I don't respond to Oxana. I can't. I'm locked in to the events of the morning. Kris's sudden weightlessness as she is borne backward by the high-velocity sniper round, and the softness with which she falls to the marble floor. The sound of bullets smacking into clothing and flesh. The tiny blur of orange announcing the shot that furrows through my back, and the way that the sound seems to follow the pain. The sight of Dasha's men as we leave. One sprawled across the stairs, glued in place by his own congealed blood. Two others sitting on the half-landing, wounded but alive, and one of them, the one that Oxana struck on the head with her Sig Sauer, raising a rueful hand in farewell as we pass.

"Kill her and move on."

"… shoot Eve in the head."

At intervals I find myself weeping, or shaking uncontrollably. When this happens Oxana looks at me with frowning concern. She doesn't know what to say or do. At random moments she takes my hand, wipes my eyes with a tissue, or puts an arm around me and presses my head awkwardly to her shoulder. Lara pointedly ignores all of this.

We spend the rest of the day in the black Mercedes, traveling to Moscow. Anton drives, Richard is in the passenger seat, and Lara, Oxana and I are in the back. It's a perverse situation. My back hurts like hell, the slightest bump or vibration tearing at the stitches. Oxana gazes wordlessly out of the side window, Lara looks bored, and I sit between them, watching the flat, snow-blown landscape race past. Meanwhile, Oxana's Sig and my Glock are in Anton's pockets.

"… shoot Eve in the head."

"Quickly please."

Velikiy Novgorod, Borovichi.

We pass exits for Gatchina, Tosno, Kirishi.

Oxana takes my head in her hands, and gently turns it until we are face to face. "Listen to me," she says, very quietly, so that only I can hear. "I'm going to tell you a story. A story about my mother. Her name was Nadezhda, and she grew up on a farm, a few miles from the town of Novozybkov, although her family was originally from Chuvashia. She was very pretty, in the Chuvash way, with a high forehead and long dark hair. Something about her eyes, perhaps the arch of her brows, gave her a surprised expression. When she was fifteen there was the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, a hundred and fifty kilometers away. The wind carried the radiation northeast to the Novozybkov district, and everyone from my mother's village was evacuated. Soon afterward the area became a Closed Zone.

"I'm not sure how my mother ended up in Perm. Perhaps she was sent to relatives. She married my father when she was twenty-two, and I was born a year later. I was a very clever child, and I'm not sure how, but I always knew that Mama was sick, and would die before long. I hated her for that, for forcing this sadness on me, and sometimes at night I dreamed that the waiting was over and she was already dead. She looked so helpless, so vulnerable, and that made me angry too, because I knew that was not how things were supposed to be. She was supposed to look after me. She was supposed to teach me all the things I needed to know.

"Kill her and move on."

"There would often be whole days when she stayed in bed, and my father had to stay at home and make my meals. He was a military instructor, and he had no idea what to do with a little girl, so he taught me the things that he taught his men: how to fight and survive. My best memory with him is of going into the woods in the winter and trapping a rabbit. I must have been about six. He made me kill and skin the rabbit myself, and we cooked it on a fire in the snow. I was very proud of that.

"It wasn't long afterward that my mother said she was feeling better, and took me on a day trip to the Kungur ice caves. It was a special treat, partly because of the outing itself, but mostly because I was getting my mother to myself for a whole day. I even got a new coat to wear. It was pink quilted nylon, with a hood, and a zip down the front.

"We caught a bus from the Central station in Perm. The journey took about two hours, and we had lunch at a café in Kungur. Hamburger and chips, with Coca-Cola to drink, a big treat. I didn't know what to expect from the caves. I didn't know what a cave was, and ice didn't sound very interesting because we lived with it for half the year. So I wasn't prepared when we actually went down inside the earth. There was a paved stone track, and it was like going into some secret fairy-tale kingdom. There were ice crystals hanging from the ceiling like spears, shining ice pillars and waterfalls, and rock pools as clear as glass. Everything was lit up with colored lights. 'Is it magic?' I asked my mother, and she told me that it was. Later, when we were on the bus going home, I asked if the magic would make her better, and she said that maybe, just maybe, it would.

