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It’s desire, Villanelle realises with a pulse of heat; the look on Eve’s face as she watches transfixed through the window of the cafe. Desire. For that kill. For her.
She’s sure of it.
The link between their eyeline is like a steel rope strung taut across the road, so firm that Villanelle can almost feel Eve not breathing.
She’s worried that it’s only shock to begin with. Maybe it was pushing too far too soon, Villanelle thinks for a fraction of a second as she lets the woman go and Eve leaps up in fright, clutching at the glass for stability.
Normally she gets some kind of rush from a kill, especially a public one but the thrill in this is entirely in watching the expressions roll across Eve’s face. Shock. Horror. Interest. And then…
Desire.
Flushed cheeks, barely breathing. It’s desire, Villanelle is certain.
It’s not only interest in the kill, or Eve would be looking at the body on the road. It’s not a concern for the onlookers, because she’s not looking at the crowd. She’s looking at Villanelle. Only Villanelle.
Finally .
She just manages to get her hand around the Peel girl’s wrist before she touches the body, drawing her up and into her arms. Not out of any concern for the girl, even if she does enjoy the jealous twitch of Eve’s lip when they embrace, but because she doesn’t want blood on this coat when she pulls the small girl against hers.
Her heart flutters against Villanelle’s palms where they spread across her back like a nervous little hummingbird and her own pounds in an echo as she wishes desperately that it were Eve’s she could feel instead.
Tell me what you’re thinking , she wants to hiss intimately as she holds Eve’s eye, unflinching. Tell me what you’re feeling, Eve. Tell me everything .
Only, she realises with a jolt, she doesn’t actually need to ask, because for the first time since she found Eve pulling her apartment to pieces in Paris, she thinks she can see exactly what it is that Eve is feeling.
Her pupils are dilated and her chest is moving shallowly and her palm is still spread out on the glass in a way that Villanelle wants to mirror on the other side before she puts a fist through and pulls Eve to her amidst the shards, kissing her while the hand that clutches Eve’s shirt bleeds freely between them.
She looks exactly like all the girls do when Villanelle slides her hand up their inner thigh at a bar, the action barely obscured as they sit on high stools but the sensation tempting enough to blur their self-control and modesty. She looks turned on. Unmistakably so. And finally, finally , completely focused on her.
Villanelle knows Niko didn’t spend the night at home last night, he spent it at that prissy teacher’s house and she wonders whether the open look of interest on Eve’s is because she’s finally acknowledged that she’s free; of him and their completely mundane marriage, of the social convention of pretending to care, of needing to show concern, of having to hide who she is.
It’s exciting, she thinks with a jolt, the interest in Eve’s eyes. Immensely so.
She liked that, Villanelle smirks to herself as Debbie sobs pathetically against her chest. The whole thing. The spectacle, the boldness, the brazenness, the violence. Not soft and weak like her . Not painless. Satisfying.
She liked what I did. What I did.
What I can do.
Me .
-
It takes some time for her to manage to extract herself from the Peel girl, a frustrating volume of tears and pathetic little sobs before she can remove herself and find her way back to Eve’s.
It’s become a ritual of sorts, to pass by before she makes her way back to the new apartment. The apartment that she’s almost certain Eve picked out for herself, although she doesn’t want to give Konstantin the satisfaction of asking him whether she’s right or not. It’s an almost dead give away in that she arrives without having to ask of the location, that she appears on that morning and barely looks around the place like she already knows every inch of the room.
There’s a touch of intimacy about the place that makes Villanelle sure of it. It’s nice but not extravagant; not something Eve would have to have fought to attain but far from the hovel she’d been forced to stay in a week ago. Just nice enough to have avoided questioning. It almost reminds her of Paris, actually. Barely lived in but not empty. Perfect, actually. Something she would have chosen herself.
She wonders if Eve is proud of herself when Villanelle makes a passing comment to herself about how nice Carolyn’s taste in accommodation was just within her earshot.
There’s an immense satisfaction in the realisation that Niko isn’t coming home on the first night. Immense. She’d been expecting his adventurous turn to sift something deeply disturbing and misaligned between them to the surface but not quite this quickly.
Eve paces the house for a while that night but she doesn’t look upset or distraught at his apparent absence. Annoyed, yes, but not beside herself with worry for the man she supposedly loves who is yet to return home.
Maybe she doesn’t love him at all, Villanelle wonders. Maybe this will be much easier than she anticipated, to strip him from Eve’s life. Maybe it’ll barely be a chore at all.
Villanelle watches Eve make a number of phone calls before she gives up and pours herself a glass of wine, not bothering with dinner. flipping open her computer and studying something on the screen for an hour or so before she calls it a night.
