rocking up onto the balls of her feet and back onto her heels. Unsurprisingly, it’s not effective. She collapses back onto the bed and groans in embarrassment and frustration.

“Graceful,” Carolyn says. “Like I said, best not to try anything in this state. You’ll have plenty of energy to make an escape attempt once you’ve healed up a bit.”

“I thought I wasn’t a prisoner,” Eve says.

“You’re not.” Carolyn turns to leave, and she looks back over her shoulder at Eve. “But you may grow to like it here. If not… I’m not taking this noose off again, Eve. Do you understand?”

“No,” Eve says.

“Excellent,” Carolyn replies. “We’re on the same page, then.” And she walks away.

A few moments later, Eve hears what sounds like the front door opening and closing; then, silence. She carefully adjusts herself back to her original position under the blankets on the soft bed, lies back onto her pillows, and falls asleep almost immediately.

—

Chapter 3

Chapter Text

Carolyn was right: it’s almost disgusting how comfortably Eve is living in this place. The room is spacious, with soft overhead lighting and light blue walls that match the bedding. Aside from the restful mattress and expensive sheets, there’s a firm-yet-cozy leather wingback chair positioned in front of an electric stone fireplace. A selection of snug throw blankets sits in a basket by the small bookshelf available for her perusal, and there’s a plush terry cloth bathrobe hanging from the bathroom door. She has everything she needs for an almost-pleasant captivity, even if she’s stuck in bed for now.

She’s only hooked up to the machines for a few more days, and she sleeps through most of that. When she’s finally wireless, she can bathe herself and take walks around the room for exercise. The nurse, Jill, comes in every day to take her vitals, check her bandages, and give her an infusion of intravenous antibiotics. Dr. Ruiz (“call me Sara”) visits twice a week to go over her numbers and look at her wounds, which are healing nicely.

“These are going to itch,” Sara says as she snips the last stitch on the exit wound. “I’ve worked with Jill a long time, and I know she keeps a stock of oven mitts and duct tape. Keep that in mind before you scratch.” She hands Eve a large tube of a moisturizing antibiotic cream. “Apply this three times daily. I’ll see you next week.”

After Sara leaves, Eve slides her hand under her shirt and feels the scabbed-over skin there. It’s rough and dry, like overcooked meat, and it itches like hell.

—

She spends her recovery working her way through a series of Steven King novels, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and several middle-grade books—all by different authors—about crime-solving cats. When she’s not reading, she’s pondering the windowless room and the door to it that is locked and bolted from the outside, and how likely it is (not very) that she’s capable of kicking down a door.

The next time Eve sees Carolyn is the day after Sara takes out her stitches. She’s on the last chapter of Leroy Fluffikins, Feline Detective when the door opens to a presence that does not belong to the medical professionals she’s grown accustomed to.

Carolyn sits down on the bed at Eve’s feet—more familiar than her ominous hovering near the doorway the last time. Eve sucks in a breath and sets down the book on the blanket. Carolyn glances at the cover.

“An excellent novel, don’t you think?”

Eve stares. “It’s…about a cat.”

“Yes,” says Carolyn, almost fondly. “This bookshelf is stocked from my personal library.”

Eve twists her mouth into an unconvincing smile. “It’s great.” She’s still trying to process that information when Carolyn speaks again.

“You look well.”

“Doing great. When can I leave?”

Carolyn’s mouth curls into something like, but not like a smile. “Again, I really don’t recommend that.”

Eve sits up straighter, moving away from Carolyn until her back is pressed against the headboard. “I’m still kind of working through the consequences of the last recommendation you made, so forgive me if I don’t give a sh*t.”

Carolyn ignores this. “Eve, I’m here to reward your good behavior.”

“I think you know that the only reason I haven’t misbehaved is because any sudden movements might rip me down the middle.”

“Be that as it may,” Carolyn continues, “I think you can be trusted to use the rest of the house.”

Eve tries to hide her surprise. She has been trapped in this room for so long that a general sense of hopelessness about getting out had settled heavily in her gut between her wounds. There would be no rescue mission, she’d realized days ago, because there’s nobody left to care where she is. She thinks for a moment. There’s no sense in putting up a fight when she’s ecstatic at the prospect of walking through a doorway.

“Okay,” Eve answers.

Carolyn rises from the bed, and Eve follows suit. There’s a keychain in Carolyn’s pocket, one of those brightly-colored spiral bracelets that always stretches too far when there’s more than one key on the ring. She selects a silver key in the middle of the ring, turns it in the lock, and holds the door open. “After you,” she says, and Eve steps past her and into the house beyond.

The first thing Eve notices is the windows. She hasn’t seen natural light in weeks, and she runs over to the tinted floor-to-ceiling glass that frames a pair of handsome oak French doors to the outside.

The second thing Eve notices is that there are bars running horizontally and vertically across every window she can see. She presses her hands against the glass and turns to Carolyn. “Remember when you said I wasn’t a prisoner?”

“It’s really in your best interest to be here voluntarily,” Carolyn says. “You’ve caused a great deal of trouble that I’m trying to undo. Until I’ve done that, you cannot go outside without putting yourself in serious danger. That’s not imprisonment, Eve; that’s protection.”

Eve leans against the window. She’s suddenly exhausted. “So you know what happened.” It’s not a question.

“I know that you killed Raymond,” Carolyn says. “I can’t say it’s a great loss for the world, but it does require some damage control.”

“I chose Villanelle.” The name tastes bitter on Eve’s lips. “When you betrayed her—us—I chose her. You left us. Why are you putting so much effort into protecting me now?”

Carolyn raises her eyebrows. “Frankly, Eve, you have knowledge about our operations, and you would be extremely easy to torture for information.”

“Right,” says Eve. “Great. Thanks.”

—

After Carolyn leaves, Eve explores her new surroundings. This house is nothing like the place they’d kept Bill in; on the contrary, it looks like it’s been pulled right out of an HGTV special. She starts in a large living room with hardwood floors, expensive furniture, and a high, vaulted ceiling, which transitions into an open kitchen sporting white cabinets and granite countertops. On the wall adjacent to the front door is a wide flat-screen television above another stone fireplace. A tall arch beyond the kitchen leads to the rest of the house. Aside from what Eve thinks of as the “hospital room,” there are three spacious bedrooms; two are decorated in a simple, neat guest room style, and one has been converted into an office. She has no use for an office here, but she goes in with a book sometime anyway because sitting at the desk makes her feel almost normal.

There’s a Blu-ray player and a shelf of movies (also from Carolyn’s personal collection) in the living room, and Eve makes her way through the shelf slowly, watching one movie every night. She’s surprised by the number of romantic comedies—she was expecting action or thrillers—and she doesn’t mind at all.

She’s sprawled on the couch, watching Legally Blonde and eating salt and vinegar chips, when there’s a knock at the front door. It's polite and gentle, like the visitor is asking permission to come inside rather than just announcing their presence. She’s sure she’s imagining it; Carolyn never knocks, and it’s not time for Jill’s weekly visit yet.

But the knock comes again, more insistent this time. She pauses the movie and sits up slowly, brushing the chip crumbs off her chest and wiping her greasy hands on the sweatpants she’s been wearing for three days. The blinds on the windows by the front door are open, but it’s dark outside and she’s not at a good angle to see anyway.

There’s no point in hiding; if someone already knows she’s here, they’ll find her no matter what. Her hand is on the doorknob when she remembers she can’t open the door from the inside. She tries the peephole, but the porch light isn’t on and she can only make out a vague figure standing a few feet away. She clears her throat and presses her ear against the door.

“Hello?” she calls.

“Eve?” The voice is familiar. Her eyes widen and she steps back. “It's me. I’m going to unlock the door.” A key slides into the top lock, then the bottom lock, and finally the heavy metal latch between them. The door creeps open.

“Hello, Eve,” Kenny says. “Can I come in?”

—-

They sit in silence in the living room for a while, Eve on the couch and Kenny on the chair across, holding cups of tea and avoiding eye contact. The tea is still steaming, but Eve quickly drinks hers down to the dregs and stares into her mug, focusing on the escaped leaf bits that stick to the bottom. After a few more minutes, Kenny leans forward and places his full cup on the coffee table.

“So,” he says.

“What are you doing here?” Eve asks quickly, looking up from her mug and finally catching his gaze.

“I came to see you,” he answers.

“Well… you saw me.” A beat. “Your mom’s a real dick. Do you know that?”

“Most of my life is dealing with that,” Kenny answers. She can see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows hard. “And sometimes it means doing something that’s going to piss her off. Like this.” He reaches into his pocket and produces a car key, dangling it from his index finger. She looks at it. It’s an older key with no remote buttons and a silver Toyota logo embossed on the plastic handle.

Eve pulls her eyes away from the key to meet Kenny’s. “What?” is all she can think to say.

“You’re not safe here,” Kenny says.

“I know,” says Eve. “So...what? A safehouse Carolyn doesn’t know about?”

“Something like that.” Kenny shifts uncomfortably, looking down at his knees. His corduroy trousers make him look like a schoolkid, and if he’d had a different mother, Eve might have pictured her picking them out for him.

Finally, Kenny reaches into his knapsack and pulls out a scrap of paper. He hands it to her.

Eve squints down at it. “Draw a...cholera...axe man?”

“Porter Cove, Alaska,” Kenny says.

“Your handwriting is terrible.”

“I know.”

She doesn’t need to ask what’s in Alaska. The heartbeat that’s grown practically sluggish during her life of leisure is alive again, thudding in her neck and chest. “How do I—”

Kenny digs in his knapsack once again, and this time he looks like he’s holding back a smile as he pulls out a manila envelope. “I wouldn’t leave you stranded.”

Eve spreads the contents out on the coffee table. It’s all there: a falsified passport, plane tickets, cash, and even black and white printouts of maps surrounding airports.

“Sorry,” he says, as she fingers the black lines crossing the page. “My printer never works right.”

“No, Kenny, this is—what exactly is this?”

“It’s a life, if you want it.” He gives her time to examine the items more closely. Stamped on the passport and license is the name “Tracy King,” paired with an unflattering photo she can’t recall ever taking.

“I doctored a candid Elena showed me,” Kenny explains.

“I can’t believe someone actually caught me looking at the camera,” she says, moving the booklet towards her face and squinting.

“Elena said it was Bill,” he says quietly. A pang of something—she’s not sure exactly what—moves down her body like a cold, cracked egg. She’s stuck there for a short, almost unnoticeable moment, and then she’s back.

She picks up the plane tickets next—there are three of them, all with her new name—and maps out the route in her mind. The final destination is Nome, Alaska.

“I have no idea where this is,” Eve says, holding up the last ticket.

“I didn’t either until a few days ago,” says Kenny. “It’s only accessible by plane, actually. Or dogsled, but I don’t know if you’re ready for that yet.”

“Watch me,” Eve counters. She looks at the ticket again and notices two words in small, bold print in the top-right corner.

“Whoa. First class?” Eve raises her eyebrows.

Kenny throws his hands up. “Just that last one,” he says. “There was only a thirty dollar difference, and you have a long layover in Anchorage. There’s a lounge. You’re welcome.”

Eve says nothing. She puts down the tickets and rifles through the maps. The most detailed one shows Nome and the surrounding areas, which means it’s mostly a blank page. To the west, there’s a star drawn in blue ink above Kenny’s atrocious handwriting: Porter Cove. She turns to him.

“There are no roads here,” she says. He takes the map from her and inspects it closely.

“No, here’s one,” he says, running his finger along a jagged line Eve had taken to be a mistake from Kenny’s faulty printer.

“Okay,” she says. “There’s one road here, and it doesn’t go anywhere near Porter Cove. How am I supposed to get there?”

Kenny shrugs. “I can get you this far,” he points to the large dot indicating Nome’s town center, “But I think you’ll have to improvise from there. A lot of the information I’ve been able to get is outdated. I did find a little bed and breakfast near the airport, though. One and a half stars.” He points to an address scribbled at the top of the page. “Should be fun.”

Eve clutches the map and keeps looking at the page, but she’s not focusing on it anymore. She’s thinking.

“You tried to warn me,” she finally says. “Before everything happened in Rome, you tried to warn me. You told me not to go.”

“I did,” Kenny replies. He looks like he doesn’t know where this is going, and Eve’s not sure either. They stare at each other. Kenny speaks first.

“So,” he says. “What do you think?”

She looks down at the maps she’s holding, at the things strewn across the coffee table, at the now-cold tea resting on a coaster, and she thinks about saying it: I’m sorry, if only in exchange for everything that Kenny has just dropped into her lap. But she’s not sorry, so she looks up and says brightly, “Can I take your cup?”

Kenny doesn’t answer; instead he stands up and hands her his knapsack. “Grab some clothes and come on. We need to go.”

Eve hurries into the bedroom and begins shoving clothes into the bag, not paying attention to what she’s grabbing or how wrinkled everything will be when she takes it out. She briefly looks down and examines the outfit she’s sporting now: sour grey sweatpants, dirty socks, and the only shoes she’s been given here (navy plaid moccasin-style slippers with rubber soles). Everyone feels gross when they travel, she reasons; she’s just getting a head start.

She takes one of Carolyn’s cat books.

When she’s done, she comes back out into the living room and finds Kenny standing by the chair where she’d left him. He nods his head silently and he’s at the door in three strides. Eve follows, her steps shorter than Kenny’s, punctuated with something like a spring now that freedom is so close. She turns in the doorway and takes a last look at the palatial prison that has detained her for weeks.

“Good f*cking riddance,” she says, and she slams the door behind her.

Chapter 4

Chapter Text

The car in the driveway is a silver Yaris that looks like it’s at least fifteen years old. Kenny unlocks the doors manually and she slides into the passenger seat, tossing her knapsack into the back. The seat is too far forward, so she reclines a little and leans back onto the headrest.

“Seatbelt,” Kenny orders as he starts the car. Eve gapes at him.

“Seriously?” she asks. “We’re escaping your mother’s guardhouse and you’re worried about my seatbelt?”

“I’m planning on flooring it out of here,” says Kenny, grinning. “You’ll fly out the windshield if you’re not strapped to that seat.” He shrugs. “Plus, last thing we need right now is to get pulled over.”

Eve buckles up.

Despite his warning, Kenny backs out of the driveway carefully, checking the rear view and side mirrors in the complete absence of street lights. Eve is about to comment when she looks over and sees a wide grin on his face.

He straightens out the car, and then he floors it.

They drive for a while on a narrow, winding road of dirt and gravel with the high beams on and the radio off. There’s the occasional tree in otherwise flat, grassy fields, but there are no houses or other landmarks to speak of. Eve is almost impressed by Carolyn’s remote-location scouting abilities, but the resentment that has been boiling under her surface quickly wins out.

Now that she’s back out in the world, Eve is confronted with the reality that she’s been trying to avoid since she woke up all stitched together: Carolyn ruined her life before she saved it.

The dark path eventually sees light on the outskirts of a quiet town peppered with mom-and-pop shops and small, sleepy houses. Eve’s eyes follow the slopes and valleys of the angled telephone poles now lining the road, her head bobbing along as Kenny steers around curves. They reach something like civilization and hit the motorway a little over an hour into the drive.

“How long is this supposed to take?” Eve asks, breaking the long silence.

“About four more hours to Manchester,” Kenny answers, glancing at the clock on the dashboard. “Heathrow is closer, but Mum could have people there if she finds out you’re missing.”

Eve closes her eyes and pictures the route she’d mapped out earlier: Manchester to Seattle, Seattle to Anchorage, Anchorage to Nome. Nome to Porter Cove, though she’s not sure how she’s going to manage the last leg of the trip. She’s going to be in the air for a full day. The first flight alone is thirteen hours.

“Okay,” she says. “Maybe I should have changed my pants.” She runs her hands through her hair anxiously, grips at the roots, and pulls hard. The dull pain is grounding in a way, and she hates it. Slowly, deliberately, she lets go and brings her hands back down into her lap.

“I have to pee,” she says.

“We just got going!” Kenny complains.

“Fine.” She cranes her neck and looks over at the fuel gauge on the dashboard. “You’re going to need gas soon anyway. I can wait.”

They drive at least another forty miles before Kenny pulls off the highway and expertly navigates the side roads, selecting the petrol station that looks most likely to have a useable bathroom. While he fills up the car, Eve wanders into the attached convenience store. It’s empty except for the kid behind the counter, whose dyed black hair falls over his eyes while he chews a lollipop stick. She makes her way through the aisles, passing shelves of chips and Sour Patch Kids when she stops among the travel-size deodorant and shampoo. Hanging next to the bins is a small selection of hair brushes, bobby pins, scrunchies, and the like. She catches a glimpse of herself in one of the upside-down handheld mirrors and stares at her distorted reflection. Her eyes look sunken. She is decaying.

The clerk is rearranging the lighters when she shows back up at the register. She swallows. “Do you have any scissors?”

He reaches into a mug of capless ballpoints and pulls out a pair of heavy metal scissors. The hinge is loose, so the scissors hang open, the halves spread wide and dangling as she slides her index finger through one of the loops.

“Where’s the toilet?” she asks. The kid points to a narrow door partially blocked by stacked blue bins of plastic soda bottles. She makes for the door and pushes the boxes a foot to the right so she can open it.

The bathroom is hot, damp, and about as gross as she’d expected. The grey tiled walls are grimy and graffitied with black Sharpie in the usual fashion (crude drawings, phone numbers, opinions on people she’s never heard of), and there’s a line of wet toilet paper trailing on the ground from the toilet to the door. The visibility conditions are less than ideal—the dirty mirror is cracked like a spiderweb from the center, and the dim yellow light flickers on and off—but her mind is made up.

She braces her hands on the sides of the sink, scissors hooked around her right thumb and index finger, and looks at the crack in the mirror, her eyes never quite focusing on her own image. Then she grabs a bundle of hair and saws through it with the scissors until the tension goes slack and she is left with the uneven result, shorter on one side, with ends that tickle the inside of her ear. The hair drops from her hand onto the floor, and she takes the next chunk in her fist and starts again.