"She died a few weeks later, and for years I wasn't quite sure if I'd imagined or dreamed the whole thing. It was all so unlike anything else in my life. All I knew was that magic might work for some people -- film stars, models, people like that -- but it didn't work for ordinary people like my family. I didn't cry when my mother died. I couldn't."

Oxana falls silent for a heartbeat or two. "I never told anyone else that story."

"Go to sleep, pupsik."

When I wake it's dark and we are crawling through an industrial suburb in heavy traffic. The motorway is awash with churned-up slush. Anton follows an exit sign reading Ramenki.

"Is it true?"

"Feeling better?" Oxana asks me.

"Yes. At least I think it is. It was all so long ago. Now lean your head on my shoulder and sleep. It's still three hours until Moscow."

"Good. We need to eat." She kicks the back of the driver's seat. "Hey assholes, we're hungry. What are the plans for dinner?"

"Yesterday," I whisper. "You were ready to die for me?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe."

"Anton, you toad-faced dildo, I'm talking to you. Which restaurant are you taking us to, because it fucking well better be good."

Richard and Anton look at each other.

"Is she always like this?" Richard asks Anton.

"Somewhere we can have a civilized, face-to-face conversation," Richard says. "We're going to have to work together here. We can't have the project compromised by personality issues. It's too important."

"She's always been a degenerate, yes. There was a time she used to behave more respectfully."

We sit in silence as we wind through the suburbs. It's snowing again, and I listen to the soft thump of the windscreen wipers and the hiss of the slush beneath our wheels. The city's traffic is as chaotic as ever, and as we pass Moscow State University and cross the river, we're forced to slow to a crawl. The last few hundred meters take almost half an hour, but finally we pull up in front of a massive Stalinist block. Its gray frontage, pierced with archways, extends the length of the entire street.

"Suck my dick, bitch. Those days are over. Tell me where we're going."

"They'd love an excuse."

Lara saunters over from the Mercedes, grinning. "Another near miss?"

"Take your things and follow Lara," he orders us. "And no bullshit. Because I know for a fact that she'd love an excuse to shoot you."

I don't answer. I can't. The idea of a spear of ice plummeting from the sky seems, at this moment, wholly unsurprising.

"What --"

"Yes. You have to watch out for those."

We follow Lara into a huge, dimly lit atrium from which passageways lead in multiple directions. There are marble pillars and classical details of the sort that you might find in an international railway station, but the overall effect is cheerless. A few people come and go, muffled against the winter weather, and no one seems perturbed by the fact that Lara is carrying a sniper's rifle and an automatic pistol. There's a shining trail of boot prints to the nearest lift, but Lara avoids this and leads us to a small alcove, and inputs a code into a wall panel. A door slides back, revealing a glass and steel lift, which whisks us with sickening speed to the twelfth floor.

Anton jumps out of the driver's seat, regards Oxana and me irritably, and locks the Mercedes.

"Fucking hell."

We climb out and stretch cramped limbs. The building's vast impersonality fills me with dread. Its towers are so tall that they vanish into the night sky. I'm standing next to Oxana, my back throbbing painfully, when there's a whooshing crunch in front of me, and glittering slivers spatter my face. Grabbing my arm, Oxana drags me beneath one of the archways.

"Falling icicle," she says, and when I've wiped my glasses I see the shattered lumps in the snow, some the size of a baby's head.

"I'm afraid there's no complimentary dressing gown or slippers," Lara tells me sourly. "We weren't expecting you to still be alive. I will collect you for dinner in one hour."

Lara touches a button beside the right-hand door and we are admitted by a young man in paramilitary uniform, who leads us along a corridor hung with abstract paintings in hues of ivory, scarlet and vermilion, their slashing brushstrokes so exactly like knife wounds that the stitches in my back start to ache. Several other men and women in business suits pass us in the corridor, before Lara lets Oxana into one of the rooms and pointedly leads me to another. It's painted dove gray, and undecorated except for a bronze statuette of a panther, which stands on a walnut side table.

