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PART I // Prologue: The Barn Swallow // ‘Oh, and Villanelle…’
the young ex-assassin turned, raising a questioning eyebrow to the woman she had grudgingly grown to like in Havana. What could she say, nothing like air guitar to make a lying intelligence agent seem more like a human.
‘I still owe you a dare.’
Villanelle grinned cheekily and mimed a guitar lick on her way out of the door. If they were ever unlucky enough to cross paths with Carolyn Martens again, she would take her up on her offer. But as much as she hadn’t been terrible in Havana, Villanelle knew that where Carolyn was, there would always be trouble and shifting alliances and danger, and right now she wanted Eve. And Eve wanted her. And nothing in the world, no person, however powerful, would be able to take that away from her without losing several limbs and probably their life. Eve looked back with a bemused smile.
‘What was that all about?’ she asked, rolling her eyes at Villanelle’s ridiculous rocker impression.
‘Ah, it was nothing. I met Carolyn in Havana. I was meant to kill her, but I just hit her with a crowbar and put her body in my car and then had really nice breakfast food and decided to stay. Then I made her play air guitar for me when we were playing truth or dare and I killed a lot of shithead abusive husbands for the housekeeper and her friends.’
Eve just raised an eyebrow at her.
‘You’re so weird.’
‘Listen Eve, you didn’t try Benita’s breakfast spread! it was so delicious and she was very very nice to me, even after she had to clean blood and some fingers out of the guest bedroom. And her husband was a firefighter who liked to burn her, which was really messed up, so I killed him by faking a fire and putting the big hose in his throat and drowning him.’Villanelle realised as the words left her mouth that maybe Eve wouldn’t want to hear about the details of her killing people, and that they’d just got into a good place with each other so she should try and steer the conversation away from her violent tendencies. But hey, Eve had gouged out Gunn’s eyes in front of her, and Eve had watched her kill Helene…
Villanelle was about to apologise (for what exactly, for being a killer? Eve of all people knows she is more than that, right?) when Eve barked out a laugh, flung her arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek.
‘Damn, that must’ve been one hell of a breakfast spread.’
Villanelle grinned, leaning into the touch.
‘It really was- she had these little tiny pastries and sliced the fruit into different shapes…’The two women’s voices faded away as Carolyn watched them leave, pressed close against each other’s sides. Pamela sat back down opposite her and took a long gulp of her orange squash.
‘It’s all in place?’
Pam nodded.
‘Good girl. Jolly good work.’
Carolyn slid what looked like a business card across the table to rest under her cardboard coaster. The young woman gave the elder a blank stare.
‘This doesn’t mean I work for you. Because I don’t want to work for you, whatever you’re planning. But thanks, for the squash. I’m gonna go now.’
Pam pushed off from the table and walked out with a spring in her step, feeling as if she knew herself for the first time in her life. Already out of sight around a street corner, hands tangled together loosely, Villanelle and Eve walked towards the riverbank the boat was supposed to be parked on. Nested in thick blonde hair, a tracker silently pulsed, and Carolyn Martens watched a blinking dot move across her digital map.
‘Yes, jolly good.’ In her left hand, a walkie-talkie crackled to life. // Chapter 1: The River Thames ; later that night //Villanelle had just killed a roomful of people. Terrible people, obviously, but still - and the kitchen staff just had the misfortune of being employed by the twelve, or maybe by the wedding – was the wedding a cover up for the twelve or did those guys just pick a terrible venue? Because she figured sooner rather than later, people would wonder where the snacks are and find the entire kitchen staff gassed to death and a conference room full of mostly old white men she had killed in, if she said so herself, particularly gruesome and inventive ways while under the time pressure and without any specific equipment. But that was how Villanelle liked it, when they really deserved it and she could watch the life drain from their squinty little government eyes and the blood gush from their mouth where she’d ripped their tongue out before stabbing them in the heart. Or the groin- the groin was always fun when it came to killing men. Or, it had been fun – but now, unless they absolutely had to in order to survive, Villanelle would make sure she and Eve didn’t have to kill anyone again. Or at least not in the immediate future. Well, unless someone really pissed them off. She remembered Eve with her thumbs in Gunn’s eye sockets and shivered. It really shouldn’t have been hot, and Villanelle had actually enjoyed Gunn’s weird and silent company until she’d gone all Stephen King on her so she did feel a little bit bad… but the determined set of Eve’s jaw, the fire in her eyes… who was she kidding, of course it was hot, just like when Eve buried her axe in Raymond’s head to protect her and Villanelle honestly contemplated proposing right there, in front of a split open skull.