After a while—she’s not sure how long—Kenny knocks on the door.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Stomachache,” she calls back, brushing some hair off her shoulder. “I’ll be out soon.”

She lied; it takes a long time. Her hair is the kind of thick and unruly that bewilders beauty school students, and when she’s done, she is surrounded by a veritable island of dark hair.

To her own eyes, she looks the same. Tired. Zombie-ish, even. Just with a dumber haircut.

Lacking a broom and dustpan, Eve gathers the fallen hair with her hands and dumps it into the wastebasket. Tiny hair clippings poke her back through the thin fabric of her shirt and stick to her face, neck, shoulders. Her stomachache is real now, settling in her gut just behind her bullet wound.

She does actually pee before leaving the bathroom. On the way out of the store, she grabs a bottled coffee beverage and a large bag of the Sour Patch Kids she’d seen earlier. When she pays, she gives the scissors back to the cashier. He examines them briefly, then drops them back in the mug where he found them. As he counts out her change, the kid finally looks up at her.

“Nice haircut,” he says.

“Thanks,” Eve replies. “It’s new.”

—

Kenny’s jaw drops when she climbs back into the car. For a moment, he’s speechless.“What?” Eve asks, bringing her hands up to her hair—God, it feels weird—and fluffing it like a movie star. “You don’t like it?”

Kenny looks like he’s about to say something, then shakes his head and changes course. “Looks good.”

Eve buckles her seatbelt and tears open her candy package, offering Kenny the first one when it turns out to be dark purple. “Want it? I hate currants.”

Kenny obligingly takes the sugar-encrusted sweet and then heads back onto the motorway.

They sit largely in silence as they go exactly the speed limit. Kenny flips through radio stations until he comes back around to the beginning and shuts the stereo off; Eve hits the lock/unlock button on the door over and over again until Kenny tells her to stop before she breaks something.

Finally, Eve speaks. Her throat feels dry as she says, “So why are you doing this? Just to screw over your mom?”

Kenny shakes his head, eyes on the road. “I don’t know,” he replies. A pause. “Not like you deserve it.”

Eve’s staring out at the road, listening to cars whip by going the opposite direction. Stray hairs itch her neck and back. “Okay, then. But why send me...there?” She can’t say her name out loud, not to Kenny.

Kenny snorts. “I don’t mean to be rude, Eve, but where else are you going to go?”

Eve thinks about Niko, about home, and can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. So much for the new windows. She starts to think of the things she’s left behind—favorite shoes, beloved books, diamond earrings from their fifth anniversary. Her dad’s ashes in the back of her closet, never properly scattered because it never seemed like the right time.

Jesus, if she keeps this up she really will start to cry. She stuffs a handful of Sour Patch Kids into her mouth and turns the radio back on, chewing until the candies form a sticky mass.

—

The airport is always eerie after dark. Voices are hushed, haggard-looking people lay out jackets on the floor in preparation for an uncomfortable night’s sleep, and runway lights stretch into the distance outside. With Kenny’s knapsack on her back and a coat from his trunk over her arm, Eve steps up to the British Airways ticket counter and tries to look like she’s not having a continuous panic attack as she hands over her documents.

Uninterested and unperturbed, the clerk scans her passport and ticket. “Not checking a bag, then?”

Eve shakes her head.

“Right, you’ve had a gate change, let me print you a new boarding pass.” And then the documents are back in her hand and she’s being directed to security. Looks like Kenny did his job.

As she enters the sparsely populated line for security screening, she does a frantic mental check of her clothes and bag to make sure she’s not carrying anything suspicious or dangerous. But even if she’d had a weapon, Carolyn would have quickly dealt with that.

When she reaches the front of the line, she removes her slippers and hoodie and places them in the plastic bin. It’s cold. Before she can wrap her arms around herself, the security agent calls her forward and she stands in the scanner, feet apart, arms up in a pantomime of surrender. When the agent stops her, her stomach drops, but they just pat the places where her sweatpants are bunched up and send her on her way. Her heart is still pounding when she reaches the other side and can sit down gratefully on a bench to put her slippers back on. She wonders if you can buy winter boots in an airport.

When she finds her gate and gets comfortable in the most isolated seat she can find—she’s early, so there are a lot to choose from—she realizes she’s starving. With a groan, she stands back up and begins scouting the terminal for something that’s still open. She passes a small coffee shop, a few convenience stores selling soggy pre-packaged sandwiches, and a pub-style restaurant that looks like it’s about to close. Then, around the corner, she sees a glowing white-and-red sign that fills her with the kind of joy she hasn’t felt since before this whole mess started: there’s a KFC in the Manchester Airport, and it’s open late.

There’s no line, so Eve is at the counter in seconds. The cashier is a short, blonde woman, probably in her mid-thirties, with a cheerful smile and perfect dimples. Her name tag reads “Mindy.”

“Welcome to KFC!” Mindy greets her. “What can I get for you?”

Eve scans the menu for a moment before she finds what she’s looking for. “Um… Can I get a six-piece bargain bucket, a side of coleslaw, and a large Pepsi?”

Mindy repeats her order back to her perfectly while Eve digs into her pocket and hands her a few folded bills. She scoots to the other side of the counter under the “ORDER PICKUP” sign and waits for her food. It comes out in just a few minutes, and she picks it up gratefully.

There’s a deserted seating area nearby. She finds what seems to be the only table without crumbs or sticky residue and settles in on the hard plastic chair. Then, she turns her attention to the bargain bucket. She starts with a drumstick, obviously. The chicken is a little warmer than room temperature, like it has been sitting slightly off-center under a heat lamp for hours. The skin is soft and soaked with grease.

It’s perfect.

She takes breaks between pieces to munch the coleslaw and sip her drink. Twenty minutes later, the coleslaw cup is empty, the Pepsi is drained, and only the bones remain in the bucket. She wipes her mouth and fingers with the tower of napkins on her tray, then walks to the bin and dumps the evidence before looking for a bathroom to wash her hands.

While she fights with the sensor on the automatic sink, she catches her reflection in the mirror. The lighting is better here than it was in the gas station bathroom, so she gets the full image of her new haircut. It’s asymmetrical in a way that would almost be trendy if it weren’t so triangular. She reaches up to feel the ends. They’re choppy and frizzy, and little pieces of stray hair come off on her wet hands as she runs them through her curls. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, feeling the ends sweep the back of her neck. It’s strange, but not unwelcome. Tearing her eyes away, she dries her hands and heads back to her gate.

There are fewer empty seats than there were before her KFC interlude, but she still finds one by an outlet so she can plug in her phone while she waits for her flight.

The flight is overfilled and she’s grateful she has nothing to carry but the knapsack. She shuffles along the jet bridge with the other passengers, and when she reaches her row she discovers that her seat for this twelve-hour flight is a middle seat. She will have to have some strong words with Kenny.

If she ever sees him again.

Eve has been trying to avoid this particular train of thought for weeks now, but since talking with Kenny in the car, it’s become more and more difficult. The panic of the airport was sufficient distraction for a while, but now… Staring out at the darkness of the runway across an already-snoring seatmate, she can’t help but wonder if she will ever see this stupid island again. (More idly, she wonders if she’ll come back in a decade and they still won’t have sorted out Brexit.)

Her other seatmate takes his place next to her, and the standard pre-flight announcements begin as they taxi onto the runway. Eve fades in and out of awareness until takeoff begins, and then she watches the lights of the city fall away beneath her, growing smaller and smaller until the plane breaks through the cloud cover and she can no longer see any trace of her borrowed home country.

The flight attendants come by with dinner practically before they have leveled off. Eve begins to regret her coffee earlier; she didn’t think to buy anything sleep-inducing at the airport, and when she tries to purchase wine, she is kindly informed that she cannot use cash for in-flight services.

“Right,” she says. “Never mind.”

As the flight attendant moves along to the next row, Eve tries to settle into her queasy, jittery exhaustion. Having filled up on fried chicken, she only picks at the provided meal and returns it nearly untouched. Once the flight attendants have picked up the dinner trays, the cabin lights go off and the man in the aisle seat nods off with his chin against his chest.

After sitting awake in the darkness for what feels like an hour but is probably more like twenty minutes, Eve turns on her overhead reading light, ignoring the grumbled protest of someone in the row behind her. She thumbs through the in-flight magazines, reading snippets of interviews with C-list celebrities, and travel writers rhapsodizing about Bermuda’s hidden gems. She fills in three answers on a crossword puzzle before giving up.

It feels like her scar is throbbing, even though she’s pretty sure that scars don’t have nerve endings. She moves her seatbelt from where it is pressing against the healed wound, but it doesn’t help.

She would kill for some wine.

The rest of the flight passes just as fitfully. She gets a few minutes of sleep here and there, but by the time she arrives in Seattle she feels sick to her stomach with exhaustion. Clutching her customs form, she tells the agent that she’s returning home from a year abroad, and he waves her through. An American passport earns barely a second glance.

She checks the next ticket in the packet that Kenny gave her and feels her stomach twinge when she sees the airline’s logo, just the word Alaska running up the side.

In this airport she remembers to buy some Benadryl. Once she boards the plane she chews two of them and passes out against the window, having finally overcome the churning stomach keeping her exhausted body from sleep.

When the bumpy landing wakes her with a jolt, it all rushes back in an instant. She wishes for a Xanax, though she suspects that the situation she’s about to enter might test the limits of chemical intervention.

She remembers Kenny’s talk of a long layover, and a lounge. She stumbles into the terminal and follows the signs to the Alaska lounge, which blessedly comes equipped with a bartender who pours a heavy glass of red. The lounge has a three drink maximum, but after two glasses she is feeling pleasant and fuzzy enough to stretch out in a chair in the corner and wait out her layover.

The final flight is uneventful, and by the time of her arrival in Nome, it has circled around to dark again. Local time is 8:35, and though this seems like a standard time for darkness to have fallen, the pilot informs them (with perhaps a bit of Schadenfreude) that the sun won’t rise again until after 10 am the next morning.

Eve gets a cab to the one-and-a-half-star bed and breakfast. She goes to bed wrapped in half a dozen blankets to counteract the faulty heater, and tries to ignore the pounding of her heart.

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

Eve wakes to darkness. Out of habit she reaches for the warm body to her left, but there’s nothing but air and the scratchy feeling of a polyester duvet cover—not her bed. Not her home. She flips the bedside lamp on, and her adrenaline spikes as soon as the room comes into view, all maroon-and-navy carpet and bland wall art of flowers.

Lately it seems like the only time she's not panicked is when she's unconscious.

She has no way of knowing what time it is: her cell phone is dead, and based on the flashing of the alarm clock on the bedside table, there must have been a power outage during the night. Maybe it still is night, but with the thudding of her pulse in her ears there’s no way she’s going back to sleep.

She stands up, bleary-eyed, and steps into the bathroom, flicking on the fluorescent light that buzzes into action on the ceiling. Her reflection peers back at her: a tired woman with a bad haircut.

Continuing to earn its low rating, this B&B appears to have no hot water available, and there’s a visible layer of grime on the shower floor. Eve runs the water until she's sure that it's not going to warm up, and even knowing what's coming, she yells aloud when she steps under the freezing spray. Her shout echoes in the small porcelain space. She showers in under a minute and comes out gasping; she grabs a towel from the rack above the toilet and rubs her skin with the starchy terrycloth until it’s pink and irritated.

She wraps her wet-but-not-clean hair in the towel and looks into the mirror again. She can’t remember the last time someone really looked at her body, even herself. It’s changed in subtle ways, and she looks at those instead of the misshapen scar above her hip bone. She looks weakened from the time spent recovering, any burgeoning muscle development lost during her stay in Carolyn’s makeshift hospital. She breathes in, and thrusts her shoulders back on the next exhale, setting her jaw and making eye contact with her reflection.

When her hair dries, the cut still looks amateurish at best. She tries to at least put it back and out of the way, but it turns out it’s too short even for a ponytail, and the strands on the sides fall away immediately, leaving her with a hairstyle that would be childish for a ten-year-old, let alone an adult woman.

She lets the hair fall back to its natural shape and digs through Kenny’s knapsack for clothes, pulling out a pair of jeans and a warm-ish jumper. The sun is finally rising as she finishes getting dressed. She remembers the comment from the pilot about sunrise; she must have slept for ten or twelve hours.

She goes to stand by the window. Looking out at the orange and yellow light streaming across the icy landscape, Eve can kind of understand why she would want to come here.

“Villanelle,” she says out loud. Like trying out a prayer after a long time away from church. Her breath fogs up the glass.

—

The breakfast portion of the bed and breakfast is nowhere to be found, and when she inquires at the front desk, Eve is told that the motel is referred to as a B&B for “historical reasons.”

She returns to her room and pulls out the binder on the dresser advertising local businesses. Scanning the wrinkled pages, she makes a mental list of priorities: food, boots, Villanelle. It’s hard to put the list in order, but she finally decides she should spend as little time as possible wearing slippers in the snow.

There’s a sports store about half a mile away that seems like it could plausibly stock winter gear. Upon feeling the freezing air through the cracks around the window, Eve reconsiders her attire and dumps the entire knapsack onto the floor. She layers the two shirts, sweatshirt, and jumper she brought with her, and pulls on every pair of socks she can find. The whole bulky ensemble is topped off with Kenny’s puffy winter jacket. (He pulled it out of his car and handed it to her, mumbling something about not sending her to Alaska without proper clothes.)

The walk to Dave’s Sporting Adventures takes about fifteen minutes at the leisurely pace made necessary by her slippers. It’s a standalone shop with an obnoxiously bright red sign in the window that reads “UP TO 50% OFF SUMMER APPAREL” in bold yellow text. A bell rings overhead as she walks in, calling unwanted attention to her. She looks around, trying to avoid eye contact with the staff to convey that she doesn’t want help, and it’s then that she realizes what “sports store” means in Nome: it’s a gun store. The walls behind the L-shaped checkout counter are lined with shotguns and mounted animal heads. Camouflage clothing of all varieties hangs on the racks in front of her, which gives her hope that the guns are primarily for hunting, but that hope fades away as she approaches the counter. The glass display case is full of smaller guns—handguns and revolvers. There’s even a little gun that looks like the one she saw in Villanelle’s hand weeks before, if a little newer.

There’s a man behind the counter with a flat-top hairstyle and a bushy silver mustache. His name tag says his name is Jeff. He catches her looking at the small handgun. “That’s a nice one,” he says, placing his dry, weathered hands on the glass. There are nicotine stains on his fingers. “It’s a Heizer Defense PKO-45. Perfect for lady hands. On sale—only seven-ninety-nine. You interested?” He reaches for the handle of the unlocked case.

Eve is tempted to ask to see the gun, to hold it, to feel her hand around the cold steel and pull the unloaded trigger so she can experience what she felt, but she doesn’t. “I’m just looking for some winter boots,” she says instead.

“Oh,” Jeff says, disappointed. “We’ve got some hunting boots over there.” He points to the back corner of the store, past racks of camo and displays of fishing equipment. The summer apparel promised by the sign in the window is nowhere to be found.

She follows Jeff’s directions and ends up in a small section with boots of all materials and structure. She finds a pair of bulky waterproof duck boots lined with a thick layer of shearling, but they’re two sizes too big. She catches sight of a sign printed on lime green copy paper on the wall that reads “NEED A DIFFERENT SIZE? JUST ASK!”, so she looks around for an employee, hoping she won’t need to go back to Jeff. She finds what she’s looking for in the fishing section. A kid wearing a faded brown flannel and a baseball cap is stocking tackle boxes with his back to her.

“Excuse me?” Eve says. The guy starts and drops what he’s holding, nearly taking down everything else on the shelf with it. “Sorry,” she says as he turns around. His name tag says TRAVIS. “I’m just looking for a different size in these boots.” She holds up the shoes and smiles awkwardly. “Do you have a women’s eight?”

“Maybe,” Travis says. “I’ll have to check.” He picks up what he dropped and takes the boot from her, leading her back to the shoe section to wait. She wanders around, picking up some of the other boots on display without really looking at them. Travis is back in just a few minutes with a big shoe box.

“You got the last one,” he says as he hands her the box. She sits on the bench there and tries the boots on. They fit and they’re surprisingly comfortable. The soft shearling takes her back to the Connecticut winters of her childhood; she hasn’t needed winter boots in decades.

“I’ll take them,” she tells Travis. Then, catching sight of a shelf of aerosol sprays on the wall, she asks, “Which one of these should I use to treat the leather if I’m doing a sh*t ton of walking tomorrow?”

“It depends,” he says. “Are you walking on a path, or are you going off road?”

“I’m not sure,” she answers. “I’m walking to Porter Cove.”

“No no no, you can’t walk to Porter Cove. Not in these. Not in any of these.” He gestures to the shelves of boots around them.

“How am I supposed to get there?” she asks. “It’s not like I can drive.”

Travis pauses. Eve can see he’s turning something over in his mind. “I’ve got a snowmobile and a day off tomorrow. I can take you there.”

Eve considers turning down the offer, or at least pretending to be polite enough not to inconvenience him. She’s not even that worried about him being a serial killer because she has been there and done that and she’s not afraid anymore. As graciously as she can manage, she says, “That would be so great. You have no idea. Thank you.”

“No problem,” he says. “We have to watch out for each other up here.”

Eve’s not sure what he means by that, but she doesn’t ask. He reaches over to the shelf of aerosol sprays and grabs a can.

“Use this one,” he says. “And get some wool socks. You’ll need them.”

—

The following day, Eve checks out of the B&B and returns to the café where she found breakfast the day before. Her eyes glaze over while she orders, and it’s only when she’s paying that she realizes that she ordered a dozen donuts in addition to her breakfast sandwich and coffee. She stuffs one into her mouth and dumps four liquid creamer singles into her coffee, along with a sizable helping of sugar.

She’s been instructed to meet Travis outside the store at nine a.m., which means the horizon is just starting to turn gray when she walks up to the bright red snowmobile. Travis looks her up and down—brand new boots and gloves, one bag of supplies. “You goin’ for the day?” he asks.