We emerge into a softly illuminated space, neither hot nor cold, dominated by armored-glass windows and a huge Salvador Dalí painting of a tiger. There are doors to left and right, and a faintly ominous humming that might be the building's climate control system or distant machinery. Beyond the windows, far below, the dark form of the Moscow river winds between snowy parks and windblown embankments.

"Definitely. There's always some crazy Russian with a butch haircut and a big-ass gun."

The doctor arrives just ten minutes later. A businesslike young woman in the uniform of a Russian navy medic, with a case full of gear. She prods the stitches, feels my lymph nodes, and gives me a box of antibiotic tablets and another of painkillers. She doesn't ask me how I came by an obvious gunshot wound, but she's interested in the stitches. "Haven't seen that before. Blanket-stitch suturing. Nice neat work, though."

Lara looks at me uncertainly. "OK. I'll find someone."

"Show me."

"I noticed."

"No."

"All the time, even in bed, she was like Eve, Eve, Eve. So annoying. I've tried to kill you twice now."

"OK, looks sore." They pause. "Why does she like you so much?"

"You have pain?"

"Die Another Day. You saw that film?"

"Oxana? I really don't know."

"Rosamund Pike, super-cute. Pierce Brosnan, not so cute. You think I could be in a Bond film?"

In answer I ease my sweater over my head, pull up my T-shirt and turn my back to them.

"Yes."

I ease myself into a sitting position on the bed. My back is screaming now. "Can you get me a doctor?" I ask them.

"Move on," I say. "Seriously? He's completely fucking insane."

I knock on Oxana's door. When she answers she's damp from the shower and wrapped in a white bathrobe. With her spiky haircut and moist pink skin she looks almost childlike.

"They are."

"Uh-huh."

"Well, I'm sure you know what you're doing. Be careful, OK."

"Do you know anything about this place?" I ask her. "Did Konstantin or anyone else ever mention it?"

"My girlfriend," I explain. "She hasn't done much sewing since school."

"Never."

"And these marks on your neck. They look like bites."

The bedside telephone rings. Oxana answers it, listens for twenty seconds, and hangs up. "That was Richard. He says we've all had a stressful day, ha fucking ha, and he'd like to invite us to meet for a quiet, informal dinner. He thinks we should all get to know each other better, so that we can draw a line under this morning's unfortunate events and move on."

"Also your girlfriend?"

"Well I'm starving, so it's fine by me. Lara's coming to collect us in fifteen minutes. Wear the bee sweater. I like you in that."

"This is all deeply weird," I say to Anton, and he shrugs.

Dinner is in a suite overlooking the river. The decor is Stalinist neoclassical with a twist, and we're shown to our places by suited waiters with a distinct paramilitary air. I'm seated between Lara and Anton, which presents an interesting conversational challenge, and Oxana is opposite me next to Richard. Oxana and I are both underdressed for our surroundings, but then we didn't exactly ask to be here.

"It's Russia," he replies. "A theater where the play is rewritten every day. And the cast change roles mid-performance."

The twelfth floor is luxurious, in an impersonal, chain-hotel sort of way, but we are unquestionably prisoners. The triple-glazed windows can't be opened, and the exit door to the lift is code-controlled. Watchful young men and women, some of them carrying weapons, patrol the corridors and move between cryptically numbered offices. By the time we leave Oxana's room the place is as busy as ever. Their work, whatever it is, continues day and night.

"A small but necessary one. A spear carrier. And what about you, Mrs. Polastri?"

"Very well." He pauses as a waiter pours wine into his glass. "So, Eve, may I ask you, how does it feel to be running with the hounds rather than the hare?"

"So what role are you playing right now?"

"You think you're different from the rest of us, Eve, but you're not." He takes an exploratory sip of his wine. "This is really good. Try some."

"Too late. You left that option behind you when you murdered Asmat Dzabrati." He smiles. "Yes, we know all about that."

"Given that you've tried to have me killed three times now, I think you can probably call me Eve, don't you?"

