Super Familiar by Claire Phillips

Author:Claire Phillips [Phillips, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

21

Marlon

It could have been worse. But I’m still embarrassed by my flat when I take Elena there. I’m a man who lives alone and I wasn’t expecting to host an elegant Russian woman here when I left this morning. She’s very gracious - in that she doesn’t say anything at all about where I live, and where she’s going to be staying for tonight. She is just relieved that we are out of danger. We both are. And we don’t really believe it. Is it that easy? There was no sign of a tail as we left her street, and we saw nothing all the way home. Even so, we both keep twitching at the curtains whenever a car goes down the street.

The initial adrenalin had faded from when we drove away from Polina’s but has been replaced by an unstoppable edginess. When we got to mine, when I had to take her down the stairs to the basement flat, rather than go through the grander front door, she was momentarily surprised. I don’t imagine she’s ever thought that someone could live in the basement. Or what the letting agent euphemistically called a ‘garden flat’. There’s no garden, just a patio door that leads to a ‘suntrap patio’, but is in reality the shared bin area.

I try small talk but I’m not good at that at the best of times so we lapse into silence. She is too pre-occupied for small talk. As time ticks away, I realise we need to eat dinner. Of course, there’s not a proper meal’s worth of food here, nothing good enough for Elena.

“What about a take away?” I suggest.

“I not hungry. Too much happen to eat,” she says.

In the end I go into the kitchen and make us both a poached egg on toast. We eat it on our knees with the TV on. This drowns out the sound of our crunching and scraping of knives across plates. She tries her best to remain elegant with the plate on her knee, but I have betrayed her by bringing her down to my level.

The second she finishes eating, she says, “Sound off, please?” pointing at the TV. “I want hear cars to come.”

I mute the TV. And then the fears return. How can I be responsible for the safety of this important lady? When will Peter come? We are not safe here. Leschek knows me. Perhaps he can find me and where I live? Kapustin knows Peter is involved, Leschek will have told him by now. Yes, Kapustin must be in London by now. Angry. Doing everything in his power to trace Elena. He has powers that we don’t know about, spies and lackeys everywhere. He’ll have a Grace. Heck, he’ll have a room of Grace’s and the ability to see into who knows what. CCTV? The police?

I start to pace. Behind the sofa, into the kitchen, down the corridor and back to the sofa again. Elena stares blankly at the muted TV. Jumping at every noise and going to the window, peeking through the curtains.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.