Eve tries to suppress her irritation at being asked questions about her life, since the kid is using his free time to give her a ride for nothing but the twenty she promised him. “I’m meeting someone,” she says.

“So you won’t be needing a ride back or anything? ’Cause there’s not a lot that goes out of Porter Cove. They’ve got an air strip, but it’s pretty much cargo or personal planes.”

“Thanks,” Eve says. “I got it.” She is very careful not to think about what might happen if she doesn’t find Villanelle.

“All right,” says Travis. He pauses, sighs, and then hands her a slip of paper. “Once we get outta Nome you’ll lose cell service. But if you can get to a landline or a satellite phone, this is my cell and the store phone. If you’re in trouble, give me a call.”

Eve tucks the paper into an inside pocket of her coat. “That’s...thank you.”

“All right,” he says, swinging his leg over the seat of the snowmobile. “Hop on.” He indicates the perch behind him, and Eve—ignoring the part of her brain screaming at her to leave the state now without ever setting eyes on Villanelle—does. The engine roars underneath them, and her heart thrills.

It doesn’t take long to get outside the city, and when they do, Eve’s stomach drops at the great expanse of nothing spread out in front of them. She pictures the snowmobile flipping and the two of them with broken backs, freezing to death because no one is around to hear them scream. She pictures Travis the nineteen-year-old dragging her to a cabin and slitting her throat.

As they pick up speed, Eve’s distracted from her thoughts of dying in the Alaskan wilderness because it starts to feel like she’s being repeatedly slapped in the face. Travis had her zip her jacket all the way up, so her mouth and chin are shielded from the well-below-freezing air, but from nose to forehead she feels like she’s on fire. She ducks down so that the top of her head takes the brunt of it, but when she can’t see where they’re going, she can picture nothing but the fiery crash when the snowmobile collides with a tree.

She lifts her head again and watches the wilderness speed by, scrunching up her face against the wind.

It seems like forever before they see smoke rising in the distance, and Travis calls out, “There! Porter Cove,” barely audible before the wind carries his voice away.

They finally come to a stop in what appears to pass for the town center—three rugged-looking buildings set along a path used by snowmobiles and pedestrians. Each has a sign: one for General Store, one for Fish and Meats, and one for Post Office. There’s no one to be seen.

“About what you expected?”

Eve blinks. Seventy-two hours ago she was in a highly secure room in England. “Sure,” she says. “Exactly.” She digs into one of her coat’s many pockets and pulls out the twenty she promised him.

Travis brings his hand to his forehead and salutes. “Thanks very much, ma’am.”

Eve stares back at him. “Yeah,” she says. “Sure.” She’s definitely back in the US.

Once Travis has mounted his snowmobile and faded into a red dot in the distance, Eve turns to the buildings behind her, and at random, she picks the general store and steps inside.

A bell rings to signal her entrance, and an older man shuffles out of the back and to the wooden counter. “Hello, ma’am. Can I help with anything?”

Eve steps up to the counter and casts her eyes around the items there. None of it seems even slightly useful to her—the counter displays are mostly of fishing lures—and she finally settles on one of the red and white peppermint candies that are piled in a wicker basket next to a laminated hand-written sign that says they cost, ludicrously, a dollar each. She picks one up and places it on the counter.

“Is that all?” He gestures to the items behind him. “Cigarettes? Lotto?”

“That’s all,” says Eve.

“All right then. A dollar even.”

She finds a five in her wallet, and waits while the change is counted out into her hand.

“Pleasure doing business,” says the man.

The door jingles again, signaling another customer.

Eve nods. She wants to ask—has he seen her, does he know her—but the words die before they reach her throat.

She turns around to go, and suddenly they are face to face. The wide eyes she recognizes have gone wider with shock.

“Hey,” says Eve.

There is a long pause.

“Hi,” says Villanelle. “Your hair looks like a triangle.”

Chapter 6

Chapter Text

They stand face to face, two deer in headlights. Trying to read Villanelle’s expression, Eve makes the reflexive, self-conscious gesture of reaching for her hair, but the new length means that she misses and her hand brushes her neck instead.

Within an instant, Villanelle composes herself; a familiar mask slides onto her face and she smiles. “You came,” she says. Like they had the time and place appointed in advance.

“I came,” Eve echoes. She holds out the peppermint candy she just purchased. Her hand looks far away.

Villanelle shakes her head with a faint laugh. “Keep it,” she says. “Do you have a place to stay?” The politeness is eerie, and Eve crosses her arms in a protective gesture.

“Not here.” She worries the fabric of her coat back and forth between her fingers. “There’s a motel in Nome…”

Villanelle tilts her head. “Come with me.”

“Didn’t you have something to buy?” Eve asks, helpless.

“It’s not important,” says Villanelle. She walks out the door, and the bell jingles.

Eve mumbles another thank you to the cashier and follows Villanelle, legs carrying her forward without her conscious intervention. It feels as if she’s in a dream.

They can’t walk side by side on the narrow path that Villanelle is taking, so Eve can only see the back of her parka. For a moment she imagines that someone else is leading her into the wilderness. The thought sends a chill through her, and she realizes that she feels...safe...with Villanelle. Or—at least, safer than she would with anyone else.

It’s a long walk. Eve has more time to think than she would like, and she tries to focus on her footfalls instead, the already-trod snow crunching under her new boots. Villanelle stops for a moment to point out rabbit tracks, and Eve catches herself smiling at the simple joy of it all, even though she can easily picture Villanelle breaking the rabbit’s neck. Spilling its blood on the snow.

The thought makes something twinge inside her, a familiar mixture of disgust and fascination and maybe something else, something more physical and urgent.

They go on. As the trees around them become more dense, Eve wants to make a joke (“You taking me somewhere to finish the job?”) but her throat is too tight to speak.

The forest finally opens up again to reveal a small log cabin, the kind that Eve didn’t think existed outside of the nineteenth century. Villanelle turns a key in the front door and gestures for Eve to enter. Her bulky, bundled frame would almost be comical if Eve were in a laughing mood.

She steps inside. It smells musty, but not so different than other buildings she’s entered in Alaska—not a window has been cracked in the entire state since the end of fall. The cabin is done in shades of red and brown, and taxidermied animal heads are mounted on the walls.

She raises her eyebrows at Villanelle as they stamp snow off their boots. “You take up hunting?”

Despite the years of dust buildup on the specimens, Eve allows herself a moment of hope: maybe Villanelle could take her murderous urges out on the wildlife; maybe they could be normal. She would eat venison every day. She would wear furs.

Villanelle makes a tch sound that almost resembles a laugh. “I’m renting,” she says.

Eve thought that once she saw Villanelle she wouldn’t be able to stop the words from spilling out of her, but now that she’s here, she can barely speak.

It seems like she can see almost the entire cabin from her spot by the door. The kitchen to the left looks sparse—she can’t imagine Villanelle is much of a chef, and the main features are a coffee maker and some dirty dishes. A small living room is visible through a doorway straight ahead, its main features being the TV and the brown leather couch draped in a plaid blanket. The bedroom is to the right, similarly decorated. Rather than make assumptions about how long she’s going to be staying here or where she might sleep if Villanelle offers, Eve drops the knapsack by the door and deposits her boots and coat next to it.

Villanelle sheds her outer layers as well, and even though she’s wearing pants and a long-sleeved shirt, watching her remove her scarf and coat feels oddly intimate. Eve looks determinedly away.

They stand in uneasy silence until Villanelle perks up and turns toward the kitchen. “Coffee?” she asks. Eve makes a vague mhmm sound and Villanelle gets to work, setting up a filter and adding scoops from the large plastic container of Folgers on the counter. Eve almost wants to laugh at this picture of Villanelle, who has always seemed more suited to café au lait in Paris than to scooping discount coffee grounds into a stained kitchen appliance.

Eve is still standing by the door the next time Villanelle turns around. Villanelle rolls her eyes, as if Eve is being silly. “Sit, Eve” she says, gesturing to the small table adjacent to the kitchen, and Eve jumps to comply as if she’s been struck by a cattle prod.

They are silent again until Villanelle brings over two full mugs of coffee, a canister of powdered non-dairy creamer, and a package of sugar that has a spoon handle sticking out from the opening. Villanelle matches Eve’s sugar consumption spoonful for spoonful, and Eve feels something like a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

After she has taken the first sip, Villanelle asks—determinedly casual—“So how did you find me? No offense, but I never thought you were much of a tracker.”

Stung, Eve wants to say that she uncovered Villanelle’s location through days of research and interviews. But Villanelle would know she was lying, and it’s a stupid lie anyway. Still, she senses that revealing the truth would mean giving up whatever advantage she might have here. She stays silent, lips pressed in a line.

Rage crosses Villanelle’s face for an instant before she recovers back to an expression of pleasant indifference. “Eve,” says Villanelle, and there’s a tenderness there that feels false. “What is the purpose of keeping this from me?”

Eve’s stomach twists. She could say: Maybe I want to have something you need. Insurance. Instead she says, “Let’s talk about something else.” From this angle, she can see a big plastic bucket through the door to the living room, set oddly in the middle of the floor, and she seizes on it as a way to escape the silence that threatens to consume them. “You have a leak?”

“A mouse,” says Villanelle. She doesn’t look away from Eve.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

Eve takes a swallow of her coffee too quickly, and she sputters as she burns first her tongue and then her throat, a fine spray of coffee covering the table in front of her.

Villanelle looks on, amused. “You should be more careful, Eve.”

The repeated use of her name should feel like the tactic of a pushy salesperson or a hostage negotiator. But now there’s a lilt in Villanelle’s voice that makes Eve wonder if she just likes saying it.

“Thanks,” says Eve. She’s trying for sardonic, but it’s hard to tell how it comes across when her tongue feels like it’s being rubbed with coarse sandpaper. She blows on the coffee before taking another sip. Even as she looks determinedly at the grain of the wooden table, she can feel Villanelle’s eyes on her.

They sit in a silence that is more pregnant than tense. There is so much to say.

“So,” Eve says, still not looking up. “How have you been?” It seems like a stupid question in the moment, but Eve finds that she genuinely wants to know the answer.

“I am so tired of eating fish,” Villanelle answers, throwing her head back dramatically.

“I’m… sorry?” Eve says.

“It is horrible. You will understand when you’ve been here long enough.” Villanelle says this nonchalantly, but Eve understands that it is a question. She takes another slow sip of coffee, then brings her eyes up from the table to meet Villanelle’s.

“I guess I will.”

—

When they finish their coffee, Villanelle takes their mugs to the sink and starts doing the dishes. Eve takes the time to take in her surroundings. Her initial assessment of the cabin was mostly accurate—it is a bit drab and bare—but Villanelle has added some personal touches that she didn’t notice before. The plaid blanket on the couch is plush and soft, clearly made by some luxury brand Eve has never heard of. A modern brass lamp with bright globes branching off the center pole looks out of place by the TV. The fluffy duvet in the bedroom would have looked perfect in Villanelle’s chic French apartment, lavish and expensive and exceedingly comfortable. Eve wonders if these touches make Villanelle feel more at home here, and what “at home” feels like to her. Cool flat.

Villanelle comes out of the kitchen holding a hand towel, which she is using to dry off her damp hands, and Eve jumps like she forgot she was here.

“So,” Villanelle says. “What do you want to do today? Oh—are you hungry?”

The donuts from earlier are now sitting heavy in Eve’s stomach. She shakes her head, the motion so small as to be barely perceptible. “I ate.” She can still feel herself avoiding eye contact.

“Okay.” Villanelle puts her hands in her pockets, a gesture that could imply shyness or co*ckiness depending on the situation. Eve truly can’t tell here; it’s not the bravado that she had while trying out undercover personas in a rented living room, but it doesn’t seem timid either. More like an animal that hasn’t finished sizing up a potential threat.

“We could go for a walk, to a place I know. It’s beautiful there. But only if you won’t be too cold.”

Eve nods. “I’m fine,” she says, even though so many years in temperate England have ruined any tolerance she had for temperatures below freezing.

“Do you have a scarf? It helps.”

Eve shakes her head.

“I have an extra,” says Villanelle, and she pulls a heavy knitted scarf off of a hook on the back of the door. She hands it to Eve, and Eve takes it, watching her hand move like a stranger’s: within an inch of Villanelle’s hand, but touching only woolen yarn. The scarf is long; she wraps it twice around her neck and feels warmer than she has in months.

Villanelle puts on her own scarf, burgundy to Eve’s gray, and they dress together, pulling on boots and hats and jackets. They head through the door. Villanelle locks it behind them and Eve wonders who could possibly find them to break in.

This path is not as well-worn as the one into town; it’s snowed since the last time someone walked it, and the only indication of a path is the lack of trees and the slightly concave surface of the snow. They can walk side by side now. It’s slow going; the snow comes nearly to the tops of their boots. Their breath crystallizes in the air, and as they go farther, Eve can faintly hear Villanelle’s breathing get heavier. The sound moves something inside her, like a string being plucked.

They don’t speak until they crest a hill, and then Villanelle lets out a delighted sigh. “There,” she says, and Eve doesn’t have to ask. Spread before them is a perfect frozen lake, its mirrored surface reflecting a fuzzy, softened image of the surrounding trees. The gray skies from the early morning have given way to a bright blue, and the ice is tinted to match.

“Wow,” says Eve.

Villanelle glances at her, and Eve can see a small smile on her lips. “You should see it at sunset,” she says. “It’s…breathtaking.” She’s not looking at the lake.

Eve mentally berates herself for the blush that she can feel creeping up her neck. It’s a stupid line. She’d make fun of anyone else for it, but her words still feel caught in her throat, so all she can do is let the warmth spread to her ears and look away from the intensity of Villanelle’s gaze.

“Do you want to sit?”

The long underwear under Eve’s jeans has just made the cold air bearable, but the extremely not-water-resistant fabrics are in no way suited for sitting on the snow-covered rock that Villanelle is indicating. She walks over anyway. She does her best to brush it off before sitting down, but almost as soon as she does so, the remaining snow begins to melt and soak into the fabric.

She stays seated anyway, her ass getting progressively more cold and damp as time passes. Villanelle sits next to her. She seems to have done a one-eighty from earlier, no longer looking at Eve like a specimen under a microscope—or, maybe more appropriately, a bug under a magnifying glass in the sun. Now Villanelle seems not to notice her presence, staring out at the frozen lake as if it has some kind of spiritual significance. Eve tries to be as interested as Villanelle seems, but apparently the majesty of nature can’t hold her attention. It’s pretty; that’s all.

Villanelle shifts her weight to lean back, moving her gloved hands to support her. For an instant, her glove brushes Eve’s.

Eve snatches her hand away without thinking. Villanelle seems not to notice, except for a twitch so minute that Eve might have imagined it.

Eve is well on her way to numb when she finally ventures to speak. “Hey, Villanelle?” Villanelle jerks to attention. Is this the first time she’s said her name? “If we stay out here much longer I’m going to have a frostbitten ass.”

“Of course,” she says, with a wink. “We would not want you to have an amputation.”

Eve rolls her eyes. If it were anyone else, she would elbow them. (She imagines it for a moment—the casual, silly intimacy that emerges in comfort and safety.) “Thanks.”

They get up, brush themselves off, and trek back to the cabin. They remove their winter clothes in the entryway for the second time, and Eve is startled to realize that this already feels like a routine.

“You should shower,” says Villanelle. “It will be the fastest way to warm up.”

Eve nods. “Towel?”

Villanelle supplies her with an impressively fluffy and white one. “The taps are backwards. Hot is cold, cold is hot.”

From the knapsack Eve picks out a change of clothes from her limited options and carries them into the bathroom with her, intensely aware of her desire to be fully dressed when she comes back out. She places them folded onto the closed lid of the toilet and turns on the water, which comes out of the shower head in an irregular but generous stream.

She steps into the hot shower. It warms her—first painfully, as the feeling comes back to her butt and toes, and then comfortably—and she emerges feeling more human than she has in days, wearing a pair of blue-and-white plaid pajama pants and a waffle-textured thermal shirt, her hair wrapped in the towel.

Villanelle is sitting at the kitchen table, and as Eve unwraps her towel-turban and rubs at her head, she asks placidly, “Why did you cut your hair?”

Eve doesn’t look at her. “Needed a change.”

Villanelle makes a hm sound.

Her heart thuds as she asks, “What, you don't like it?”

Villanelle hums again. Eve throws the damp towel over the back of a chair and runs her fingers through the wet, tangled strands, and a twisted sense of victory settles in her gut.

Villanelle springs up from the table and says, “Are you ready for your first fish meal?”

“Sounds great,” says Eve, and finds that she means it. The time spent in the cold is catching up with her, and her stomach has become a yawning pit.

Villanelle turns back as she heads into the kitchen. “Please put your wet towel away, Eve. There is a hamper off of the living room.”

Eve ignores her and sits down on the chair. The towel makes her back damp.

As it turns out, Villanelle is actually a decent cook. She serves grilled salmon on a bed of wild rice with a side of (frozen) roasted broccoli. It’s even plated nicely. Eve longs for a lemon wedge to squeeze on the fish, but as soon as she takes a bite she’s satisfied with what she has. The fish is fresh and flavorful. As she goes for her second bite, she realizes Villanelle is watching her. Eve looks back at her, fork halfway to her mouth.

“Do you like it?” Villanelle asks. She hasn’t taken a bite yet, and Eve realizes that she has taken and eaten food made by a known killer without question. She starts to lower her fork back down to her plate, but Villanelle’s eyes flick to her descending arm so she stops, hovering awkwardly a few inches above the table.

“It’s good,” Eve answers. “Thanks for cooking.”

“I use a special marinade,” Villanelle says, picking up her own fork and taking a bite. “Don’t worry. You’ll get sick of it.”

There are easier ways for Villanelle to kill her, Eve reasons, than sprinkling a tasteless poison like a spice onto her salmon, or roasting her broccoli with a cyanide-infused oil, or whatever assassins learn in their targeted cooking workshops. She returns to her meal without trepidation.

It's only seven-thirty when they finish dinner, and after a moment of silence, Villanelle speaks. She takes a long breath before she does so, and the gravity of her expression makes Eve's stomach seize up.