"To be honest, I was hoping to avoid the hunt altogether."

"I see." The stitches in my back are throbbing angrily. The wound feels raw and jagged.

"I'm afraid that if I drink so much as a drop, I'm going to pass out. It's been the most traumatic day of my life, starting with the moment when Lara shot Kristina dead, thinking that she was me."

"That's exactly why you need a glass of this excellent Romanian Chardonnay."

"You don't know her," I say, surreptitiously necking a couple of painkillers with the wine.

"I wasn't always a soldier," he continues. "My first love was literature, especially Shakespeare, so I appreciate a moral dilemma. I'm not like your lady friend over there, devoid of feeling and thought."

I touch the heavy crystal glass to my lips for politeness' sake, and take a deep, cold swallow. Anton's right, it's delicious.

"Oh but I do, Eve. I do know her. And I know exactly how she works. She's like a clockwork toy you can take apart and put back together over and over again. She's entirely predictable, which is what makes her so useful. Enjoy her all you want, but don't make the mistake of thinking she'll ever be human."

I'm saved from replying by the arrival of the first course. "Scallops from Okhotsk," murmurs the waiter before slipping a porcelain plateful in front of me.

"Wow," says Lara, squeezing a lemon segment over their scallops with such force that juice squirts in my eye. "Oh fuck. Shit." They dab at my face with their napkin. "First that girl this morning and now this. It's not our day, is it?"

"I was an au pair there with a family. The Weadle-Smythes. I looked after their daughters. Fifteen-year-old twins."

Lara brightens. "Since I was in England, a few months ago. Have you ever been to Chipping Norton?"

"Never. My loss, I'm sure."

"It was really nice. The father was only there at weekends; he was a Conservative MP with a red face who spent almost all of his time in London. He had a girlfriend there, some sort of prostitute I think, but his wife didn't mind because it meant that she could sit up all night watching Netflix. And Celia and Emma were so sweet. They used to take me out with them in the evening. We'd go to the local pub, get drunk, and then go dog-fighting."

"How long have you been, um, gender non-binary?" I ask them.

"Seriously?"

"How did that go?"

"Yes, they were a very traditional, upper-class family. The girls asked me if I had a boyfriend back in Russia, and obviously I said no. I explained that I worked in this quite macho world -- I was vague about what I actually did -- and I didn't think of myself as girly and feminine, and didn't like to be treated that way. So they said why didn't I change my pronouns, which was kind of funny since I was sent there to improve my English. So I did."

"Yes, tell us about it," says Anton, overhearing. "What is all that about? I mean, you do a man's job, and nobody makes an issue about it, so what's the problem?"

"You ducked."

"OK, twice. But you took my girlfriend."

"Small world. And you missed."

"Was that cheating?"

"I'm sure you have other wonderful qualities." Watching them chomping the scallops, I'm reminded of Oxana's comment about their jaws.

"That's not true."

"How did that go down with the parents?"

"She was never yours, Lara, she was always mine."

"Twice."

"You're so funny. Oxana always said I have no sense of humor."

"The mother was like 'why are you referring to Lara as "they," girls? She hasn't split in two' and the father rolled his eyes and talked about the 'PC Brigade,' so yeah. And then suddenly I was called back here to Moscow to…" Their hand flies to their mouth. "Shit, you won't believe it. I was going to say that I was called back to shoot some woman, but then I remembered that the woman was you."

"Yes it is. Tell me more about the gender thing."

"Yes, many. But we're quits now, yes? I tried to shoot you --"

"Or the privileges?"

"What privileges? Men staring at my tits and talking to me like I'm stupid?"

"Why is shooting people with a rifle and telescopic sights a man's job?" asks Lara, spearing another scallop. "Anyone can learn to do it. I'm fed up with being called a female sniper. I'm just a sniper. A torpedo. I don't want the bullshit that comes with people thinking of me as a woman."

"No one talks to you like you're stupid," says Richard, who's been listening to these exchanges. "People think you're clever because you have the best of both worlds. You're treated with respect as an elite assassin, and also admired as a very spectacular young woman." He raises his glass to her with creepy gallantry.