She waits outside as Eve sleeps alone for the first few nights, partly to keep an eye on the house to make sure there aren’t any interested parties sniffing around but mainly to confirm the absence of Niko and Eve’s apparent lack of concern.
There’s a potential flash of regret in the mornings but it’s nothing that lingers. The thing that seems to hover with more permanence is the way she paces the kitchen like she’s trying to find the ghost of Villanelle’s presence there. She smirks with an unfettered pleasure when she discovers the thing she’s seen Eve twist and manipulate in her hands every night is the wire around the top of her champagne bottle.
Not her wedding ring, not anything of Niko’s, but one of the last things Villanelle make physical contact with in the house. About the only tangible reminder of her that Eve has to hand.
It’s tempting to break in and lie down next to her when she finally lets herself think about sleep but she knows Eve’s not quite ready for that. Yet. The ring she still wears is a symbol of that even if she treats that piece of wire like it holds as much value. She might allow it, Villanelle’s appearance, but that’s still Niko’s side of the bed in Eve’s head - for now anyway - and Villanelle doesn’t want it until it’s hers, until Eve breathes her name in her sleep and craves it to be so.
Villanelle has done enough chasing. She’s covered enough ground. Eve needs to come to her now, not the other way around. She’s made the journey to London, now Eve needs to prove she’s worthy of her.
There’s a neat irony in the fact that she uses other people but she refuses to be used. Eve needs to prove that she can show Villanelle the respect she deserves. She needs to prove she can run with the animals without flinching away from the blood and bone between their teeth. Eve needs to prove that she understands Villanelle like she thinks she does.
I know you can do it, Eve, she thinks as she watches Eve twist the wire in something like a ring, rubbing it absentmindedly across her lips and cheeks as she reads over the files for Rome once they start to line everything up. Just cross the line .
It would be sweet to bend low and whisper her thoughts into Eve’s ear as she reads, to push the laptop shut when she loses her patience with waiting, to feel the shiver of Eve’s body when she takes the pulse in her neck between her teeth and slides her hand between Eve’s thighs. It would be so sweet.
I know you can do it, she thinks, gnawing at her lip when Eve pulls her hair down out of its ponytail for the sixth time that night. Up, down, up, down, like she does when she’s nervous, or jittery, or excited. I know you have it in you. Come to me, Eve. Hurry. I’ll be waiting for you on the other side, away from rationality and rules and restraint. Just you and me and nothing in the middle, nothing to stop us from tearing the world down.
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Something doesn’t feel right about Rome, something feels off, obscured even more than it normally is, and she knows Eve thinks so too.
They go anyway, of course.
Eve’s hands are as soft as Villanelle remembers her face being when she takes the bread from her, the gasp that slips from her barely audible but most definitely there .
I know her better than she knows herself, Villanelle thinks as she sits bored out of her mind at the dinner table while Aaron Peel talks down to the Russians across from her, biting her tongue to stop speaking back to them in her own tongue for no other reason than to infuse some vague excitement into the evening. I know more of her than she knows herself. I wonder how long it will take her to realise I’m not seeing anything that isn’t there.
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She muses the absence of her things as she climbs into bed. She wonders how many voicemails Eve has left her now. She wishes she could see her. She wishes she could listen to her try and hide the adorably high strung concern in her voice behind the illusion of professionalism.
It’s an unexpected luxury, the room, and utterly wasted without someone to string across the bed to help her ruin the sheets. Eve would look beautiful, she thinks, her black hair against the silk. Her cheeks flushed as Villanelle trails her hand up Eve’s thigh, the muscle shaking in anticipation.
She wishes she could…
The earpiece , she remembers. The earpiece. Eve will be listening . She knows she will . Without having been able to talk to her all day she knows Eve will monitor it all night. She knows she will.
She settles into the covers, pulling them high to her neck as both of her hands push the sleeping top high up her stomach, fingertips glittering over her bare skin. “Are you going to listen all night?” she whispers into the night.
God, she wishes she could see the flush on Eve’s face.
“I can help you,” she says as her hands run down the length of her stomach, slipping beneath her own waistband. Like you help me , she thinks as she tastes the weight of her own desire.
Her fingers slip and her breathing drops an octave. She wonders if Eve can hear the music in her head the same as she can. The rise and fall of the strings. The slow, deep incline of the bass. The pause of everything when she pushes inside.
“I’m wet, Eve,” she whispers, her voice low and rough. “Can you feel it? Can you imagine it?”
She sighs prettily when she starts thrusting, clenching around her own fingers, the noise that Anna used to hold her breath for when she had her in her lap, one hand on her lower back leading her into the fingers buried between her thighs.
Almost too much, too soon; the stretch of it. Almost, as she tenses, shifting the weight of her bite to her back teeth. She likes pain too much to exclude it from sex. So did Anna. She thinks Eve will be the same.
