Eve put her pen down, set her shoulders back, plumped her lips out, and faked a lascivious grin. Good thing I wore a trouser suit. “Last night, before my bath, thinking about you, sir,” she lied, simulating arousal in her bleak office cell under the gaze of Rupert’s cameras. It was unusually easy to fake it while she talked dirty to him today. At some point in the past ten minutes a dam had burst. She’d known for years that she’d eventually have a final reckoning with Rupert, but now she knew it couldn’t wait any longer. Imp was in the frame: if she didn’t want to lose her brother for good—the last remaining connection to her old life, before she started down this darkling path—she’d have to deal with the Bond, and if she dealt with the Bond she’d have to deal with his master, which meant—
She grew increasingly turned on as she delivered the submissive spiel Rupert expected: tension winding tighter and higher, the blueprint on her blotter breathless with the promise of final release, imagining him choking and gagging and finally convulsing. After Rupert ended the call she sat motionless for a minute, pulse pounding, thinking about masturbating. That was one act for which telekinesis was a game-changer; but she couldn’t bring herself to do it here, not under the gaze of Rupert’s cameras. Especially not if it meant admitting to herself how much she’d grown to resemble her master’s dark fixations.
Either way, this has to end soon, she thought, and by soon, I mean before the boss gets home.
“Whoo! That was fucking awesome!”
Del turned off the ignition. Wendy leaned across the transmission tunnel and tried to kiss her on the cheek, just as Del was turning to face her: their lips collided. Speech became difficult for a time; when they separated, Del was breathing fast. “You’re telling me. Gonna need new plates.”
“So sue me.” Wendy checked her phone again. The lap timer on her clock app was frozen at 46 minutes and 27 seconds. “That makes an average of—holy fuck. And you did that in daylight hours, not at four in the morning!”
“Yup.” Del looked smug. The engine pinged as it cooled. “Going to need a garage though, the tires are unhappy.” (Somewhere in the trackless suburban wastes of London, a blameless banker’s wife who had the misfortune to drive a similar bus was going to get a nasty surprise in the mail. She’d later claim an alibi, courtesy of the traffic cameras around her daughter’s school gate.)
“Holy…” Wendy unlatched the passenger door and climbed out, shaky from the adrenaline crash. She took a deep breath. “I didn’t scream.” She took another breath. Nor had she thrown up when they passed the camera gantry with the display of skulls at Junction 24. Highways England could only stick you up there if they caught you, after all, and by then she was pretty confident that wasn’t going to happen. “Next time I try to race with you, remind me to indent for a helicopter pursuit in advance.”
“I’m faster than helicopters,” Del said smugly as she stepped down from the SUV. The central locking chirped. She bent at the front and rear bumpers, pausing to peel a layer of laminate off the plates, which she then wadded up and shoved in a pocket. “So.” She watched Wendy expectantly. “You going to bust me for dangerous driving, Officer? Or what was that really about?”
Wendy shook her head. “I just—” She shook her head again. “We were being watched, back in the cafe. Bloke in a suit tailed us when we left. But I’m pretty sure you lost him.”
“Oh. Not one of your co-workers?”
“Deffo not one of mine.” And that had Wendy well rattled. “Do you know what your mates were trying to st—liberate from the safe deposit box at the bank? The one that attracted all the unwelcome attention?”
“I dunno, some letter I think. I wasn’t paying attention, you know? Too busy trying not to get stuck in traffic.” She tapped the side of her forehead: “Better than satnav, but I don’t have much room for anything else while I’m cogitating.” Del was indeed better than satnav: it was her special genius to figure out perfect routes.1 “Anyway, Imp took it to his sister. She’s who hired us,” Del added.
“Well.” Wendy kicked the curb. “Looks like I need to talk to your friends. Can you hook me up?”
Del cocked her head to one side. “How about … nope?”
“Well.” Wendy sniffed. “It’s for their own good, you know? I think you’re in danger.”
“How about we go wherever it is you want to take me and then give me a reason why I should trust you?” Del jabbed back. Out of her armored cyborg shell she was thin-skinned and sensitive. “It better not be a cop shop, Officer.”
“I keep telling you, I’m off the force.” Wendy tugged her gently along the cracked pavement, stepping over dogshit and dandelions sprouting in the cracks, passing boarded-up windows until they came to an anonymous door in sun-bleached red paint. “This is where I live. It’s not much, but I call it home.”
Taking Rebecca home with her was her way of showing trust: a calculated risk, and not much of one at that. Wendy had already demonstrated she had the upper hand, proven that she could be useful to Del, held her hand … accidentally kissed her. Del wasn’t stupid, maniacal driving notwithstanding—there had been that one stretch where Wendy had timed her for ten miles at an average of 160 mph. Wendy would swear that Del had known which vehicles were going to switch lanes before their drivers did, anticipating and positioning herself with eerie precision. Which was probably why her palms were moist and her pulse was so hard to ignore. Del would come inside and they could bond over a beer while she tried to dig a little deeper into her strange little crime family, and—
“Hey, are you okay?”
Suddenly Wendy found herself staring