The waiter announces the second course. My Russian vocabulary isn't wide when it comes to the larger mammals, but it's something like elk or reindeer. Something that once had antlers, and has now been reduced to dark, bloody steaks in a red berry sauce. Our glasses are exchanged for larger ones and charged with Georgian wine that's so easy to drink I need a refill almost immediately. On the other side of the table Oxana, animated by the morning's slaughter, is on sparkling form. She meets Richard's condescension with demure flirtatiousness, studiously ignores Anton, stares lasciviously at Lara, and shoots tender, soft-eyed glances at me. It's a performance, a chance to run through her repertoire of learned responses.

Lara regards him doubtfully. "You can say what you like, but my pronouns are my pronouns. If you don't use them I'm not shooting anyone. I'm going to change my name, too."

"You're not becoming a vegetarian, are you?" asks Anton.

"Don't be ridiculous."

When I was a teenager my parents had a cat, a beautiful, murderous creature called Violet, although Violent would have been a better name, who presented them daily with bloodied and dying voles, mice and small birds. I hated the sight of these heartbreaking little tributes, and begged my parents to put a bell on Violet, or give her more food at home, but they were having none of it. "It's just how cats are," they told me. "It's instinctive. She needs to hunt." Violet died as brutally as she'd lived, under the wheels of a speeding car at night, and looking back on the years she spent with us I think my parents not only tolerated their cat's savage ways, but were secretly gratified by them. Violet's behavior was in some sense authentic and enabled them to feel superior to city folk who preferred to avert their eyes from nature's darker realities. I understand my parents better now. Oxana, red in tooth and claw, is my Violet. She is how the world is, when you look at it without blinking, or flinching. She needs to hunt.

Lara helps me to my feet. They seem to believe that we're pals now.

Richard taps his glass with his knife, and I open my eyes. I'm so tired, so utterly exhausted, it's as much as I can do to stop myself sliding under the table. "Can we all just stand up a moment and walk to the window?" Richard asks.

Loosening his tie, Richard starts to talk. With an expansive sweep of his arm, he indicates the blazing expanse of the city. After the dilapidated grandeur of St. Petersburg, Moscow is fortress-like and monolithic. It's impressive, but too inhuman in scale to be beautiful. I feel myself swaying. Lara steadies me with a hand on my arm.

"Everything that you see before you is dead or dying," Richard says. "Nothing works. There are no big political ideas, no great leaders, nothing to give people hope. I'm not just talking about Russia, but Russia is the perfect illustration of what I'm saying. Everything that people value, everything that once made them proud, belongs to the past. Communism was flawed as a system, but there was an ideal there, once upon a time. An aspiration. People understood that they were part of something, however imperfect. Now there is nothing. Nothing except the systematic looting of the nation's assets by a rapacious, self-appointed elite."

Sensing my eye on them, Lara inclines toward me. "What do you think of the name Charlie?" they whisper. "I really like it. Oxana was codenamed Charlie on the Odessa job and I was super-jealous."

His words have the sheen of frequent usage. He's spoken them before, perhaps many times. Oxana is listening with a slight frown on her face, Anton is expressionless, and Lara, who has let go of my arm, is examining their fingernails.

"So what does the Twelve propose?" Richard continues, turning away from the window to face us. "What have all our plans and strategies been leading up to? A new world, nothing less. We put the corrupt old men out of their misery, and we rebuild."

"It's nice. Suits you."

"You really think Charlie suits me?"

"The old dies, the new is born. That's how history works. A golden age comes to pass -- an era of prosperity, nobility and wisdom -- and then over the course of millennia things decline until that golden age is just a folk memory, a set of half-understood stories, a vague longing for what has been lost. And that's where we are now. Feeling our way through the darkness."

"Mmm."

"He likes to talk, doesn't he?" Lara murmurs.

"Uh-huh."

"Not Alex?"

"You're right. Everyone's called Alex."

"No. Charlie's perfect."