“Eve,” she says. “Do you…want to watch a movie?”

Eve could have laughed with relief. “Sure.”

“Good,” says Villanelle. “Let's look at the DVDs.”

The DVDs are in a wicker basket next to the TV in the living room, and they each pull out a stack. Eve feels dizzy; she can't process the reality of sitting on the floor with Villanelle, sorting through action movies like they’re twelve-year-olds having a sleepover. She places several installments of the Fast and the Furious series in the “no” pile. The next movie to appear is Thelma and Louise, and she hurriedly hides it underneath Fast Five, the spine with the title facing away from her and Villanelle. If there’s any worse time to watch Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon drive hom*oerotically off of a cliff together, she can’t think of it.

Villanelle selects Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and sets up the DVD player, grumbling about the multiple remote controls required while Eve settles in, seated against one of the couch’s arms with her feet tucked under her and the plaid blanket pulled over her lap. Once the DVD menu has loaded, Villanelle sits down on the other end of the couch, not quite against the arm but definitely a few feet from Eve. As Angelina Jolie flips through the air, Villanelle glances at her. “Can I have some blanket?”

Eve freezes for the slightest moment. Then, eyes locked on the screen, she slides half of the blanket between them. The blanket isn’t long enough to cover both of their laps fully when they’re sitting this far apart, but Eve pretends she doesn’t notice and lets part of her left leg hang out. Out of the corner of her eye, Eve sees Villanelle look down at her uncovered leg and smile.

“Don’t be silly, Eve,” she says. For a moment, Eve thinks she’s going to scoot closer, and a feeling she can’t quite identify—panic? excitement?—shoots sharply up her spine and lodges in her throat. Instead, Villanelle takes the blanket off them both and rotates it ninety degrees. “It’s longer this way.”

2000s Angelina Jolie is now nude, in a tasteful PG-13 way, and Eve freezes with her eyes just to the left of the screen. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Villanelle glance at her with an expression that might be a smirk. And then the moment is blessedly over, and Eve relaxes against the arm of the couch as the movie continues. By the time Lara Croft has saved the universe and killed the bad guy, her heart rate is almost normal.

—

Villanelle doesn’t put up much of a fight about taking the bed; she likes her creature comforts, after all. But before Eve has even begun to make up the couch, Villanelle comes back into the living room and thrusts a plush pillow in her direction. “The ones on the couch are uncomfortable,” she says.

It should be suspicious, all the simple kindnesses that Villanelle is offering her. But it’s just a pillow, and the square throw pillows on the couch are scratchy and misshapen. Eve grumbles minimally before accepting it, and only regrets it a little when Villanelle walks out looking like she’s won something.

The light switch for the living room is by the door, so Eve flips it off and finds her way back to the couch in the semidarkness, pulling the blanket over her body and letting her head fall into the borrowed pillow.

She hears the light in the other room click off, and the faint glow coming through the doorway disappears.

“Good night, Eve,” calls Villanelle softly.

Eve doesn’t answer, but as she turns onto her side she breathes in and catches a faint smell—of Villanelle’s perfume, and maybe salmon.

She should be afraid to close her eyes.

She’s not.

Chapter 7

Chapter Text

For not the first time lately, Eve wakes to unfamiliar surroundings and her heart thuds as she rubs sleep from her eyes and wracks her memory to determine if she’s been kidnapped-slash-rescued, or just went to sleep somewhere new. She can’t help the sigh of relief she feels as the living room of Villanelle’s cabin takes shape in her vision.

The open DVD case is still on the floor. The first rays of dawn—or rather, late morning—are peeking around the edges of the blackout curtains. Eve smells coffee.

She sits up and makes an effort to smooth down her hair before walking into the kitchen, where Villanelle sits at the table with a mug and a book. Across from her is another mug, full instead of half-empty. Eve swallows.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” says Villanelle. “I poured you coffee, but it’s probably cold now.”

Eve sits down anyway and takes a sip. It’s getting down to lukewarm, but Villanelle put cream and sugar in for her in somehow precisely the right ratio. “It’s okay,” she says.

“Sit down,” Villanelle says, gesturing to the chair across from her. It’s a suggestion rather than a command; Eve sits. “How did you sleep?” Villanelle asks.

“Fine,” Eve answers. It’s true, too. She slept better than she has in weeks, even though Villanelle’s couch is smaller and less extravagant than the bed back in Carolyn’s prison-slash-safehouse. “I think I drooled on your pillow,” she adds.

“I have a washing machine,” Villanelle says, shrugging. “I was thinking of doing laundry today. Do you have anything you need washed?”

Eve thinks about her wet socks and the sour sweatpants she wore for days. “I do, actually,” she answers. “I only brought two pairs of pants.”

Villanelle’s eyes roam down Eve’s body, taking in her wrinkled clothes. “I’m going to wash everything you have,” she says. “I have some things you can borrow.”

“Um. Okay,” Eve says hesitantly. “Thanks.”

They sit in silence for a little while. Villanelle goes back to her book Eve sips her coffee. When the cup is drained, Eve stands up. “I’m going to take a shower,” she says.

“Okay,” Villanelle says. “There are clean towels in the linen closet. Let me get some clothes for you.” Eve starts to protest that she can use her towel from yesterday, but it has disappeared from the chair back where she left it, presumably into a hamper somewhere. Villanelle disappears into her room for a minute and returns with a soft lavender t-shirt and yoga pants.

Eve appraises the yoga pants and her own figure just long enough to figure that they’ll probably fit her—just maybe a little long. She feels very little real urge to compare her body to Villanelle’s, or even to give it much thought beyond the desire to strengthen her weakened muscles.

She has just pulled her shirt over her head when she hears Villanelle’s voice. “Eve! I need your pajamas. I’m going to start a load.”

Eve freezes in the act of undressing, feeling suddenly exposed by the presence on the other side of the door. Stupid. She steps out of her pants and underwear, and quickly wraps the towel around her body. She pulls the door open only a crack, allowing just enough space to shove the offending articles through.

“You don’t need to be so precious,” says Villanelle. “I’m not going to peek at you.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you,” Eve calls back at the retreating footsteps. She waits until Villanelle is gone before she takes the towel down and turns the shower on.

The water is warm and soothing, and Eve slumps against the side, letting the water run down her chest, her stomach, her thighs. As if her own mind is determined to prove her wrong, she suddenly can’t stop thinking about her body—or rather, about how much thought Villanelle has given it. She feels flushed.

Almost without realizing, certainly without meaning to, she’s drawn her hand to the soft skin of her inner thigh.

She pulls it away, crosses her arms over her chest instead.

But who is Villanelle to get in her head, anyway? Just because she masturbat*s in the shower doesn’t mean she’s doing it about anyone. f*ck it.

She lets her hands drift downward again, but between her racing thoughts and the way her legs are braced to keep her upright, all she can manage is some inelegant rubbing that gets her nowhere but frustrated. She emerges from the bathroom in Villanelle’s clothes, glowering.

“Hello, Eve,” Villanelle says. “Your ass looks amazing.”

There’s a familiar urge that might be I want to stab you, and might be...something else. Instead of any of that, Eve raises her eyebrows and says, “Shut the f*ck up.”

—

Over the next few days, they fall into a routine. Villanelle wakes up before Eve every morning and has coffee ready for her when she rolls out of bed at least an hour later. They eat a lot of fish. On warmer days, they walk down to the frozen lake and stand in silence for an unquantifiable length of time, staring out at the ice until they can’t feel their faces and they go back to the cabin for hot chocolate.

One day, when they’re running low on fish and coffee, they go into town. They walk the two miles or so in near silence, which Villanelle breaks from time to time to point out an interesting landmark.

“And this is where I saw a caribou taking a huge sh*t,” Villanelle says. Eve appreciates the interruptions. She likes knowing what Villanelle has been doing in Porter Cove without her.

When they get into town, Villanelle immediately steers them toward the fish market. She beckons Eve with a wave of the hand, and Eve’s instinct is to reach out and take it, to let herself be led like a child, but she doesn’t.

“There is someone I want you to meet,” Villanelle says. She gestures to an elderly native woman sitting behind a truly enormous display of fresh salmon on ice.

“Sasha!” the woman says. “It has been too long!”

Eve looks at Villanelle. Sasha . So many identities.

“Good morning, Sylvia,” Villanelle says. “This is my friend, Tracy.”

Friend. Is that what they are?

“Nice to meet you, Tracy,” Sylvia says. “Do you like fish?”

“I do,” Eve answers. She’s sick of eating it every day, but she’d rather not insult this woman’s livelihood.

“Good,” Sylvia says. She starts piling thick cuts of fresh salmon onto a scale and wrapping them paper without asking what they want. “You are as thin as Sasha. Sylvia is going to take care of you both.”

“I still don’t see any moose,” Villanelle says, narrowing her eyes playfully.

“Moose is not what you want,” Sylvia says, taping the paper on a filet and stacking it neatly on the pile. “Elk is better. It’s less chewy.”

“Fine,” Villanelle says, pulling out her wallet to pay for the fish. “Shoot me an elk, then.”

They return to the cabin a few hours later with enough coffee, fish, and hot chocolate supplies to last at least a few weeks. They bring back a pizza from the only Italian-ish restaurant in all of Porter Cove to give themselves a break from fish for a night. Villanelle puts away the food while Eve changes into Villanelle’s clothes and her own ratty sweatshirt.

“I got you a present,” Villanelle says when Eve emerges from the bathroom, reaching into the bag from the convenience store where they picked up coffee and milk. She pulls out a new deck of playing cards and presents them like Vanna White. Eve doesn’t know what she expected, but it certainly wasn’t game night.

She chuckles low in her chest. “Oh, I’m going to kick your ass.”

Villanelle smirks. “Good luck.” She sits down at the table and opens the box; Eve follows suit, sitting down across from her. Villanelle cuts the deck in half and shuffles expertly a few times, never breaking eye contact.

They spend the evening eating bad pizza and playing Egyptian Ratscrew, Gin Rummy, and Spit. They teach the games the other doesn’t know, and the wins are split more or less evenly between them—they laugh more than they ever have together. As they move from round to round, Eve realizes that this does feel something like friendship.

Chapter 8

Chapter Text

It’s been nearly a week, and Eve is starting to feel...something adjacent to safe. She has gone on a solo trip to the general store, where the man behind the counter now recognizes her, and as she trudges through the snow she’s thinking about watching a movie, playing cards, different ways to fill the next day in her new life of leisure.

She climbs the front steps, duly salted for minimal slippage, and when she opens the cabin door she sees—a familiar bulky figure sitting at the table with Villanelle, laughing over a cup of coffee. Her stomach drops.

“Welcome home, Eve,” says Villanelle brightly. “We have a guest.”

The figure turns, revealing dark eyebrows and a white beard. “Hello,” says Konstantin. “I thought you were dead.”

Eve’s heart is pounding in her ears. “Hi,” she says. “I’m not.” She stands and stares; the snow clinging to her coat is starting to melt and drip onto the floor.

“Come on, Eve, join us,” says Villanelle. “You must be freezing.”

Numbly, Eve sheds her outer layers and pulls up a chair.

Villanelle and Konstantin continue their conversation, which is lively; the only sign that their interaction hasn’t been all friendly is a faint bruise swelling on Konstantin’s cheek. They’re talking about people and places that Eve has never heard of, and the longer they go, the closer she comes to popping a blood vessel. Finally, in a momentary lull, she speaks up. “Konstantin, what the f*ck are you doing here?”

“Oh yes,” says Konstantin. There is a long pause that seems designed specifically to drive Eve insane. Finally he looks at Villanelle and asks, “Do you want to tell her?”

Villanelle waves her hand. “You are better at this kind of thing.”

Konstantin shifts his gaze to Eve. Eve doesn’t like looking at him; his bruise is turning purple and his face gives her the creeps. Instead she watches her hands folding and unfolding on the table. “You are not safe here,” he says. “No matter how remote a location you choose, if you stay there long enough...you will be found.”

Eve closes her eyes. She feels suddenly exhausted. “What do we matter to anyone anymore?”

Konstantin chuckles. “You’re almost right,” he says. “The Twelve have washed their hands of you both. And I think Carolyn believes you have had enough chances. But you two made a rather dangerous enemy when you took down Raymond.”

Eve suppresses a wave of nausea. An axe blade cutting into flesh, hitting bone. Thunk.

“The Twelve may not care anymore,” he says. “But Raymond had a partner, and she is…” He smirks. “Ruthless. And highly loyal.” He grows more somber. “She hasn’t found you yet. But she will.” He slurps the end of his coffee, tilting the cup back. “I have given Villanelle some information about her. What you do with that information…” He pushes back his chair, and stands up, supported by his large, sturdy hands on the table. “If it were me I would stay on the move. But I am a coward.”

He walks out. The door shuts behind him, and they are left in silence. Eve’s vision seems to have narrowed so that only what’s right before her eyes stays in focus; everything else is blurred.

“So,” says Villanelle. Eve can barely make out the words. “What do you say? Do we go on the run?”

“I have a headache,” says Eve. It’s not even starting to get dark, but she curls up on the couch and tries to sleep.

—

After going to bed in the middle of the afternoon, Eve wakes in the early hours of the morning, with no hint of light in the sky. At this point in the early spring, the amount of daylight is increasing at a rate she’s never experienced—the sun is up for an hour longer than it was a week ago—but the daylight hours are still skewed late in the day.

In the time that they’ve been here she’s never woken before Villanelle. The bedroom door is partway open, and Eve glances in. The only light on is the one over the stove, and she can only see the vague shape of Villanelle in bed: sleeping on her side, lightly snoring. Something twinges in her gut, and she turns away quickly and goes into the kitchen. She feels more lucid this morning, but with a genuine headache pounding at her temples, and she starts brewing coffee by the stove light.

By the time Villanelle wakes up, Eve has finished most of her huge mug of coffee and is considering the rest of the pot.

“You’re up early,” Villanelle says. There’s a questioning way about her movements, her voice, the way she tilts her head toward Eve.

“Mm.” Eve takes another sip of coffee. “So what do you have on our, uh…” She can’t decide on a noun. Target? Would-be assassin?

“Enough,” says Villanelle. “We can find her, if we want to.”

Eve’s mind has been racing all morning, but nothing has brought her closer to a conclusion. She is so tired. “What do you think?” she asks, knowing what the answer is going to be.

“I think we should stop her before she has a chance to stop us,” says Villanelle. She hasn’t stopped looking at Eve, staring at her like she’s waiting for a telepathic communication.

“Okay,” says Eve in a near-whisper. “Okay.”

—

Villanelle has done another load of laundry. Eve’s clean clothes are folded on the couch where she’s been sleeping, and in a daze, she stuffs them into the knapsack. Around her, Villanelle is stripping all her personal belongings from the cabin with ruthless efficiency.

Eve hoped they might be able to take a commercial flight from Nome, but Villanelle nixes that idea quickly. “A fake passport is okay when no one is really looking for you. Now we have to be untraceable.” She co*cks her head to the side. “What about your little friend with the snowmobile? Maybe he has a plane.”

They walk into Porter Cove to use a phone and make arrangements with Travis, who seems thrilled to have another opportunity to take his snowmobile out—even more so when Eve mentions she’s traveling with a friend and Villanelle says a sultry “hello” into the phone.

Travis doesn’t have a plane, but as it turns out, he has a friend who has an uncle who has a plane, which he uses to fly down to the lower forty-eight to buy up hard-to-find items for reselling. “Ammo, mostly,” Travis said. “Plus some fresh fruit.” They set a price and a date, and suddenly this has all become very, very real.

—

Villanelle’s luggage is suspiciously light, Eve thinks, as she watches Villanelle haul two medium-sized duffel bags down the path toward Porter Cove proper. Eve is comfortably toting her knapsack containing her now-clean sweats, several pairs of socks, and the deck of cards they’ve been using nightly since Villanelle brought them home. The walk takes the same amount of time as usual despite the additional baggage, so they have time to stop at the general store for something breakfast-adjacent. Eve buys a pack of six mini powdered donuts wrapped in plastic, and Villanelle chooses an extra-long Slim Jim.

“We have one more stop to make,” Villanelle says as they leave the store. “It’ll only take a minute,” she assures Eve, who has begun anxiously checking her watch.

She leads them back to the fish market where Sylvia sits in her usual spot, handing a very full bag to a large man in a fur coat.

“Sasha! Tracy!” Sylvia says when she sees them. “You’re back so soon!”

“We were hungry,” Villanelle says, looking at Eve. Their uneaten fish lay forgotten in the freezer next to the broccoli.

“Yeah,” Eve chimes in. “Your salmon is delicious.”

“Thank you, dear,” Sylvia says, smiling. “It’s caught fresh every day! Do you need more?”

“Not yet,” Villanelle says, gesturing at her duffel bags. “We’re going on a trip. We just wanted to stop in and get some jerky for the road.”

“A trip! Where are you going?” Sylvia asks.

“We’re not sure,” Villanelle says, making eye contact with Eve again.

“We’re going where the road takes us,” Eve adds.

“Do it while you’re young, you two,” Sylvia says. “You’ll appreciate it when you’re old like me.” Eve almost snorts. She’s not exactly young, but she’ll take it.

Sylvia hands them a bag full of salmon jerky. When Villanelle goes to pay, Sylvia holds up her hand and shakes her head.

“This one’s on me,” she says. She mimics a toast, holding an invisible champagne glass up to a clear sky. “To youth.”

—

They meet Travis at the same spot where he dropped Eve off, just over a week ago.

“Thanks again for doing this,” Eve says when she reaches him.

“No problem,” he says. “Like I said, we have to stick together around here.” He looks Villanelle up and down. “Nice to meet you,” he says. “Sasha, was it?”

“Sasha,” Villanelle agrees in her regular Russian accent, stretching out a hand for him to shake. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Nice handshake,” Travis says as he pulls his hand back. He takes their bags and loads them onto the snowmobile. “Hop in,” he says. “And hang on.”