God, she was madly in love with Eve Polastri. And finally, it seems Eve Polastri had come to her senses and realised she loved Villanelle too. Eve knew that Villanelle had killed a roomful of people. The wild gleam in her eyes, her hair in disarray, the blood across her shirt – once Eve had confirmed it wasn’t Villanelle’s own blood and she was pretty much uninjured, she could appreciate how even that looked like art on her perfect canvas of a body. God, why hadn’t she listened to Bill in Berlin – how had everyone, even Niko, spotted her obvious infatuation with the woman except her?
It was like she was the last person to be told a big secret, except the secret was herself all along, and she was in love with the woman who killed Bill and god this was all such a mess. But Villanelle was walking towards her, lit by the soft glow of fairy-lights on the deck, and the wind was catching in her hair, and Eve was melting away.Eve was in love with Villanelle and now she was finally letting herself feel it, it was like an entire city had grown in between her ribcage and every door, every window, every road was Villanelle’s laugh; the way she rolled her eyes at Eve but really it meant she found her actions adorable; all the ways Villanelle had shown her that she was good, deep down in her core she was good, and capable of love and tenderness, and she wanted to be better; and the twelve had taken her vulnerable, damaged teenage mind and twisted it to fit their means. For that alone, not counting all the other things, Eve would’ve happily killed the bastards with her bare hands too. That is, if she hadn’t been busy being a distraction by officiating a wedding and doing the electric slide with a roomful of very tipsy and enthusiastic wedding guests on a pleasure cruise. All this while Villanelle murdered a roomful of people and Eve imagined how she might’ve done it with no hint of disgust, just morbid curiosity and admiration and – god – that ever-present love that had hollowed her out and filled her up again with nothing but Villanelle. And she was glad , she was glad that Villanelle had been able to kill them herself, to physically break the hold they had had on her all these years. Hopefully, even though the road would be treacherous, with the twelve dealt such a brutal blow they would have a window of relative safety to escape and start a new life together. Because Eve finally knew what she wanted, and it had always been Villanelle. Villanelle walked closer towards Eve, smiling softly until it seemed like her patience broke and she ran across the deck, sweeping Eve up in her arms and swinging her around in a circle.
‘I did it, Eve! They’re gone. They’re finally gone.’
Eve squealed as the lights on the bank and deck blended together into one, incredibly disorienting, swirl, before being set gently back on her feet and pulled into an impossibly tight hug.
‘Don’t you mean we did it?’ she teased, only half-joking.
Villanelle rolled her eyes (the way that let Eve know she wasn’t actually annoyed, just found her a little ridiculous) and acquiesced.
‘Fine, we did it,’ she said, before pulling Eve’s body flush against hers and whispering in the older woman’s ear, ‘but it was mostly me.’ Eve could only laugh and hold villanelle tighter until she heard a tell-tale whisper through the air, a snick of a bullet passing through fabric and skin, and Villanelle let out a little puff of air and an oh as something warm and wet bloomed against Eve’s shirt where they’d been touching. Villanelle pulled back, eyes widening in shock as she registered the bullet wound in her shoulder before grabbing Eve’s arm and yelling at her to jump, get in the water, get in the water where the bullets won’t get us except the bullets kept coming and blood bloomed from Villanelle’s shoulder blades like wings except this was all wrong, they had only just found each other and the universe couldn’t possibly be this cruel, to dangle real love in front of them both for a taste and then snatch it back.