"And that, my friends, is where we come in," Richard says. "We are the advance guard of the new age. And we're not alone. All over the world there are people like ourselves, aristocrats of the spirit, waiting for the moment to strike. But our task is perhaps the hardest, and the most dangerous. With one decisive action, we have to set the whole process in motion. And so I ask you all -- Villanelle, Eve, Lara, and of course you Anton, old friend -- are you with us? Are you ready to go down in history?"

Richard's voice continues its urbane flow. I read somewhere that Etonians learn a skill called "oiling," which is the art of courteously, but firmly, persuading others to your point of view. Richard is oiling us now, but his words are beginning to run together. I pull out my chair, and as I lower myself to the cushioned seat Oxana flicks an irritated glance at me. I'm not very drunk, but I feel heavy-limbed and uncoordinated. It's as much as I can do not to lie down under the dining table and close my eyes.

"But we can find it again, that golden age, because history is cyclic. All that is needed is a few good people. Men and women with the vision to see that the old must be destroyed to make way for the new, and the courage to do it."

"Why not? We could use your input. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I sense that you would welcome the challenge of a new world order. The old one didn't do a great deal for you, after all."

As if I had the ghost of a choice.

I shrug. "OK."

"Sure," says Lara. "But from now on it's Charlie. Lara is my deadname."

Richard gives her the ghost of a bow. "Very well, Charlie it is. Eve, you look… uncertain."

"Eve, we were all in a different place this morning. I think you're exceptional."

Oxana nods.

Somehow, the meal draws to a close, and Oxana steers me back to her room. I can hardly place one foot in front of the other. Oxana's snoring within a couple of minutes, her arms out-thrown, her mouth wide open, but I'm so tired that I can't sleep. The stitches don't help. The painkillers and the wine have kicked in, reducing the pain to a hot, dull throb, but I still get a warning stab if I move too suddenly.

Anton narrows his pale gaze. "All the way."

"It's been a long day. But let me get this right. This morning you seemed quite anxious to end my life, and now you want me to join your team?"

"You're sure I'm not too… what was it you called me this morning? Ordinary?"

What have I agreed to? Is any one of us going to get out alive? From Richard's apocalyptic tone, and his talk of the danger of the mission, I would guess not. None of the foot soldiers, anyway. Richard himself, of course, is another matter. If one thing is certain it's that when the smoke clears he'll still be standing there, Old Etonian tie knotted, urbane smile in place.

It's weird. On the one hand I know that Richard's speech is brassy, echoing bullshit. That all this talk of golden ages and spiritual rebirth is just cover for what will undoubtedly turn out to be one more squalid political coup. On the other hand, there's something perversely thrilling about being locked into a conspiracy with Oxana. For all its horror, this is her world. I knew that when I abandoned my own. And was it really so ridiculous, Richard's talk of destruction and rebirth? Hadn't I done the same thing myself? Destroyed my old life to make way for my truer, darker self?

And yet I said yes. Whatever the project involves, it must surely include the murder of at least one prominent figure. It seems strange that Richard should want me to be part of the team. He probably just wants me on board to keep Oxana happy, or as a way of controlling her.

"They're going to kill us. They're just making us do one last job for them first."

"How do you mean? Of what?"

"What do you mean, probably?"

"No. I'm not afraid. We'll find out soon enough what they want from us, then we can figure out our next move. Right now they need us, and that's all that matters."

"Go to sleep, stupid," she murmurs blearily.

I turn over in bed at the same time as Oxana and we collide in a confusion of limbs.

"Probably."

"I know."

The bedclothes shift as she raises herself on one elbow. "I mean that you have to live in the present, pchelka. I've told you this before. Right now, we're fine, and we need to sleep. You especially. Tomorrow, when we've cleared our heads, we'll make a plan."

"I'm kind of terrified," I tell her. "And my back hurts."

"Aren't you afraid?"

"Of everything that might happen."

I reach out in the dark and feel her face. The line of her cheek and her mouth. I touch her lips and she bites my finger. "You're enjoying this," I say. "We're on this insane death ride, totally out of control, and…"

"No, it's bullshit. What's true is that we don't get fucked up. We stay calm and focused. We get our sleep, and we live to fight another day."