The ride back to Nome is as smooth as it reasonably can be on the back of a utility snowmobile. By the time they slow to a stop in front of Dave’s Sporting Adventures, Eve’s face has been numb for about an hour, and her ears are ringing from the roar of the engine. After climbing to the ground, Travis and Villanelle are immediately steady on their feet, but Eve hobbles around for a minute until she gains her footing.

“See ya,” Travis says easily, waving goodbye as he re-mounts the snowmobile to return it to wherever it gets parked. “Safe travels.”

Villanelle blows him a kiss, and Eve rolls her eyes.

Travis’ friend’s uncle is named Silas, and he meets them at the landing strip, which is a short walk away. The plane looks older but sturdy, with a pointed nose and twin propellers, and an orange stripe down the side. The engines are already running, the roar too loud to shout over. The propellers whip around; as they get closer Eve pictures her head neatly severed from her body, flung into the distance by the force of the blades. Silas opens up a hatch into the small cargo hold; Villanelle lets him hoist her bags into it. Eve shakes her head when he offers to throw the knapsack in as well.

They can hear better when they get inside. The plane is made to seat six, but the two rear seats have been removed to make space for auxiliary fuel tanks. Villanelle sits down on a worn leather seat like she owns it, and co*cks an eyebrow at Eve.

Eve sits heavily in the seat next to Villanelle, the narrow aisle space between them. She clutches the knapsack in her lap now, as if its contents are more valuable than a few sets of worn clothing. (Her fake identity documents are in a pouch around her neck tucked under her clothes, just how they taught her to keep her passport for her semester abroad in college. The real ones are in a small home safe in London, unless they’ve been turned into the police or something.)

“Here we go!” Silas calls back to them.

Villanelle nudges Eve’s foot with her own, and Eve jumps like it’s an electric shock. “Buckle up, Eve,” she says. Eve does so numbly, without even thinking to argue. It’s only when the belt buckle settles in her lap that she thinks maybe she shouldn’t be following Villanelle’s every order without question. It’s only a seat belt, but she can’t shake the feeling that she would have done whatever Villanelle said.

You have an axe. Do it.

Thunk.

The runway—if it could even be called that—is a mixture of icy dirt and gravel, and the plane shudders violently as it picks up speed; Eve braces her legs against the bottom of her seat, trying to stop herself from bouncing around. For one horrible (exhilarating) moment she thinks the engine must be about to explode, and she pictures their limbs scattered in the snow. Maybe Villanelle would hold her hand while they blow up.

And then the ground falls away, and their little plane has made it into the air. “How ya doing?” Silas calls, but Eve couldn’t speak if she wanted to. Villanelle answers, in an absurd caricature of an American accent: “Super-duper!”

Flying is better than taking off, but it’s still nothing like the smooth ride of a passenger plane. They can feel each air current, each adjustment that Silas makes. Eve keeps her eyes down for the most part. The vast expanse of snow below them makes her feel queasy, and it’s worse when it turns to a dark, churning ocean. She soothes herself by thinking that if they landed in the water, they’d still probably freeze to death before drowning. She’s never liked the idea of drowning. But maybe she wouldn’t mind so much if Villanelle was there.

For a while after they get over land again—Canada—Villanelle stares out the window, head turned away for long enough that it feels safe to look at her. To regard her. There’s a strand of hair that has escaped the bun that’s tucked into her hat, and there’s a slight curl to it against her cheek. She’s unzipped her coat, revealing the expensive-looking sweater underneath. She has one leg crossed over the other, one hand resting on her thigh. For a minute Eve can feel it like it’s her own hand, and then the illusion passes and leaves a terrible absence in its wake. The palm of Eve’s hand feels cold.

Villanelle shifts position, and Eve’s eyes snap back into position, staring down at the knapsack between her knees.

The flight seems to last forever. Villanelle leans forward to speak to Silas. “Do you make much money doing this?” she asks.

Silas laughs, a rough, gravelly sound that brings to mind a jovial uncle. “Hardly. Barely worth the cost of the fuel—sometimes I don’t even break even. But I love to fly, and if I can do a favor for my neighbors at the same time, I call that a worthwhile trip.”

Villanelle gives him a smile, the kind that doesn’t reach her eyes but is convincing enough if you’re not paying attention. “I think that’s wonderful,” she says. “And we really appreciate the favor as well.”

There’s something thrilling about seeing her act so blandly pedestrian—watching her smile and laugh with Silas, knowing that she could snap his neck in an instant if she wanted to.

“Happy to help,” he says. “Any friend of Travis is a friend of mine. He’s a good kid.”

“The best,” Villanelle agrees. “What a sweetheart.”

“You know, he’s pretty good with computers—he could get somewhere in life, you know? But he’s got that girlfriend; he doesn’t want to go anywhere…”

Eve zones out and lets the conversation happen in the periphery of her awareness. Rock and snow pass underneath them, closer than she’s ever seen the ground underneath a plane.

She finally fades back into reality because she has to pee so badly she might explode. “Not any chance there’s a stop on this ride, is there?” she asks.

Silas chuckles. “If we land in Canada we have to process our passports. I got a feeling you’re trying to avoid that.”

Eve grunts.

Silas’ arm appears from behind the pilot seat. He’s holding an empty Snapple bottle, and it takes Eve a second to figure out what it’s for.

“I can hold it,” she says, and the arm retracts.

She does pee behind a bush as soon as they land in Washington. There’s only so much dignity left for her to salvage anyhow.

Villanelle calls a cab, and they find a nondescript motel that rents by the hour, night, or week. Eve lies flat on her back and pictures the walls closing in.

Chapter 9

Chapter Text

Eve wakes yet again to an unfamiliar room. She’s starting to get used to being unmoored.

The hotel room is dingy, with a smell of disinfectant that is small comfort when paired with the decades of grime that must be permanently infused into the carpet fibers. The shower is running but after a few minutes it shuts off, and Villanelle emerges, looking absurdly fresh-faced—practically glowing, with one towel wrapped around her body and another twisted around her hair.

Eve shuts her eyes again, feigning sleep. She’s not ready for the day to start, not ready for the beginning of a long, uncertain journey.

She squints through her eyelashes at Villanelle, who’s standing in her towel holding up outfits on hangers and frowning. If she can just stay in this moment for a little longer—

She fades back into sleep, and wakes to Villanelle’s voice, startlingly close. “Eve?” she’s saying. “Eve, I am going for breakfast. Would you like something?”

There’s nothing quite like the joy of realizing that you are not just in civilization, but American civilization, and within walking distance of any breakfast sandwich your heart desires. Eve grumbles a sleepy, satisfied noise. “Bacon egg and cheese on an everything bagel,” she says, without opening her eyes. “And a large coffee.” She almost specifies quantities of cream and sugar but is stopped by the realization that, at this point, Villanelle knows nothing better than how she takes her coffee.

Villanelle chuckles. “I will be back soon. You should shower; you smell like sh*t.”

Once the door closes, bolstered by the thought of coffee and bacon, Eve rolls out of bed and stumbles into the shower. It’s hot, at least, and she lets the water tumble over her hair, her face, turning up the heat until she’s filled the room with steam and her skin is starting to flush. Scrubbed clean, she steps out into the humid bathroom and grabs the one remaining towel on the rack.

After some digging around, she finds a cheap hairdryer tucked into the corner of the closet and plugs it in by the sink. The sound of it covers the sound of the door opening, so when she emerges from the bathroom she’s momentarily startled by the sight of Villanelle, sitting on the end of her bed eating a croissant.

Having once again had the foresight to bring her fresh clothes into the bathroom with her, Eve is—thankfully—dressed.

“Coffee,” she says.

“On the nightstand,” Villanelle says, smiling, and then: “You are very demanding this morning.”

“Traveling brings it out in me.”

Eve scalds the roof of her mouth, but can’t bring herself to care. Her breakfast sandwich is in the bag beside the take-away coffee cup, and as she takes the first perfect bite, she makes a sound that could reasonably be interpreted as a moan.

Villanelle bursts out laughing. “It seems I’ve found the way to your heart,” she says, and Eve rolls her eyes even as her face flushes.

It’s not until she’s chewing her final bite of bagel that her stomach begins to tie itself in knots. She wants to lie down again, close her eyes until she wakes up somewhere else, but instead she turns to Villanelle and says, “So, what’s our first step?”

“We need a car,” says Villanelle. “I’m talking to a man who has one.” She holds up her phone. “Safe to drive across state lines. Clean plates.”

Right. Almost involuntarily, Eve reaches for the pouch of fake documents under her clothes. Tracy King. “Do you have a map?”

Villanelle smiles, and pulls one, folded, out of her purse. “It took a while to find,” she says. “We are living in the digital age, Eve.”

Eve snorts at how sagely she says it.

“I want to help,” says Eve, and it’s the first thing she’s felt sure about in weeks. “Tell me where we’re going; I’ll plot a route.”

Villanelle grins as she hands over the map and a pen. “New York City. Manhattan.” It’s said in her American accent—her Billie accent—and Eve flushes, maybe from embarrassment.

—And a really annoying accent.

I like her accent.

Eve would prefer a highlighter, like they used to use on maps of the northeast on vacation when she was a kid, but the pen is an acceptable substitute. She mumbles as she squints at the paper, and tries to ignore Villanelle’s obvious staring. “We can take I-90 for most of it,” she reports. She hasn’t driven cross-country since college, and back then they took the southern route, heading for the beaches in San Diego. “It’ll take us through to Ohio, anyway. Then 80 to New York.”

“You’ve missed America,” Villanelle accuses, struck maybe by the easy way Eve refers to interstate numbers.

Eve ignores her. “State cops like to hang out by the borders, so we should plan to exit to backroads before we cross state lines.” She traces the route in pen, marking stars by borders where they’ll have to find their way off and back on to the interstate, and pushes the map back towards Villanelle.

Villanelle looks more self-satisfied than she has any right to be. “Very good, Eve,” she says, and Eve takes in a sharp, short breath.

—

After breakfast, Villanelle calls the cab company listed on the hotel’s black-and-white brochure of local businesses, and they have a taxi bring them to what looks for all the world like a regular small-time car dealership-slash-mechanic, BRUNO’S AUTO in dingy letters on the building. The guy at the desk—scrawny, a little greasy—eyes Villanelle appreciatively, and Eve digs her fingernails into her palm.

“Hi there,” Villanelle says with that honeyed voice she does so well. “I was talking to Dave earlier.”

Without turning around, the guy yells, “DAVE! THAT CHICK IS HERE!”

Another man, sturdier and somehow cleaner-looking, despite the engine grease residue on his hands, emerges from the door into the garage. In another life, he’s the kind of man who she might have taken to bed, thrilled by his muscled arms and rough manner. Now she thinks about Villanelle breaking his neck, one sharp twist before he falls to the ground.

Dave and Villanelle head towards the door into the back office. “You can wait out here if you want,” Villanelle says to Eve, so she retreats to a scratchy chair with wooden arms to glare daggers at the desk guy.

Villanelle emerges less than ten minutes later with a storage-size Ziploc of folded paperwork and a set of keys jangling in her hand. “Thank you soooo much,” she’s saying to Dave with a sickly sweet smile. Eve wishes desperately that he were dead.

The car waiting for them in the back lot is a small gray Mazda, unobtrusive and perfect. Eve can see Villanelle heading for the driver’s seat, and she reaches to snatch the keys.

Villanelle holds them out of her reach, and rather than humiliate herself trying to jump for them like a little kid playing monkey in the middle, she stands back and crosses her arms. “I am not getting in that car if you’re driving.”

“Eve,” says Villanelle, as if she’s being very stupid, “I am an excellent driver.”

Eve meets her eyes, stubborn.

“Fine,” Villanelle says, but she doesn’t hand over the keys. There’s a vicious little glint in her eyes. “You can stay here. I’m sure you and Dave will have a great life together.” She gets in the driver’s seat.

“Fine,” says Eve, and without thinking she plants herself in front of the car.

Villanelle starts it; the engine noise is loud from where she’s standing. The sun glints off the windshield. Unable to see Villanelle’s face, Eve feels like she might if she knew there were a wild animal just out of sight. Her breathing grows shallow and rapid, but she consciously slows it, taking deep, steadying breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth, like she’s in a yoga class. Her arms are still folded. She stares into the glare, making eye contact where Villanelle’s face should be.

The engine revs. Eve startles, heart pounding, and then—after a moment—breathes a deep sigh of relief. If Villanelle were going to run her over, she’d do it; she wouldn’t waste time revving in park to make her jump.

Sure enough, after another minute, the door opens and Villanelle’s long legs appear, then the rest of her.

She’s left the car running. She stalks up to Eve. “You,” she says, and she’s inches away—Eve can feel her breath—“are very annoying.”

She walks away, around to the passenger side. Eve’s pulse is throbbing again, but she makes her legs work again and puts on a smirk to flash at Villanelle as she gets into the driver’s seat. “You make it too easy.”

Chapter 10

Chapter Text

Eve’s plan finds its first hitch as they approach the border from Washington into Idaho. It’s already been four long hours of driving, and Eve realizes with a lurch of her stomach that this state line—along with a lot of other state lines, she now recalls—follows a river, meaning the network of back roads she imagined using to cross the border has narrowed to just a few bridges.

She exits the interstate and finds her way to the bridge that seems less-traveled, and as her heart thumps and she scans the area for lurking state cops, the other reality of crossing into Idaho hits her like a punch to the gut. They’ve now entered the part of the country where, if someone were to come around asking about an Asian woman, there would be very little question of which one.

Once they’ve passed through the first border town without being pulled over, Eve turns into the next gas station. They are low on gas, but before getting out to pay, she rests her head on the steering wheel.

“All right, Eve?” Villanelle asks, and Eve can almost believe the concern in her voice. Then she says, “You want me to drive?” and Eve lifts her head to more effectively roll her eyes.

“Your concern is noted,” Eve says. Then she grabs the keys, locks the door, and heads inside, at the last minute digging into her bag for sunglasses and putting them on. Cash means more gas-station interactions, which make her nervous, but she does kind of like the sullen teens and their equally sullen middle-aged counterparts. This cashier is the latter, a prematurely graying man with a lump of chewing tobacco making a bulge in his lower lip. “Help you?” he grunts.

“Thirty on pump two.”

“Anything else?” He gestures to the collection of lottery tickets and Juuls behind him.

“Uh...pack of Marlboro Reds.” It’s the only brand she recognizes enough to not sound like a complete idiot when asking for them. She hands over her two twenties and receives her cigarettes and paltry change.

“Don’t smoke while you’re pumping,” says the cashier.

“Oh sh*t, uh, a lighter too.”

The cashier sighs and rolls his eyes at having to do another transaction. He grabs a bright green lighter from the pack behind him and punches numbers into the register with significantly more force than before. The purchase takes care of most of Eve’s change, and she dumps the remaining coins into the take-a-penny dish. The cashier grunts.

Outside, Villanelle has leaned her seat all the way back and put her sock feet up on the dash, eyes closed peacefully as if she isn’t seething at being locked in the car like a child.

Eve pumps her gas, inhaling the scent of it. It gave her mother migraines, so Eve pumped the gas for her as soon as she was big enough. Everything felt bigger and heavier then, lifting the nozzle while her mother sat in the car covering her nose with a handkerchief.

“You didn’t get me a snack,” Villanelle pouts, when Eve re-enters the car.

Eve rolls her eyes. She pulls a cigarette out of the pack and lights it, setting the lighter down and cracking the window as she pulls out of the station.

“I didn’t know you smoke, Eve.”

“I don’t,” she says, taking a rancid puff and narrowly suppressing the urge to cough. Aside from the occasional shared cigarette on the balcony at a late-night party, she really hasn’t smoked since college.

“It’s kind of sexy,” says Villanelle.

Eve’s stomach drops, and a stupid, pigtail-pulling impulse drives her to blow smoke in Villanelle’s face. (Villanelle’s expression doesn’t change.)

Eve sighs and ashes into the indented space by the door handle. Regrettably, the car is just new enough to lack an ashtray; it’s a 2005 model from the era of cars with both CD players and tape decks. Villanelle drums her feet on the dash and pushes the power button on the sound system with her toe; the radio comes to life with a burst of static. Villanelle begins to clumsily turn the dial, subjecting them to momentary snippets of morning shows, Spanish-language advertisem*nts, classic-rock stations, Christian alt rock.

“Villanelle, I swear to God—”

“Shut up,” says Villanelle.

Eve pulls on the cigarette again, blows her smoke out the cracked window. It’s starting to feel more natural, and she shivers at the odd, seductive dizziness that accompanies it.

Villanelle finally settles on a radio station, something playing “all 80s, all weekend.” Madonna is crooning “Like a Virgin” at one in the afternoon and Eve is taken back to sitting cross-legged on the end of her bed, volume turned down to a whisper, as MTV plays Madonna—writhing on a gondola in blue spandex leggings—and her face and ears burn hot. The already-embarrassing memory grows more so in present company, bringing her age sharply into focus. Villanelle probably hadn’t even been born.

“Eve”—Villanelle’s voice cuts in—“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Well, I am. Let’s get lunch.”

“Drive-through,” Eve counters, and Villanelle narrows her eyes.

“This is going to be a very long day, Eve. Don’t you want to get out of the car for a while?”

“It’ll be longer if we keep stopping,” Eve replies, but the next time they see a sign for a diner, she takes the exit and pulls into a half-full parking lot in front of a place called Rosie’s.

They’re shown into a booth by a friendly waitress, probably mid-forties with deep smile lines; she’s wearing a pair of 2000s-era rhinestoned jeans and a T-shirt that says ROSIE’S - WE GIVE YOU THE BUSINESS.

Villanelle buries her nose in her menu (a classic foldable one along with a printed sheet of specials), but before long puts it down and stage-whispers, “Eve. What the hell are these burgers.”

Eve glances at her own menu. The burger section of the menu has at least eight or ten options, from a basic cheeseburger to something called the “heart attack,” featuring two kinds of cheese, bacon, a fried egg, and a slice of ham. She snorts. “Welcome to America.”

