Dasha Kvariani is thriving. We met her unexpectedly on Sadovaya Ulitsa, near Oxana’s university, where Dasha has opened a nightclub. We went along to the club one evening, and she gave us dinner in the VIP suite, but the conversation didn’t flow and Oxana became agitated. We were all too conscious, perhaps, of the weight of each other’s secrets.
Winter is here again, and in the park below our apartment the trees are bare and the fountains frozen. I am reading, and Oxana is completing an assignment on her laptop beside me. She is a very competitive student and will be expecting a top grade. Neither of us has spoken for an hour, nor felt the need to. When she finishes her work Oxana closes the laptop, reaches out and takes my hand.
We’ve often talked about that evening at the Bolshoi Theatre. Not so much about the events in the scarlet anteroom, but about what followed. While the theatrics might have been necessary, Oxana tells me, they were horrible. The blank cartridges, the blood pack under her shirt, all of it. What she remembers most keenly is hearing me scream. At that moment, she remembers, something shifted inside her. “I could feel what you were feeling.”
Last night I awoke in the early hours of the morning, weeping. I was certain that Oxana was dead, and that the events of the last year had all been a dream. It took almost a minute of her holding me and saying my name to convince me that she was alive. She doesn’t experience these terrors herself, but she sees their effect on me and knows that what I need at such moments is to know that she is real, and here.
This morning, we took the Metro to Nevsky Prospekt. The pavements were crowded with shoppers, their breath vaporous in the cold air. We had lunch in Café Singer, above the House of Books, then crossed the road to Zara, where I tried on skirts and sweaters and Oxana bought a hoodie. By the time we came out of the building, the brightness had gone from the sky and the first snowflakes were drifting down. Arm in arm, we walked down to the embankment. We spent a long time there, but no one took any notice of us. We were just two women gazing out over the frozen Neva river, in the fading light of a Russian winter afternoon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks, as ever, to my agent Patrick Walsh, to Mark Richards and all at John Murray, and to Josh Kendall and the Mulholland team. Alexandra Hackett-Jones read the book first, and her insights were invaluable. Daria Novikova was limitlessly generous with her time and advice, especially in St. Petersburg. To my family, who have lived with Eve and Villanelle for more than five years now, my love and thanks.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Luke Jennings is the author of the memoir Blood Knots, short-listed for the Samuel Johnson and William Hill prizes, and of several novels, including the Booker Prize–nominated Atlantic. His previous book Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle is the basis for BBC America’s new TV series Killing Eve, starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer. As a journalist, he has written for The Observer, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Time.
Also by Luke Jennings
Fiction
Breach Candy
Atlantic
Beauty Story
Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle
Killing Eve: No Tomorrow
Nonfiction
Blood Knots: A Memoir of Fishing and Friendship
The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet (with Deborah Bull)
Children’s Fiction
Stars (with Laura Jennings)
Stars: Stealing the Show (with Laura Jennings)
Die for Me Page 19