"They get it wrong?"

I feel her shrug. "You know what I am. Read the textbooks. They'll tell you that people like me are very bad at processing threat."

I can't speak. Oxana reaches out and I feel her hand close over my heart. "Listen to you," she says. "Boom, boom, boom. You're so sweet."

"Of course they are. I mean, I love you, baby bee."

"All the time."

She yawns. "Like, for a start, they say psychopaths aren't capable of falling in love."

"Give me an example."

"Is that true?"

"And are they?"

"Why didn't you say?"

"So you've read psychopathy textbooks?"

"Of course. All the so-called important ones. They're actually quite funny. All those creepy guys desperately trying to figure us out. You know, don't you, that all the case studies are male? They just assume that female psychopaths work the same way."

"Why didn't you say, dumbass? You do love me, don't you?"

"Well then, there we go. Now turn over, so that I can spoon into you, and go to sleep."

Breakfast, by unspoken agreement, is conducted in near silence, the only sound in the dining room the murmur of the waiters as they dispense joltingly strong coffee. We all take the same places as the night before. Outside the snow flies past the windows, caught in the rogue currents surrounding the building. Looking out, as I pile my plate with scrambled eggs and salmon caviar, I can barely see the ground. Just the black sweep of the highway and the gray-green curve of the river.

"I… yes, of course I do."

Oxana chooses the same dishes as me and stares fixedly in front of her as she eats. She's in a wretched mood. When we woke up this morning, our bodies entwined, she extricated herself with fastidious distaste before dressing in a whirlwind fury. It was as if I revolted her, as if she couldn't bear to be naked in front of me. All that I can do is avoid her gaze and wish myself elsewhere.

I know what's going on. In saying that she loves me Oxana thinks she's gone too far, so she's trying to unsay it by hating me. And it's working. Charlie looks at us as if keen to talk, but on seeing our expressions turns away and starts carefully spreading themself successive squares of toast and apricot jam. Beside them, Anton devours soft, flaky pastries.

"We have ten days," he announces. "Ten days to prepare for an operation that will require supreme daring and technical skill. If we succeed -- when we succeed -- we change the course of history." He spreads his hands and looks at each of us in turn. "I want you all to remember the words of Field Marshal Suvorov, which I believe were much admired at your former regiment, Anton?"

By the time Richard arrives we've all finished. Ignoring the food, he pours himself a cup of coffee, and takes his place at the table.

"They were indeed," Anton says. "'Train hard, fight easy.' Painted on the CO's door."

"We'll be leaving midday tomorrow," Richard continues. "Destination to be announced in due course. Today is for supply and paperwork. We'll be measuring you up for clothes and equipment, and taking photographs for passports, et cetera. It's a tight turnaround, but our people are used to working against the clock. Your documents, clothes and hand luggage are being delivered in twenty-four hours. Your weaponry is waiting for you at the training destination."

The day passes slowly and miserably. Oxana is unreachable, she won't even look at me. Instead she flirts listlessly with Charlie, making sure that I can see, and stares out the windows. With its stale, climate-controlled atmosphere, the apartment is oppressive. Everyone is on edge. The snow continues to fall all day, and although it's freezing on the streets I'd give anything to be out there, breathing the clean, cold air. Impossible, of course. We can't even open a window.

I listen with increasing disbelief. I agreed to be involved in whatever Richard and the Twelve are planning because of Oxana, and because I had no choice. I couldn't imagine Richard and Anton, knowing what they know about me, being so suicidally unwise as to award me any but the most minor, walk-on role. A couple of days on the range at Bullington doesn't add up to any kind of real training. I can fire, dismantle and clean a Service-issue Glock, but that's as far as it goes. I've spent my professional life behind a desk. I wear glasses. What part could I possibly play in an operation requiring "supreme daring and technical skill"? I'd be a liability, and it would be crazy to think otherwise. Yet Richard is clearly including me in this briefing.