Villanelle wrinkles her nose, but when the waitress comes back she orders the chicken and waffles. “I’ve always wanted to try it,” she confides, and something flutters in Eve’s chest. Eve orders a cheeseburger.

Villanelle leans in as they watch the waitress relay their orders to the cook behind the counter. “Do you think they’re sleeping together?”

Eve watches their movements, the easy but guarded way they interact. “No,” she decides. “No, but they want to. Probably both married.” She sucks from the straw in her complimentary water glass. “How long do you think they’ll last?”

The cook turns to watch the waitress as she walks away. Villanelle snorts. “I give it a week.”

When the waitress brings their meals, they both tuck in with an animal abandon, and the food is gone in what seems like an instant. Wiping grease off her face with a paper napkin, Eve makes a satisfied hum. She looks up to see Villanelle trying to make eye contact as she licks gravy off of her lips. “Jesus Christ. You’re like a twelve-year-old boy who just discovered his dick.”

Before Villanelle can retort, the waitress returns. “Can I interest you ladies in some dessert? Where are you headin’, anyway?”

“Just the check, actually,” Eve says, stepping in to prevent what could become a seven-course meal and an elaborate backstory, and the waitress obligingly pulls it from her apron pocket and sets it on the table.

Eve counts out the cash and places her sweaty water glass on top of the bills to hold them down. Villanelle, watching, grumbles: “American money is ugly.”

As they walk out the swinging glass door they’re followed by a family of four, a giggling primary-school boy bringing up the rear. So quickly that Eve almost doesn’t notice, Villanelle nudges her foot into just the right spot to send the boy flying; he hits the sidewalk and immediately, like a switch was flipped, begins to bawl. His family turns to find him on all fours on the ground, hands and knees scraped.

“Kayden, I told you to watch where you’re going,” the mother snaps. Villanelle has knelt down next to him, face a picture of concern—“I’m so sorry, I must have gotten in your way”—and the mother says, “He’s fine, thank you.”

They walk away. Eve glances back to see the boy looking desperately after Villanelle, maybe thinking, I wish that nice lady was my mom. She shivers.

—

When they finally stop for the night, it’s at a motel a few hours over the border into Montana. Eve’s stomach is upset after a dinner of leftover diner fries and a granola bar, but Villanelle seems to be in high spirits. She tells the person at the check-in desk that they’re on their honeymoon, and they are duly given a room with a single king-sized bed.

Once they’re safely on the elevator, Eve elbows Villanelle hard in the ribs. Villanelle yelps “Hey!” and Eve growls, “You want us to be even more conspicuous? That guy’s going to tell everyone about the interracial lesbians he checked in today.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes. “You are overestimating how fascinating we are,” she says, and reaches for Eve’s hand. Her hand is warm, soft. Maybe not not sweaty, but at least less sweaty than Eve’s, which has been resting on a steering wheel all day.

“Not in Montana,” Eve grumbles, but Villanelle has knocked the wind out of her protest.

“Besides,” Villanelle says, “he was super high.”

As the elevator door opens, Eve snatches her hand back, heart pounding like she expects the specter of rural hom*ophobia to appear outside. Instead, they’re welcomed to the third floor only by a dusty plastic fern. The card-reader for their room works on the first try, and they enter a generic hotel room only distinguished by its bed—huge, but singular.

Villanelle glances at her as the door shuts. “If you’re worried about the bed I can sleep on the floor. But it’s very big; you can pretend I’m not even there.” From someone else the words might sound self-deprecating, but Villanelle’s voice is unmistakably teasing. “Or pretend I’m your h—”

“Shut up,” Eve snaps, her pulse suddenly loud in her ears again. “I’m taking the left side.”

When they get in bed, it really does seem like there’s a chasm between them. The distance seems too insurmountable even for conversation, and they each do some cursory blanket-adjusting and pillow-fluffing before turning out the lights.

It’s not until she’s lying awake in the dark that Eve recalls the last time they were lying in a bed together. Like she has many times before, she tries to feel some kind of regret. Instead, her mind lingers on the sensation of a knife plunging into flesh: resistance at first, but startlingly quick after breaking through the skin. It’s hard to say if she truly recorded the act in so much detail or if she’s added on with each remembering, polishing the memory to a shine. In the dark, practically alone given how far away Villanelle seems, Eve flushes hot under the blankets.

Chapter 11

Chapter Text

It takes practically a whole day of driving to get through Montana. Sure, it’s pretty now and then, but Eve can’t help feeling like they’re not getting anywhere. When they stop for dinner, she rests her exhausted head on her hands and groans into her plate of mac and cheese.

“Eve? Are you all right?” True to her nature, Villanelle sounds part caring, part mocking—mocking Eve, or maybe just mocking the very idea of caring.

“Doing great,” Eve says, and she can’t help the bite in her voice. She figures she might as well lean into it, and adds, “f*ck off.”

Villanelle smirks. “You know, if you’re tired of driving—”

“Still not going to let you drive.”

Villanelle pouts in a stupid, exaggerated way that makes Eve want to stab her. (Again.)

At the hotel, Villanelle goes up to the desk and looks pointedly at Eve as she says, “My friend and I would like a room with two beds.” Then she jerks her head toward Eve and stage-whispers, “Lesbian. Don’t want to give her any ideas.”

Eve gives her a look once they enter the rickety elevator, and Villanelle says in a sing-song, “Well, you didn’t like when I said we were married.”

Eve rolls her eyes as dramatically as she can muster. “I swear to god…” she groans, and then the elevator doors open to an elderly couple bickering about formalwear. (“Honestly, Ed, that tie…” the woman is saying. Ed grumbles.)

Their room is reasonably clean, and Eve claims the bed by the window by plopping down on it and switching on the TV. Villanelle drops her bag and disappears into the bathroom; after a moment Eve can hear the shower turn on.

Eve flips through the channels, skipping sitcoms and news channels and loud infomercials until she finally settles on Forensic Files, and she does not think about Villanelle showering. She stares at the TV screen hard enough to bore holes in it and tries to decide who dumped the body, who the victim was sleeping with and when.

Her mental censorship is rendered mostly pointless when Villanelle exits the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her chest and begins rummaging in her bag for pajamas. Her long legs are exposed as she bends over in a way that has got to be calculated, for God’s sake.

Pajamas found, Villanelle lets the towel drop and begins to dress. Eve glances down—back up—then down again, and the moment is all too reminiscent of hunching over in her swim-team suit in the locker room at age fourteen, trying desperately not to see or be seen.

But in those locker-room days, it was partly that she knew they didn’t ask for her gaze, which she knew would be jealous or hungry or both if she let it. Now Villanelle wants her to look. But if she stops holding herself in check—

“So what are we watching?” Villanelle asks, flopping down in bed in her black silk pajama set.

Eve has changed the channel—did so as soon as she heard the shower shut off. She knows from flipping through grainy channels in the Alaskan cabin that Villanelle’s commentary on Forensic Files is not just creepy but loud, like she’s watching a football game.

“Life in the Serengeti,” Eve says.

“Boooooring,” Villanelle declares at the slow pan across a herd of wildebeest. “Wake me up when they show the lions.”

She really does half-close her eyes, feigning sleep lying on top of the covers until there’s a lion roar on TV, at which point she gasps dramatically, sitting bolt upright as if she’s just been woken from the dead.

“You are so annoying,” says Eve, but she can’t hide the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

Villanelle moves towards Eve all at once, gathering herself with long limbs and sliding so she can sit on the side of the bed, legs hanging. “You like it,” she says, teasing. “You love when I annoy you.” Her voice is smooth like she’s preparing a seduction, like Eve is a mark. But it’s almost working; Eve is sitting up and her knees are inches from Villanelle’s and she feels for all the world like she’s following the bobbing light of an anglerfish.

Villanelle leans toward her—falters—leans again. Her pupils are wide; Eve feels like falling into them. Her breath is hot, and close, and Eve's heart thumps frantically in her ears. She tries to plant her feet on the floor, which feels like it’s undulating beneath her, and then—with a sickening lurch, the whole world tilts around her and Eve is up and stumbling toward the bathroom, scrabbling with the toilet seat, barely getting it up before she heaves into the bowl, vomiting up her dinner.

Great.

She flushes, rinses her mouth, and brushes her teeth (twice). By the time she emerges from the bathroom, the room is dark, the lights and TV shut off. Whether she’s asleep or not, Villanelle is motionless on her bed.

It takes Eve a long time to get to sleep, restlessness made worse every time she looks at the clock glowing red and calculates how much sleep she’ll be running on in the morning. Villanelle doesn’t make a single noise while Eve is lying awake, so either she’s completely passed out or exhibiting some kind of finely honed assassin skill. It takes hours until Eve is exhausted enough by her own racing thoughts to fall into a fitful sleep.

—

She wakes tired and resentful, a mood made worse by Villanelle's failure to bring her the coffee and breakfast that she's grown accustomed to—and even worse when Villanelle looks at her sitting like a zombie in the driver’s seat and says, “Okay, I think I need to drive.”

Eve sighs, but she’s too exhausted to put up much of a fight; she can barely hold up her head. “Fine,” she says. “Don’t do anything stupid.” She hands Villanelle the keys and gets herself set up to nap in the back: strapped in awkwardly with the belt for the middle seat, lying on her side, head resting on her arms.

Without an audience, Villanelle has little impetus to pull stupid stunts, so the car travels smoothly and Eve has no trouble falling asleep to the white-noise sound of the highway.

When she wakes again, it’s to the sound of comfortable chatter, and it takes a moment for her to remember where she is and realize that there is another person in the car with them.

Laughing. There’s another person in the car and Villanelle is laughing and so is the other person, and Eve’s stomach feels like it’s been flooded with ice water. The last time someone showed up in their lives out of nowhere—

“Your friend’s awake,” says the unfamiliar voice.

“Tracy!” Villanelle calls jovially. “You’ve been fast asleep.”

Eve wrests her body into an upright position, and manages to grumble out, “What the sh*t?”

The person in the passenger seat turns around and leans to get a good look at Eve. It’s the face of a kid—well, a teenager, with faded blue-green hair and wispy hints of a mustache at the corners of their mouth. “Hi,” the teen says, head tilted in greeting. “I’m Hazard.”

Feeling like she’s walked into some kind of dreamland, Eve squeezes her eyes shut and then opens them again. The teenager is still in front of her.

“Hazard is going to Fargo,” Villanelle supplies, all politeness.

“My pronouns are they/them,” says Hazard.

Eve blinks, unsure how to react to such a pronouncement, finally responding with a blank “Okay.” And then, because it’s the first question that comes to mind, she asks, “Is that your legal name?”

Hazard gives her an are you serious? look along with a truly devastating single-eyebrow raise. “No. Obviously.”

“Okay, well, are you running away?” This question is partly because she’s picturing an Amber Alert in their future and partly because, well, come on, it’s a blue-haired teenager in the middle of North Dakota.

“No,” they say. Eve waits, but apparently no elaboration is forthcoming.

“Fine. Great.” Eve turns her attention on Villanelle, whose expression betrays nothing. “I swear to f*ck, if we get arrested for kidnapping because you picked up a hitchhiker—”

Villanelle turns to Hazard and says, “Don’t worry about Tracy. She can be very dramatic.”

Hazard turns back around to face Eve again. “Okay, I promise no one’s going to file a report or anything, my dad knows where I’m going and everything.”

“What, your dad is a big fan of hitchhiking?”

Hazard rolls their eyes. “He thinks I’m on a bus, but this way I can keep the bus money.”

“I told you,” Villanelle sing-songs. “Dramatic.” Hazard snorts like making fun of Eve is a private sport that they and Villanelle invented together, and Eve bristles.

“So now you’ve told us you have cash,” Eve says. It comes out less jokingly than she intended. “What’s stopping us from robbing you and leaving you by the side of the road?”

A deeper and more dramatic eyeroll. “I don’t have cash. It’s on Venmo.”

That pretty much ends that conversation. After a pause, Hazard asks, “Why are you guys going to New Jersey?” and Eve breathes a little sigh of relief that Villanelle supplied a destination just far enough away from reality.

“Visiting my mother,” Villanelle replies, as easily as if it were the truth. “She’s been very lonely since we lost my dad, and I thought, why not bring my friend Tracy and make it a road trip?”

Hazard looks like they’re about to ask a followup question, so Eve cuts in with, “What’s in Fargo?”

“Convention,” Hazard says, with a shrug that looks almost embarrassed. “Meeting online friends and stuff.”

“Be caaareful,” Villanelle warns, a hint of theatricality in her tone. “There are some real weirdos online.”

Undeterred, Hazard replies, “There are some real weirdos offline too.”

Neither Eve nor Villanelle can argue with that.

Hazard takes charge of the radio and Eve and Villanelle are treated to whatever experimental college stations they can find, supplemented with top 40 stations (frequently switched off when they play one of many songs that “suuuuuck”) and some excruciating Christian rock stations because Hazard thinks they’re funny.

After the fifth identical-sounding song about Jesus being awesome, Villanelle hits the power button. Then, perfectly calm, she says, “If you play any more of that I will cut out your heart with a pocket knife.”

Eve’s insides twist and her mind runs away with her, crashing through scenarios—Hazard tries to call the cops—Villanelle murders this teenager who stumbled into this situation completely by accident and doesn’t deserve any of this—they have to bury another body and Eve becomes truly, completely irredeemable—

Hazard turns steely right back and says, “Do you really think that would be enough to kill me?” And then they both crack up.

“I’m going back to sleep,” Eve says.

“Oh, don’t pout, Eve,” Villanelle says. “I still like you best.”

Eve ignores the way the words make her feel like there’s a flower blooming in her chest. “Whatever,” she says, as if she’s a teenager. She doesn’t lie down on her side again, but hunches down with her arms crossed.

Hazard’s narrowed eyes flick between the two of them. “Okay, are you guys like, dating?”

“No,” they both say at the same time. It’s weird—Eve has almost gotten used to the way they normally answer that question, Eve’s “no” and Villanelle’s “yes” melding together into one bewildering response.

Hazard smirks. “Okayyyy, sure.”

Eve remains mostly silent for the rest of their drive through North Dakota, but there is something stupidly charming about this kid, and when they drop them off outside a convention center Eve has to resist the urge to call something maternal after them—“be safe,” maybe, or at least “don’t do drugs supplied by strangers.”

A big sign in drippy red letters reads HORROR CON, and Hazard disappears into a sea of Freddy Kreuger masks and bloodstained clothing. “Weird kid,” Eve says, with something like affection, and Villanelle nods. “Weird kid.”

They get hot dogs in Fargo and then drive for a few more hours, Eve reclaiming her rightful place in the driver’s seat while Villanelle pouts, and they finally stop at a motel in Minneapolis.

Eve fidgets while getting ready for bed, her fingers clenching and unclenching as she goes through the usual routine—brushing her teeth, brushing her hair, washing her face. When Villanelle knocks on the bathroom door to whine that she’s taking too long, Eve jumps like the knock is a gunshot. Maybe it’s just because they’ve passed the halfway point. Maybe it’s from hearing about a person’s normal life, where a new name is chosen for self-expression and not because you’re on the run from the law and/or from a professional assassin bent on revenge. Either way, she doesn’t fall asleep until long after Villanelle’s breathing becomes slow and rhythmic in the other bed.

Chapter 12

Chapter Text

In Wisconsin they stop for dinner in a tiny nowhere town, at a diner called “When Pigs Fly.” Eve directs them toward the counter, taking the two empty stools closest to the kitchen door. As she flips through the menu, she realizes that she perhaps should have paid more attention to the name of the restaurant: the menu is filled with bacon. Eggs cooked with bacon fat, bacon pancakes, bacon milkshakes, bacon sodas, and dozens of other things that make her glad she didn’t inherit her father’s high cholesterol. Villanelle is quiet, running her index finger down the menu pages.

“I can’t decide between the Oreo bacon milkshake or the bacon soda,” Villanelle says seriously.

“Gross,” Eve says, turning the page to read about the various bacon pastas available.

After a few minutes, the young waiter comes up to take their orders. He looks about sixteen, gangly with greasy hair and a significant acne problem—potentially both caused by the bacon-grease molecules suspended in the air. Villanelle orders a bacon grilled cheese and the Oreo bacon milkshake she was pondering.

“I’ll get the peanut butter bacon burger,” Eve says bravely. “And the bacon soda,” she adds, looking at Villanelle. “We’ll share.”

“Adorable,” says Villanelle.

The milkshake and soda come out first. After trying both, Eve pushes the bacon soda aside and plants her straw in Villanelle’s milkshake. They’re sharing it like 50s teens when a cop in full uniform sits down at the stool next to Eve, and Eve pulls back from the cup so sharply that she’s probably pulled something in her neck.

Villanelle rolls her eyes with an impressive level of drama.

“Stacy’s not here?” the cop asks the teen waiter.

“Her babysitter got sick,” the waiter says. “Ya just got me tonight.” The cop visibly deflates.

Apparently unable to resist a chance to be charming, Villanelle offers up a cheeky grin to the officer and says in her best American accent, “Oh good, a regular. You can tell me if we made the right choices with this menu!”

The cop—Officer Carter, according to his badge—chuckles and turns to Villanelle (and consequently Eve) after telling the waiter he wants his regular. “Well, what’dya get? Most nights I get a BLT, but if I wanna treat myself, I like the carbonara.”

Eve loses the thread of the conversation as she tries to quell the rising panic in her gut; she zones back in just in time to hear them discussing the regular waitress Stacy. “I’m sure she’s gorgeous,” Villanelle is saying. “If I were single maybe I’d fight you for her, but I don’t need anyone else but this one.” She pats Eve’s thigh and it hits Eve like a jolt; the jerk of her knee knocks Villanelle’s hand back.

Villanelle simpers at the cop again. “She gets so nervous about being in public, but I told her, in most places it’s not like that anymore.”

As if frozen, Eve fails to speak, even to breathe.

“Believe me, I get it,” the cop agrees. “My sister’s a hom*o-sexual, and I know it hasn’t always been easy for her out here in the boonies. But her and her life partner—er, I guess wife now—been doing pretty well the last couple years.” He shifts on his stool. “You two married?”