“Slower ,” she demands aloud, as much in order to herself as it is to Eve.
She closes her eyes and concentrates on the ache between her thighs, feels every inch of her fingers, wonders what Eve’s will feel like inside her.
“ Deeper ,” she growls, rolling onto her stomach so she can bear down on her hand, rolling her hips and gasping when she finds something deep and primal in the action.
God, she wishes she could see Eve, she thinks, groaning, squeezing around her own fingers, pressing down onto the awkward angle of her wrist and relishing the lick of pain. She wishes she could see the desperate, furious look on her face as she searches for something just out of reach. Something she would, could, will give Eve with a smile rolling off the point of her teeth.
“Wait,” she hisses as she feels her orgasm threaten the base of her spine.
She forces herself to stop, biting down on the silk pillowcase as she moans loudly, tensing, feeling a jolt of pleasure push out from her core to her toes.
“I said wait , Eve,” she says again, sharper, almost hearing the impatience in Eve’s body, imagining the exact shape the line of her jaw as she curses her under her breath.
“Now,” she breathes finally. “Come for me, Eve,” she says clearly, allowing her fingers to pick up a punishing pace, sighing heavily, gutturally. “Come for me when I come for you.”
Her own release hits her like the weight of a bullet with a vest in the way. It’s a deep ache that spreads outwards, overwhelming her, making her writhe on her own hand, making her gasp into the pillow, the depth of her voice giving way to a soft sigh as the last lingering waves urge their way through her fingertips.
“Good,” she laughs, her voice muffled by the pillow, her fingers stroking slowly again, her teeth in her lip and blood on her tongue. “Good. Now, again.”
-
The emotion in her chest is so foreign when she wakes, the twist of it so heavy that she almost thinks she must be unwell before realisation dawns with the bolt of sunlight streaming in through the window.
Excitement, she realises as she inhales deeply, the dull scent of her pleasure just there when she moves in bed. She’s excited.
Eve , she remembers, licking her lips and squeezing her thighs together, relishing the ache she can feel there. Eve did this. They did this together .
“Morning,” she says aloud, smugly, because she knows Eve will be awake and listening. If she even slept at all.
She throws the covers off with a smile on her face, her teeth hungry for the day, hungry for Eve, hungry for something sharp and red in the middle of the mundane.
Come and find me, she thinks. Come and let me touch you like that in person, Eve. Imagine how good that would be. Come feel for yourself how wet you make me. Come and listen to the sound I make in person.
She wants her things, she thinks, suddenly impatient. She wants her phone. She wants to hear the nervous quiver in Eve’s voice when they speak for the first time as lovers. She wants to hear the way her breathing falters when she tells Eve how good it was, how much better than those girls she was even without being in the same room, how much better it was knowing Eve was there with her.
She wants to know what this means.
“I dreamt of you,” she says aloud as she walks to the bathroom, smiling at the light in her own eyes when she looks into the mirror. Beautiful , she thinks. Just beautiful.
“I dreamt we killed him together,” she says into the microphone, turning her chin from side to side. “I dreamt that you kissed me over his body with his blood on your hands. Does that scare you?”
She laughs to herself as she reaches for the hairbrush on the vanity. “No, I don’t think it would.”
There’s a sound at the door to her room that makes her whip her head around and look for a weapon at the same time, her fingers wrapping around the tortoiseshell of the acrylic hairbrush. She could snap the handle into something sharp enough if she needed to, but she relaxes when she sees the old matron poke her head rudely in through the door.
“Mr Peel is ready for breakfast,” she says emotionlessly. “Wear the blue dress. He’s asked specifically.”
She glances to the wardrobe, her eyes falling on something red. Like Eve’s lips. Like her blood that covered them both in Paris. She’ll wear that instead.
“Fine,” she sighs impatiently back in the accent that makes her own teeth ache. “I’ll be there in ten.”
She holds the woman’s eye until she turns to leave, not flinching, not even moving until the door shuts and locks behind her. Definitely the red jumpsuit, she thinks with a scowl. If she can’t kill him the least she can do is upset his delicate little perfectionist-control-freak act.
“I wish you were here,” she says into the microphone, chuckling softly. “I bet you look beautiful in the mornings.”
She turns on her heel and walks towards the wardrobe, her fingers caressing the soft fabric before she pulls it off its hanger. She drops it carelessly from her hands, falling bodily into the bed next to it, the sheets soft around her face.
Come and find me, Eve , she thinks, smiles, stretching out long and feline, groaning with satisfaction when her spine cracks in relief. There’s so much I want to tell you. There’s so much I want to say. Come and find me, Eve. You’re mine now, aren’t you? You’re mine. You promised. You said you’d give me everything and I want that paid.
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