"You don't like anything about me," I say, swaying aggressively toward him and spilling a crimson splash of wine on the damask tablecloth. "You just need me because you need my girlfriend. Cheers."

"I'm definitely looking forward to drinking a shitload of this stuff," I say, hearing my voice slur. "Assuming I make it back alive, that is."

Dinner is once again superlative but I have no appetite, and the smell of rare meat and blood-thickened gravy turns my stomach. Instead, that evening, I drink the best part of a bottle of Château Pétrus, a wine so expensive that I never thought I'd taste it. Seeing me pouring my fifth glass, Richard looks at me indulgently. "Pétrus is the unofficial house wine of the Twelve," he says. "You're going to fit in perfectly."

"Oh you will," he replies. "You're very hard to kill. It's one of the things I like most about you."

He smiles. "But is she? Your girlfriend, I mean. She seems to be getting on very well with Lara, or whatever she's calling herself these days."

I see what he means. On the other side of the table, Oxana is playing with Charlie's hand, holding their gaze and nipping their fingertips between her teeth.

"Maybe she's busy."

"I need a word," I say to Oxana.

"If that was her trigger finger I'd be worried," Richard says, but I'm already out of my chair and moving unsteadily round the table.

She follows me. More out of curiosity, I'm guessing, than anything else.

"Fuck off, Charlie. Oxana, you heard me."

Slamming the bedroom door behind me I slap Oxana's face so hard that, for a moment, she's shocked into wide-eyed immobility. "Enough, OK? Enough of your stupid sulking, enough of this shit with Charlie, enough of you being such a complete and utter bitch."

"Fuck you, Oxana. That's not good enough. You can't go through your life saying I am what I am and that's the end of it. You're worth more than that. We're worth more than that."

My hand stings and it feels like the stitches in my back have torn open. Oxana recovers herself and flicks me a sly half-smile. "You knew what you were getting into with me. You knew better than anyone."

"Really? Well perhaps I like how I am. Perhaps I don't want to be what you want me to be, has that thought ever crossed your mind?"

"Oh boohoo, you pussy."

"Since you gave up everything to be with me? Are you going to drag that one out again? Because I tell you, Polastri, it's not very fucking sexy, OK?"

"I meant it."

"Yes, every day. Every single day since --"

"You heard what I said."

"Eve, I never said I didn't care about you. Last night --"

"What about last night?"

Walking over to the window, I look down at the figures on the pavement below, braced against the driving snow. "Listen to me," I tell her. "The only reason I'm here, the only reason I'm even alive, is that Richard and Anton think that you care what happens to me. They need you, so they keep me around. But you know what? I think I'd rather tell them that they're wrong, that you don't actually give a shit about me. Then they can just put a bullet through the back of my head and get it over with. I've had enough."

"You said you loved me."

"Whatever. I really don't care anymore."

"And then you panicked. You thought you'd given me something, some kind of power, that I'd use against you. You didn't trust me to love you back, so you turned on me, like you always do."

"I'm just trying to understand you."

I turn round to face her. "Oxana."

"Don't. You understood me better before you met me, when I was just the worst fucking person you could imagine. A monster you had to hunt down. Think of me like that and you won't go far wrong."

"We have one more night here. Two at the most. Then God knows what." I walk toward her, and place my hands on her arms. Her muscles twitch through her thin sweater, and her depthless gray eyes hold mine. I touch a finger to the ridge of scar tissue on her lip and hear the faint shiver of her breath. "Like you said, now's all there is. And you're all that I have and all that I want."

"You've thought it all out, haven't you? Got all the theories. But you know something? That doesn't make you someone who cares. It just makes you the latest in a long line of assholes who've been poking at my mind ever since I was a child."

"I know it is."

"What?"

She looks away and I catch the flash of tears. I taste them when I kiss her.

She frowns, as if trying to recall a distant memory. "I don't feel all the things that other people do. I have to fake some of them. But I do have my own kind of love. It's probably not the same as…" She shrugs faintly. "But it's real."

"I'm sorry," she says. "I'm a mess. Just fuck me, OK?"