There’s a pause in which Villanelle does some intense eyebrow signaling to Eve to speak. Eve opens her mouth, but can’t make any sound come out. She finally nods frantically, eyes wide, and Villanelle forces a chuckle.

“We’re on our honeymoon,” she says, reaching for Eve’s hand, which remains limp and lifeless. “We’re having such a good time, aren’t we, honey?”

Eve chokes on her words again, but finally manages to say “bathroom” and get unsteadily on her feet.

“In the back,” the cop informs her, as if she couldn’t have figured that out herself. She makes it into the single-occupant women’s room, locks the door, and sits down fully clothed on the toilet seat. Dangerously close to hyperventilating, she brings her knees up—the heels of her shoes now making contact with the seat—and rests her forehead against the fabric of her jeans. Jesus Christ. She counts out her breaths: in-two-three-four, out-two-three-four-five-six. Tells herself to just f*cking breathe like a normal person. Some combination of breathing exercises and self-flagellation apparently works, and her breathing and heart rate both begin to slow.

When she feels capable of forming a complete sentence, she gets up and opens the door—and who’s outside but Officer f*cking Carter, looking for all the world like he’s been waiting for her. Her heart starts thudding again.

He takes a step towards her, and all she can do is back up until she’s against the wall. “Listen, ma’am,” he says. “I need to know if you’re okay.”

It was the last thing she expected him to say, and she stares at him for a minute, stunned. But of course—the way she’s acting…

“I’m fine,” she chokes out. “Officer, I’m not—whatever you think is happening, is uh—it isn’t. I’m just—” She casts around. “I have an…anxiety disorder?”

She doesn’t sound convinced, and he doesn’t look it. He backs away from her, hands in front of his chest in a classic “Hey, don’t blame me” pose. "Listen, if you say you're fine, you're fine. Just give me a shout if you need anything.”

Eve manages a few bites of her burger, but she can’t stop shaking and the cop hasn’t left, even though he’s done with his food and apparently done with talking to Villanelle, who tries a few more times to strike up friendly conversation.

By the time they pay and leave, Eve feels like she could melt into the floor. She passes the keys to Villanelle, who very kindly pretends she’s not dancing a celebratory cha-cha in her mind over being permitted to drive again.

It’s only once she’s in the car that Eve can breathe easily, letting out a shuddering sigh that makes Villanelle touch her shoulder with surprising tenderness.

Then they get on the road, and Villanelle makes a concerned noise.

“What?”

“Nothing,” says Villanelle, but it’s not convincing, and when she glances in the rearview, Eve can see a cop car behind them.

“Is it him?”

Villanelle nods curtly.

Eve’s heart starts thudding again. f*ck. But at least Villanelle is going against her nature and keeping the car two miles per hour under the speed limit and signaling her lane changes well in advance.

All of Villanelle’s care seems not to matter; it’s in response to nothing at all that the sirens go on, and as they pull over to the side of the road, Eve thinks about her future: if she’s lucky, it ends with Villanelle in prison and Eve lying her way into a women’s shelter. If she’s unlucky, they both end up dead on the roadside. She’s picturing vultures circling when Villanelle rolls the window down and smiles sweetly at the same man who just sat through dinner beside them.

“Can I help you, officer?” she asks, American accent still impeccable.

“Ma’am, I’m concerned about the safety of your passenger here. Now I’m sure there’s been some kind of misunderstanding, but I’m going to need you to get out of the car.” His tone assured them that he did not, in fact, believe there was a misunderstanding.

Villanelle gets out of the car slowly and carefully, her arms raised above her head. The cop’s right hand is on his gun, and Villanelle turns to face the side of the car. The cop begins to pat her down and Eve feels hot with rage.

He stops, feels in Villlanelle’s pocket, and comes out with a knife that he flips open. “Hm. Don’t like the look of that.”

Villanelle says nothing; she doesn’t pretend to be a woodworker or a chef. Then the cop’s radio crackles to life, and Villanelle moves so quickly that Eve almost doesn’t see the moment she draws another tiny knife from her sleeve and stabs it right into the cop’s throat.

His fingers scrabble uselessly at the buttons of his radio—blood spurts from the wound and burbles from his mouth—and then he’s limp and dead and Villanelle is hissing “Help me!” as she catches his fall.

Eve can’t hear anything over the rush of blood in her head, but she can read Villanelle’s lips and she jumps to life as if woken from a dream. She clambers out of their car and into the police car, popping the trunk, and together they drag the body to the trunk and stuff it inside.

Now that they’re out of the plains there are trees all over, and as if she’d planned it this way all along, Villanelle slides easily into the driver’s seat of the police car and drives it off the road and into the wooded area just beyond, until it’s no longer visible from the road. And then she walks back toward Eve. Before she was wearing a light blue button-up shirt that got stained bright red, but the shirt is gone, revealing a white undershirt sticking sweaty to her stomach. Eve, shaking uncontrollably, can’t stop looking.

They are silent for the rest of the drive, only going for another hour and a half before Villanelle pulls into a motel lot. She doesn’t even make pleasant conversation with the bellboy, and Eve finds herself bewildered: if anything, shouldn’t a nice murder put Villanelle in a good mood?

In the hotel room, Eve heaves her bag down and then says, “Okay, what the f*ck is going on with you?”

The two of them stand in the entryway, facing each other.

Villanelle is silent for a long moment, and then she says, low and dangerous, “You need to stop screwing around.”

Eve says nothing. She waits, face as placid as she can make it while her chest grows tight and hot with rage. Me? She’s angry with me?

“You used to be so…” Villanelle shakes her head. “I can see in your eyes every time you want to do something, and instead you do what you’re supposed to do. You used to be pushy, to make crazy decisions all on your own.” She breathes heavily, like each word is a terrible exertion. And then she spits: “I just want to know, when did you become so f*cking passive?”

“Maybe when I saw consequences for my actions,” says Eve. Her voice is low and she meets Villanelle’s eyes without fear. “Maybe when I broke protocol and a whole room of people were slaughtered.” She swallows; she still has a hard time connecting that first horror with Villanelle. “When you slaughtered them. And the dozens after that.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes. “It was not dozens. You are being dramatic.”

“Oh f*ck off,” Eve snaps.

Villanelle’s laugh is cold this time. “Come on, Eve,” she says. “Carolyn manipulated you, and then I manipulated you, and now here you are, still going along like you’re floating down a river. You sit and wait for me to make decisions so you don’t have to feel responsible. Aren’t you tired of it? What are you afraid of?”

There’s a moment of clarity where Eve feels, if she wanted, she could answer honestly. She could say Once I start, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop. Or I liked how it felt to sink an axe into a man’s back, even though it made me want to throw up. I want to do it again, and that terrifies me.

Villanelle's face is red with fury, and Eve thinks she could match that rage. She closes her eyes and steels herself, and then she surges forward.

Her mouth finds Villanelle’s with more force than she intended, and Villanelle gasps, the sharp intake of air stolen right from Eve’s lungs. Her back hits the wall. And then Villanelle is kissing her back, and it feels unlike any kiss that Eve has ever had before. The electric charge that’s been building in her for months has somewhere to go; their lips and now—oh—tongues—have completed a circuit and energy flows through them both, connecting them endlessly.

Villanelle’s teeth nip at Eve’s lower lip; she groans into Villanelle’s mouth. Then suddenly the ground lurches beneath her and she pulls back, breathing heavily.

“Villanelle, I—I can’t—”

Their eyes meet again. Villanelle is—could she be trembling? “Why not?” she asks in a whisper. And then, “Eve.” Her voice is heavy with desire. It’s intoxicating, and when she asks, “What’s left to stop you now?” Eve can’t think of a single answer.

“Nothing,” she says, low. Their faces have moved close again, close enough for Eve to feel Villanelle’s breath on her face. “God, just—kiss me again.”

Villanelle does. She’s slow at first, her mouth hot against Eve’s, but the kiss quickly becomes urgent, intense. One of her hands tangles in Eve’s hair (the hair that she fixated on, the hair that Eve desecrated in the bathroom of a petrol station halfway across the world) and the other is on Eve’s back, tugging her closer, closer, closer.

Chapter 13

Chapter Text

Villanelle pushes, and Eve falls back against the wall on the other side of the hallway. Villanelle’s body follows her, presses against her again. Eve’s hands scrabble at Villanelle’s back, tugging until Villanelle’s shirt is untucked and she can touch bare skin. Villanelle’s head dips and her mouth is on Eve’s neck and Eve can’t help the moan that escapes her lips; all over her skin is hot with need. Villanelle groans as Eve’s hand grips her hair, as Eve pulls her back up for their mouths to meet again.

Villanelle crooks her knee just enough to find purchase between Eve’s legs, and Eve gasps as she grinds against the tensed muscle of Villanelle’s thigh. “Please,” she whispers, but Villanelle has never been kind, and she remains the same now as she smiles against Eve’s neck and says, “Please what?”

“Villanelle,” Eve says hoarsely, “if you don’t go down on me soon I swear to god I’m going to explode.”

Villanelle sucks in a little gasp of her own, and it’s with a rush of arousal that Eve recalls how long Villanelle has wanted her—since before Eve had even seen her face. I masturbat* about you a lot. It's only now that Eve truly lets herself picture it, Villanelle splayed and gasping, thinking of Eve and only Eve.

“Bed,” Villanelle whispers, either an order or a plea.

“Okay,” Eve murmurs, “okay.”

They make their way to the bed; Eve drags the polyester bedspread to the floor and lies back onto the sheets, still half-clothed. She slides her pants off and reaches for Villanelle’s shirt, and in a moment they’re bare in each other’s presence and Eve, rather than shrinking from it, revels in the intensity of Villanelle’s gaze.

Villanelle sits before her, legs bent underneath her, her hands reverently on Eve’s thighs. She gets up on her knees and leans forward to kiss Eve again, hard and intentional, on the mouth. And then she kisses down Eve’s torso, lingering on her breasts, rolling one nipple between her fingers while she takes the other into her mouth. Eve whimpers and her hips strain towards Villanelle, all desperation.

And then Villanelle kisses the tender skin of her inner thigh, hot and intense, and then Villanelle’s mouth is on her, and Eve feels like she’s being worshiped.

Villanelle savors the experience, almost obscenely. She’s not sloppy, but neither is she intensely goal-focused, like some men who take pride in their skills but seem mainly focused on getting it over with as quickly as possible. Her tongue makes long, languorous moves. Her nails press crescents into the flesh of Eve’s hips, and the wet sound of Villanelle’s mouth on her makes Eve, if possible, wetter.

It’s like Villanelle’s been starving to death. Without breaking contact, she lifts Eve’s legs to hang over her shoulders. Eve’s heels dig into Villanelle’s back and she whispers “Jesus,” and Villanelle responds with a low, muffled rumble of a laugh.

Like most people, Eve’s had practice at keeping quiet: roommates, apartments with thin walls, quickies in supply closets. But in this moment she couldn’t have held herself in check if she’d wanted to. She’s barely conscious of the sounds she’s making, gasps that have turned to moans and now a desperate whine that would seem comical if she weren’t on fire from head to toe. Seeking some kind of purchase, her hand tries grabbing the sheets, then her own stomach, and finally finds a grip in Villanelle’s hair, pulling her in as if she could possibly be closer than she is right now.

There’s a telltale sensation, something gravity-defying in her chest, and Eve’s hips rock involuntarily. She whines again, incapable of speech, hoping the sound can communicate everything she needs it to, which is chiefly: Jesus Christ, don’t stop.

God knows she’s had her fair share of org*sms, but her first one under Villanelle’s mouth feels like a f*cking resurrection. Like she’s been walking around as a ghost since a bullet ripped through her guts, and now she’s shuddered back to life, gasping.

Chapter 14

Chapter Text

Eve wakes up naked in a new world, dizzy with revelation.

Villanelle is still asleep. The fine, wispy hairs at her temples are stuck to her skin, and Eve reaches out to unstick them, curl them behind her ear. The action happens almost automatically, with no hesitation, and Eve revels in this lightness in her chest. It feels like daybreak.

Light is, in fact, streaming through the window; the gauzy privacy curtains are in place but the blackout curtains are flung wide, letting in the early-dawn light.

Eve is starving. She gets back in bed for a moment to nudge Villanelle awake. “I’m going for breakfast,” she murmurs. “Just so you know—I’m not running away, or anything.”

Villanelle makes a grumbling sound in response.

She digs around in her bag for underwear, sweats, and a T-shirt. Clothes from last night are strewn across the floor.

It suddenly seems absurd that Villanelle has been carrying all the cash this whole time. Eve takes much more from her wallet than is necessary to buy a few breakfast sandwiches, and shuts the door carefully behind her.

The diner down the street has a huge American flag blocking three windows out front. As Eve walks in and is hit with the greasy smell of bacon, she remembers the milkshake she and Villanelle shared just twelve hours ago. She closes her eyes and takes another whiff, and a bell rings as the door opens behind her.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” says an elderly man in a sweater vest. His wife, leaning heavily on a cane, trails slowly behind him.

“Sorry,” Eve says. She heads to the counter to order. There’s no one there, but there’s a bell by the register. Before she can actually ring it, a balding man with a robust mustache and a very stained white t-shirt appears out of nowhere. He says nothing, but picks up a pad and pulls a pencil from behind his ear.

“Two ham egg and cheese bagels, please, and two coffees, cream and extra sugar. To go.”

The man grunts. “Anything else?”

“That’s all.”

The elderly couple orders, and then the man disappears into the back.

They all sit down on the vinyl-covered bench beside the counter, sticky with syrup and miscellaneous diner grime. “Are you new in town?” asks the woman with the walker.

A moment of panic, but no—she knows how to handle this, has done it herself a dozen times and seen Villanelle do it even more. “Just passing through,” she says with a smile. “My friend and I are on a road trip.”

“How nice,” the woman replies. “You must be close.”

Eve smirks. “You could say that. Do you two live in town?”

The woman nods. “Howard and I grew up not too far from here. Childhood sweethearts, you know. Moved to town when the factory opened…of course, that’s all gone now. But this is where our life is. Our son lives an hour away, he does something with computers, you know…”

Eve nods, thinking, How unimaginably dull. She lets the woman talk, filling the silence successfully until Eve’s order is up.

“So nice talking to you,” she says, smiling, grabbing the bag and beverage carrier. “Have a wonderful day.”

She wolfs down her food while walking, the bag with Villanelle’s sandwich awkwardly pinned to her side by her elbow. She could swear it’s the best breakfast sandwich she’s had on this whole trip.

In the hotel room, Villanelle is beginning to stir. Eve sets down breakfast and gets back into bed, curling her clothed body around Villanelle’s naked one; she presses a kiss to the side of her neck. Now full of ham and egg, she closes her eyes and feels that she could stay like this all day, her arm flung over Villanelle’s side, hand against her chest.

Villanelle grumbles sleepily again, and then murmurs, “Take off your shirt.”

Eve snorts. “What, you already want to go again?”

Villanelle’s head shakes against the pillow. “I just want to feel you.”

Something in Eve’s heart skips. She pulls her shirt off and then settles back in, skin on skin, breasts pressed against Villanelle’s back. Villanelle’s grumble is contented this time, and she pushes back against Eve, as if they could be even closer together than they already are.

Eve shuts her eyes, forehead pressed against Villanelle’s upper back, and hums her own contentment against her skin.

They stay that way for what feels like forever, and not nearly long enough. When Villanelle finally gets up, Eve grabs at her petulantly, but Villanelle’s hunger has caught up with her and she eats her own sandwich almost as ravenously as Eve did, the main difference being that Villanelle is stark naked, letting crumbs tumble down her bare chest. Eve sits up, and they sit cross-legged on the hotel bed, sipping coffee. Neither of them can seem to stop staring.

An itch begins to settle low in Eve’s stomach, and she recognizes it. She glances at Villanelle and says, “Tell me about Payton. Everything we know.”

A grin spreads across Villanelle’s face. “Really?”

“I want to know.” Her heart is pounding picturing their near future: Payton strung up in a window, Payton with her throat slit, Payton’s own heart shuddering until it gives out.

Villanelle throws on a silk robe—despite the paucity of luggage, she somehow keeps producing clothing items that Eve has never seen before—and rummages through a bag until she finds a mess of wrinkled paperwork.

Eve groans. “You don’t even have a folder?”

“I didn’t think a stop at OfficeMax would be on the top of our list.”

“This is painful,” Eve says, pulling her shirt back on as Villanelle smooths out the paperwork on the hotel room’s particle-board desk.

“Are you going to listen, or not?”

Eve rolls her eyes. “Fine. Tell me.”

Spread out on the desk are several maps with pen markings on them, and a handwritten collection of facts, figures, addresses, and times. Villanelle points out important spots—“Here’s her apartment, and here’s her office. Security at the office is high, so the weak points are the apartment and the commute.”

“How does she travel?”

“Private car.”

Eve raises her eyebrows. “You think…?”

“There are a few options,” Villanelle says. “We want to be quick and subtle, but without the need for specialized supplies.”

“So no drugs?”

“It’s easier if we can avoid it.”

“Right. Just seems like the most subtle option. She doesn’t have any prescriptions that could be useful?”

“Her medical information is incomplete.”

“But if she were to have an anxiety problem or something…”

“Smart, Eve.” There's a glint of pride in Villanelle's eye; Eve can’t help her own grin in response. “Maybe she took too many Xanax?”

“It’s good, but I think dosing can be imprecise.” Eve thinks of an utterly different conversation that happened what feels like a hundred years ago. “You know what I told Niko I would do to him?” Speaking his name feels a little like sacrilege, and she almost wishes she hadn’t, but Villanelle only smirks.

“Tell me.”

A little shyly, Eve repeats her perfect spousal murder: paralysis, suffocation, a long and involved cooking process.

“What about the bones?”

“I had a really good blender.”

Villanelle snorts. “I like it. You would have been a good widow.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I would have come to the funeral.” She tilts her head. “You look good in black.”