Eve thought this was the kind of moment where time would slow down, and she would watch Villanelle’s face disappear into the murky depths over what would feel like an eternity. In reality, though, time sped up. Eve was hyperaware of the current rushing through her ears and pulling villanelle down and away from her because her arms could barely paddle with the wounds in her shoulders. Eve was hyperaware of the seconds ticking by underwater, of just how soon she would be running out of breath. Still, Eve paddled downwards towards the vague shape of Villanelle’s hand in the freezing, dark water until her lungs felt close to bursting and her vision blackened around the edges and only then did she kick towards the surface to gulp down oxygen as fast as she could, hyperaware of every second she was inhaling while Villanelle, oh god Villanelle not like this , was under the water and floating further and further from her reach. Eve dived down, again and again, pushing her body to the furthest limits it could take and straining her eyes against the gloom and dirt in the river water in the vain hope she would see Villanelle kicking towards the surface to meet her. After the fifth dive down, Eve was close to blacking out completely and she broke the surface with a primal scream, nothing but rage and grief and something that was almost the shape of Villanelle’s name but was more like the keening of a banshee, and she struck out towards the shore because if Villanelle was still underwater by now she would have drowned, so she must have found her way to shore and washed up there, all alone and injured and confused and oh god villanelle not like this, I had so much to tell you, so much love to give, so much- The revving of a small but powerful motor broke through the haze of her own screaming, as someone yelled ‘over there!’ and tossed a life ring around her to haul her in towards a bright yellow rescue dinghy. Eve looked around wildly as they pulled her over the edge of the raft, grabbing the closest rescuer’s jacket and pulling him towards her as she spoke.
‘Another woman, another woman was in the water with me, she was slim and blonde and a little taller than me and she was – she had at least one gunshot wound to the shoulder, possibly more, and you have to find her please you have to find her I love her please, please you have to find her, she can’t be dead, not like this…’Eve’s voice cracked and broke off into a whisper as she mumbled to herself, her eyes darting along the surface of the river to the riverbank and back again, desperately searching for a hint of a body. When they reached the shore, a paramedic waiting on the tide-exposed beach wrapped foil around her shoulders. When Eve kept running up and down the shoreline calling Villanelle’s name, and when she tried again and again to jump back in the water to keep searching, the paramedic signalled to his colleague and she slowly approached Eve, grabbing her into a hug and plunging a syringe into her arm. After that, the world faded round the edges into cool, dark, nothingness, like waves breaking softly against her temples, with the faint sense that there was something she desperately needed waiting just beyond them. // Location Unknown ; 6 days later // The last thing Villanelle remembered was thinking the bullets in her shoulders felt different than she was expecting. Then, the pain. She cracked open dry, heavy lids and turned her head as much as she could to look around at a blurry room, mostly white and pastel with a single empty chair pushed up by the singular window at the other end. God, where was Eve? Had she made it out of the river, was she in the hospital here being held captive like her or had she made an escape? Villanelle wouldn’t even entertain the thought that Eve was dead; all the bullets had been aimed at her , and snipers only missed fatal shots that many times on purpose. No, for whatever reason they wanted Villanelle alive, so they would have either let Eve go free (unlikely) or taken her at the same time as Villanelle, maybe with force.
Eve would be okay though, she had to be. Villanelle knew she would burn the whole world down just to make that certain. But first, she would take the painkillers because she could feel her heartbeat in her teeth and her shoulders felt like they’d been pulled apart with pliers and stuck back in the wrong place (she had seen Helene do that once and been, begrudgingly, very impressed.) Trusting that the medicine would kick in soon and numb the extra pain she was about to cause herself, Villanelle pushed herself into a half-sitting position and twisted around to get a proper look at the room, see if she could find any clues to who had taken her, and where they might have taken Eve. There, on a bedside table just behind where her head had been laying flat (god her hair must be a disaster right now) was a post-it note stuck to a plastic cup of water with a straw and a packet of painkillers. Be back soon, play nice, and don’t blame the nurses.
- C. And on the railing of the hospital bed, next to where a set of metal handcuffs fastened her in place, another post-it, this one simply reading:One last dare. Oh, she was going to fucking kill Carolyn Martens.As the painkillers dulled the world around the edges once more, Villanelle formed her plan. First, she would fix her shoulders; second, find a way to get out of these handcuffs; then find out what shit Carolyn was pulling so she could kill her, get out of it and go and find the love of her life before the wrong people did first, assuming they hadn’t already. Eve would be okay, she had to be. Villanelle just had to find her again. It’s not like she was new to the whole “finding her way to Eve Polastri against all odds” thing. They’d be together again soon, with their whole lives ahead of them.
With that thought, Villanelle let unconsciousness pull her under once again, like black water closing over her head.