Eve feels an urge bubble up inside her, the kind she would normally shove away. But Villanelle is beside her in a silk robe, falling away to reveal her upper thigh, and less than ten hours ago Eve’s hand was—well.

She leans over and kisses Villanelle on the mouth. “Thank you,” she says after pulling back, their faces still close enough to share breath. And then: “I love the way you see me.”

Villanelle’s mouth quirks into a smile. “Well, I love to look at you.”

It’s most of the way to sappy, but many things can be allowed for in a post-coital—or pre-murder—haze.

Chapter 15

Chapter Text

Even the car feels different now. Villanelle still annoys Eve with stupid radio stations, and Eve still hates merging on unfamiliar highways. But she sits up straighter, and the tension that’s been permeating every muscle in her body while they drive is practically gone.

Instead, her heart is pounding in a steady thud-thud-thud of anticipation. One more day of driving, one night in a crappy hotel outside of the city, and then they’re off.

They brainstorm as they go. “Make it look like a carjacking,” Eve suggests. “Target the commute, like you said.”

“Then we’d have to kill the driver too.”

“Does the driver need to die?” Eve asks, not sure if she’s asking out of concern or not. “Maybe just wounded.”

“It’s cleaner without a close eyewitness.”

Eve’s mind races through drugs that cause memory loss, but without a pharmacist at your beck and call… “You’re right. Driver dies too.”

“The other option is the apartment. There’s a doorman, but…”

It’s almost funny how much it feels like idle chitchat, this discussion of how to end a woman’s life. Eve watches the endless Pennsylvania forests whip by, and contributes an idea here, a point of concern there, not trying very hard to dispel the giddiness in her chest.

By the time they arrive at their next motel, they have made their decisions. (They have dispensed with the need for subtlety in their methods, opting instead for quick but fun.) Tomorrow, Eve keeps thinking. She kisses Villanelle, hungry and urgent, all the while the refrain in her head: tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

It’s all new and gorgeous: the shape of Villanelle’s hips, the taste of her mouth, the press of her body against Eve’s. (The sense of anticipation, the heart-thumping memories of an axe in her hands taking new shape, the plan that they made together—not Villanelle’s plan but their plan.)

“You need your rest,” Villanelle says at one point. “Big day tomorrow.” The words send Eve’s heart hammering against her ribs. It takes her a long time to wind down for the night; she’s awake long after Villanelle’s chest starts rising and falling, but it’s that gentle, comforting rhythm that finally lulls her to sleep.

—

In the morning Villanelle gets breakfast sandwiches again, and Eve savors her New York bagel while thinking that it should feel impossible to eat at a time like this.

It doesn’t, though. If anything, she’s ravenous, devouring the sandwich like a wild animal. She grins up at Villanelle, and says, “Okay, what now?”

“Now we return our key to the front desk,” says Villanelle serenely.

Eve exaggeratedly rolls her eyes. “Great. I was wondering what we’d do with that.”

“And then…we wait.”

They spend the morning staking out, which Villanelle finds unspeakably boring, but Eve can be of use here; she scribbles notes in a notebook they picked up at a Duane Reade. Dinner plans, work schedules, the demeanor of the doorman and what pulls him away from his post…all this goes into Eve’s little notebook.

They have to wait til evening to make their move, so in the meantime—after lunch—they hit the Met. Villanelle hates Pollock and Rothko, whispering, "This is boooooooring" while Eve admires brush strokes and paint spatters. She only likes the bloody ones, and Eve can see the appeal, eyeing a painting of a butchered lamb that Villanelle looks like she wants to swallow whole. But with the rest of the museum, Eve looks at art and Villanelle looks at Eve, her mouth slightly open, as if Eve is more captivating than a Van Gogh, a Monet. Eve feels a flush rise on her neck at the intensity of Villanelle's gaze.

They stay until Villanelle's boredom overrules her desire to watch Eve look at the art, and they exit and move on to Central Park. Villanelle wants to ride the carousel, and Eve sits back and watches her. Every time they come into view of each other, Villanelle makes a different obscene gesture, and Eve can’t help the laughter that comes out of her.

They wander to the zoo, pay admission, and spend an hour in front of the snow leopard enclosure. Villanelle makes little snarls and growls when the leopards come near, and Eve laughs and wants to kiss her, and then she does.

They get tacos from a food truck for dinner, and then head to the subway.

It’s not that warm outside, but the subway station is muggy and hot and makes them both sweat within minutes. Eve pulls off her jacket and hangs it over her arm. Villanelle seems unbothered in her red peacoat.

“How can you wear that in here?” Eve asks, wiping sweat off her forehead with her sleeve.

“I’ve been hotter,” Villanelle says, winking playfully. Eve laughs in spite of herself.

The air conditioning on the train is blasting and welcome. Eve presses a hand to her chest, trying to calm her breathing, the frantic pounding of her heart. She doesn’t succeed.

Payton’s penthouse apartment is a six minute walk from the 86th Street station according to Google Maps. They walk in silence, and about two minutes in, Villanelle grabs Eve’s hand. The warm touch works like a benzo, bringing her pulse back to normal, slowing her breathing, drying the cold sweat on the back of her neck.

The walk to Payton’s building goes by quickly. Villanelle stays back while Eve goes up to the doorman, calling “Excuse me? There’s a car down the street that’s about to get towed, it’s a green Civic, I think? Do you know anyone who—”

“Oh, sh*t,” mutters the doorman, and takes off running.

Villanelle comes around the corner, laughing and hefting a cardboard box under her arm. “That was easy.”

“Shh,” says Eve, and they slip through the door.

A clerk sits behind a desk, looking bored. Villanelle indicates her package. “Delivery for Ms. Payton Vanetti.”

“Fourteenth floor,” the clerk says, not even looking up from her phone. “I’ll buzz you in.”

The elevator opens directly into Payton’s large apartment. The noise from the elevator makes them both jump, but no one comes to greet them. Villanelle pulls her large knife out of her belt as they step across the threshold. Though the building has an old New York aesthetic on the outside, the apartment is sleek and modern. It’s an open concept with high ceilings, with the living room, kitchen, and dining room occupying one huge space. There are hallways framed by tall arches on either side of the main room. Villanelle puts the package down on a table by the door.

“It looks like the Queer Eye guys got here first,” Villanelle whispers as she wanders in, eyeing a lamp straight out of a West Elm catalog.

“Let’s split up,” Eve says, stepping quietly toward the hallway on the left.

“Good idea,” Villanelle says, “If you want to get murdered first.” She steps in front of Eve, holding her knife out in front of her. Eve realizes she should probably be holding a knife too.

“Hold on,” Eve says, looking around. There’s a knife block on the kitchen counter. Eve selects the largest, sharpest one. Villanelle’s wide smile in response makes her heart swell. She smiles back.

Together, they venture into the hallway and peer into each room. There’s a large bedroom with an en suite bathroom, but it’s furnished too generically to be Payton’s bedroom. Another bathroom, another bedroom, and office, a home gym equipped with every machine imaginable and what looks like an entire spinning studio, all unoccupied.

They head back to the other hallway and find a movie theater, more bathrooms and guest bedrooms, and finally the main bedroom. It’s huge and surprisingly minimalistic compared to the rest of the apartment, all white with black and grey accents. There’s an enormous walk-in closet on one side, almost the size of the bedroom, filled with hundreds of items of clothing and even more pairs of shoes, most of them at least four inch heels.

“This woman has style,” Villanelle says, examining a pair of red patent leather pumps. “And she’s my size. Remind me to raid her closet after we gut her.”

“Me too,” Eve says, running the sleeve of a blazer through the fingers of the hand not clutching a knife.

Villanelle puts down the shoe. “No one’s here,” she says. “Let’s wait in the main room until she gets home. Maybe raid the fridge for caviar or gold leaf or whatever rich New Yorkers eat.” She jerks her head toward the bedroom door and starts walking out. Eve follows without question.

They take turns posing on the countless pieces of furniture in Payton’s open living room, not all of them meant for sitting. Villanelle perches herself on the edge of an end table with a too-small base, and she falls to the ground before Eve can steady her. The loud crash echoes on the high ceilings. Villanelle stretches out on the floor, laughing uncontrollably, and Eve laughs with her until they both have tears in their eyes. The laughter dies down naturally, and they’re left looking at each other, breathing heavily in the quiet.

“You’re so different than I thought you were when we first met,” Eve says.

“You thought I was a slu*tty nurse when we first met,” Villanelle says.

“f*ck off,” Eve laughs for a moment before her face turns serious again. “I mean it. You’re just—” and then the elevator pings.

Villanelle is on Payton before she can fully step inside. One hand grabs a handful of her red hair and pulls her head back so hard that her neck bends at almost a ninety degree angle; the other holds the gleaming knife at her throat. Villanelle lowers her lips to Payton’s ear. “You have a lovely home,” she whispers, then positions the knife to slit her throat.

“Thank you,” Payton says calmly, not even flinching. Her voice is like honey, low, thick, and sickly sweet. “I decorated it myself.”

“Huh. I assumed you had Restoration Hardware on speed dial,” Villanelle says a little louder, moving her mouth away from Payton’s ear and pushing the knife deeper into her pale skin.

“Speed dial seven,” Payton smirks. “I have to say, I’m surprised my last moments are so dull,” she says. “Delivering a fake package? Slitting my throat in my entryway? I’ve heard all about you. You’re more sophisticated than this. What happened to you?” Payton moves her eyes to Eve for the first time. “Gone soft?”

“Will you still think I’m soft when I’m gutting you like a fish?” Villanelle asks. The knife is breaking the skin now, coating the edge of the blade with blood.

“I’ll bleed out before then if you go with your original stupid plan of slitting my f*cking throat before you can have any fun with me,” Payton says.

“It’s a classic for a reason,” Villanelle says. “Goodbye!”

“Wait!” Eve says. Villanelle looks at her, not moving the knife.

“I thought you were over this superiority sh*t,” Villanelle says, pulling Payton’s head back harder. “She has to go. Now.”

“No,” Eve says. “I want to do it.”

Villanelle smiles like Eve has never seen before, like she’s watching Eve take her first steps and walk right into her outstretched arms.

“Be my guest,” Villanelle says, still smiling, still holding Payton in place. Eve moves in front of her, watching blood begin to trickle down the pale skin of her throat.

“Ah, the accessory,” Payton says, laughing softly. “You’re new at this, aren’t you? Do you really think you can do it?”

“Maybe,” Eve says, looking down at the kitchen knife in her sweaty hand.

She smiles. “Yes.” And she plunges the knife into Payton’s stomach.

Eve barely processes the gasp that leaves Payton’s mouth as she doubles over. The knife goes in more easily than it did into Villanelle, like stabbing a firm down pillow. She can’t help but compare the two. Villanelle is curvy where Payton is slender, muscular where Payton is soft. With Villanelle, she was hesitant, even guilty, but with Payton, she feels certain, joyful, powerful.

Eve pauses briefly, unsure whether she wants to twist the knife or slice downward, but she remembers Villanelle’s words from moments ago: Will you still think I’m soft when I’m gutting you like a fish? Eve is not soft, not anymore, so she draws the knife downward toward Payton’s intestines and watches the skin tear open under her dress, watches the blood spread onto the expensive white fabric, hears the dull squishing sound as her organs give way to the knife, now slippery with blood. And so she doesn’t miss out, she twists the knife, too, causing Payton to cry out and collapse. They all fall to the ground together.

“Shut her up,” Eve says roughly, looking up at Villanelle. Villanelle nods, and there’s a flash of silver as she slits her throat in one swift motion. Payton chokes immediately, gargling and gasping, eyes wide as her lungs fill with her own blood.

“Much better,” Eve says. Payton is twitching now, very near losing consciousness. That won’t do , Eve thinks. She hasn’t suffered enough yet, hasn’t paid for what she’s put them through. So Eve quickly pulls the knife out of Payton’s guts and moves it to her chest, and she hears a rib crack as she spears her directly through the heart. Payton’s eyes look like they’re going to pop out of her head, and then they begin to close. Eve grabs her face and turns it toward her.

“Look at me,” Eve says, voice shaking, desperate to watch her light go out. All at once, the twitching stops, and Payton is still, and her eyes that were looking into Eve’s eyes are now looking at nothing at all. Eve can’t stop looking at her, has to take in every part of her, wants to admire her work before they have to flee.

When she’s had her fill, when her breathing slows, she looks up at Villanelle. Villanelle’s hand is still in Payton’s hair, tangled in the roots, her smile nearly too wide for her face.

Eve can’t help it; she leans in and the hot, wanting cavity of Villanelle’s mouth is there to meet her. Payton’s body slips downward, and as Villanelle’s tongue slides against hers, Eve’s blood-sticky hand smears against her cheek.

“I did it,” Eve whispers.

Villanelle echoes “You did it,” with something awestruck in her voice, close enough that Eve can feel Villanelle’s breath against her own lips. Eve’s bloodied hands cradle Villanelle’s face, slide against her neck, and she feels hot and frantic and elated.

“What now?”

“Now,” says Villanelle, “we clean ourselves up.” She pulls her legs out from beneath Payton’s body, which falls ungracefully to the floor, neck at a strange angle, limbs askew, blood still pooling beneath it. Eve disentangles herself as well, and, recalling a bathroom off of Payton’s bedroom, she leads Villanelle there.

Villanelle’s clothes saw the odd blood spatter here and there, but Eve’s are soaked through. She begins to scrub at her hands in the sink, watching the water turn red, but Villanelle makes a tch sound and when Eve turns around, Villanelle has turned on the shower and stripped to her underwear.

“You’re going to shower?”

“Come on, Eve.” She tilts her head. “You don’t want to try it out? It’s a waterfall…” She trails off enticingly, then unhooks her bra, and Eve doesn’t try to hide her appreciative grin.

“You make a convincing point,” says Eve, unbuttoning her bloody shirt and tossing it into the sink. Her pants are next to go, and she lets herself bask in the sensation of Villanelle’s eyes on her, watching her, enjoying her. There’s red underneath her clothes too, blood dripping down her chest and stomach, and some part of her pictures Villanelle licking it off.

Villanelle would do it, if she asked, but the more rational part of Eve’s brain reminds her they don’t have Payton’s medical records and she could have hepatitis or something, and instead she steps into the shower (Villanelle follows) and lets the hot water wash it all away.

The water turns faintly pink for a moment, and within minutes the blood is mostly gone from their bodies and hands, and they could get out now. But Villanelle reaches out and traces the curve from Eve’s ear down her neck and across to her shoulder, and Eve shudders with the thrill of it. She closes her eyes and lets Villanelle touch her, lets her trace the shape of her body with her fingertips.

“You have a little blood here,” Villanelle murmurs, touching the side of Eve’s hip, and Eve doesn’t care if it’s true; Villanelle takes a pump of an expensive body wash that smells faintly of lilacs, and begins to scrub Eve gently and all over. She lingers on Eve’s breasts, soapy hands tracing the soft curve of them, and Eve gasps and sighs and leans her head back against Villanelle’s chest.

“Tease,” Eve says, and Villanelle laughs softly.

“You don’t know what I plan on doing with you,” she says, low. “Just as soon as we are far, far away from here.”

Eve shivers with joy and anticipation and, too, with the memory of Payton’s crimson-stained corpse in the entryway. She realizes suddenly she’s shaking, has been shaking since the moment she took up the knife, but it’s delicious; she turns around and lets her hands tremble against Villanelle’s skin and thinks she wants to feel like this, exactly like this, for the rest of her life.

—

The decoy package contains a change of clothes for each of them, and—carefully avoiding the blood pooled on the floor—they put on the clothes and stroll back down to the lobby.

The clerk glances at them. “You were up there for a while.”

“Ms. Vanetti likes to inspect the merchandise personally,” says Villanelle with an American accent and a simper.

And they walk out.

“I have a surprise for you,” Villanelle says as they reach the end of the street.

Eve raises her eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”

“Oh, yeah,” Villanelle mimics. “Come with me.”

They head back to the sweltering subway and get on the Q line, and Eve wracks her memory. “Brooklyn?” she asks.

“Not that far. Just come on!”

When Villanelle ushers her out of the car at the Times Square stop, Eve audibly groans. “I don’t want to go to Times Square.”

“Come on!” is all Villanelle will say to her, and Eve sighs and lets herself be led up the stairs and into the chaos of flashing advertisem*nts and throngs of tourists. A street performer in a large dog costume pushes by as they emerge, and Eve pictures herself slitting his throat, stringing up his body inside the costume—or maybe naked except for the dog head.

Out loud, she says, “f*ck off.” A nearby tourist covers his young son’s ears. “Come on, he’s heard worse,” she says, and then Villanelle grabs her hand and tugs her along.

The hand grab turns out to be necessary given how many people are on the street, and it’s a relief when they finally head onto a side street and the mad rush of people is reduced to an ordinary trickle. Villanelle is still pulling her, almost too fast for Eve’s shorter legs to keep up, and then Villanelle stops.

Eve looks up. “It’s…a FedEx store.”

“Just wait.” Villanelle heads into the store and to the customer service counter. Eve follows. Villanelle is saying, “Package for Eliza Lovett?” It’s a name Eve hasn’t heard her use before. Villanelle signs for it, and heads for the door.

Eve follows, again trying fruitlessly to keep up. “You’re being coy,” she grumbles. “And walking too fast.”

At the end of the street, Villanelle finally turns around, face shining. She rips open the package and hands Eve a folded manila envelope. Eve empties the contents into her hand, and what emerges looks like two U.S. passports.

She opens the first one, and there is Villanelle’s face, along with the name Eliza Lovett, born in Iowa. The next one has her own face, and Eve groans at the picture Villanelle chose. “You know,” she says, “there are plenty of pictures where I look perfectly nice.” The name on the passport is Lucy Park.

“I think you look lovely,” says Villanelle. “Look, brand-new, perfectly clean. We’re ready.”

“Where are we going?” Eve asks.

Villanelle grins at her. “Anywhere you want.”

The future spreads out before her, gorgeous and bloody and new, and Eve stands on her toes to kiss Villanelle hard, fingers tangling in her hair. “Let’s go.”