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“Piccadilly Circus,” I said at last. “Next to the Eros statue.” I wasn’t sure it was perfect—but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment. It had the benefit of being at the junction of half a dozen different roads, most of them major traffic routes that would be impossible to block without causing serious disruption, plus it had at least four or five Tube exits. And it was lined with cafes and fast-food restaurants, so I had plenty of options for getting a good look at the area before doing anything stupid.
“Fuck me,” Jeff said with a laugh. “When did you get so suspicious? You weren’t always like this, Cross. But at least it’s on my Tube line. All right. Piccadilly it is. Can you make seven p.m. tonight? I get off duty at six.”
Seven? I felt my pulse spike with a flicker of adrenaline. Seven was less than twelve hours away—not long to get myself back down to London and into position. Could I get everything sorted by then?
I didn’t have a choice. I needed that number.
“Seven tonight,” I agreed. “Don’t let me down, Jeff.” And then, my phone flashing a red battery warning at me, I hung up and vomited into the ditch.
The rest of the day was a sick haze of nerves and waiting, punctuated by anxious flashbacks at the thought of meeting Jeff.
You weren’t always like this, Cross. Jeff’s words kept playing over and over inside my head, like an accusation. I could have retorted with the obvious—that up until now I hadn’t been on the run from the police, suspected of murdering my own husband. And that would be true—but it wouldn’t be the whole truth, and I knew it wasn’t what Jeff had meant. Because he was right, he and I hadn’t always been like this. There had been a time when it had been good, although it made me nauseous to think of it.
I had been barely twenty when I’d met Jeff—not long into my fledgling pen testing career, working for a company that specialized in security tests for public sector organizations. Jeff had arrested me one night as I’d strolled out of the back door of a local government headquarters in North London—and once he’d established that I was who I said I was, he’d been fascinated to hear about what I did for a living. He’d ended up giving me a lift home, because I’d missed the last Tube, and in the car we’d talked for the whole journey about the legalities of my job, the challenges it posed, the stories I had from my encounters and near misses. He’d been funny, charming, full of a kind of teasing, provocative banter that I’d found disarming at the time, before I’d realized there was a darker side to his goading.
He’d asked me out for a drink—to pick my brain about security at the station, or so I had thought—and only halfway through I’d realized it was a date as far as he was concerned. When he kissed me that night, I’d found it funny. Me, a reformed shoplifter, snogging a cop. There had been a kind of weird symmetry to it. The red flags had come later.
The first flags had been disguised as protectiveness—a need to know where I was, who I was seeing, when I’d be home. When I pushed back, he’d dressed it up as a concern born out of the dark side of his job, an if you’d seen what I’d seen, you’d be worried too kind of thing.
Later, as his behavior became more unmistakably controlling, I was in too deep, and I had no one to tell me how to get out. My parents were dead. My friends had mostly left for university, and the ones who stayed had somehow fallen away in the face of Jeff’s suffocating presence, made increasingly unwelcome by him on the rare occasions we did meet up. Only Hel remained—and she was mired in her finals, studying every hour she could. By the time I realized what was happening, I was trapped.
Two things saved me. The first was that in spite of Jeff’s pressing the issue, we had never officially moved in together. Yes, I was sleeping almost every night at his house, worn down by the constant nagging when I spent time elsewhere. Yes, my clothes—vetted by him—were in his closet, and my bank statements—checked by him—were coming to his address. But my name was still on the flat I shared with Hel. When I did finally wrench myself out from under his thumb, I had somewhere to go back to.
The second thing was my job. Because when Jeff started to suggest it was getting in the way of our time together, that maybe I should consider quitting, taking up something a bit safer, a bit more sensible, something with a pension and career prospects, I knew that if I was forced to choose between Jeff and my work, I would choose pen testing every single time.
I had left him when I was twenty-two, almost six years ago. It felt like a lifetime—and yet on the phone to him, it had felt like yesterday.
The walk to the train station in Northampton was four miles along a dual carriageway, trudging slowly with the cars whistling past just feet from my elbow. About halfway I passed a small tarmaced stopping area for truckers, with a burger van parked up. The smell of the frying onions and hot chips was almost unbearably good, and I hovered for a long time, mentally counting the rest of my money and weighing the prospect of a hot meal against the energy bars I had left in my pack, before giving way to my watering mouth and rumbling stomach.
The owner was a cheerful older woman in a grease-spattered apron, and when I tried to pay for my veggie deluxe, she waved away my cash and muttered something about helping the homeless. I felt a rush of blood to my cheeks: a mix of gratitude and something sharper—something a lot like shame. For a moment I wanted to protest. Oh, no! You’ve got it all wrong! But… had she really? I had spent last night sleeping under a hedge. I had nowhere I could go home to. I was, quite literally, homeless. And I was also down to the very last of my cash—unless you counted the Bitcoin in Gabe’s account, but it was becoming increasingly apparent how utterly useless that was to me. I still had to buy my ticket back to London, and since the National Rail website didn’t take cryptocurrency, I couldn’t pay directly in Bitcoin. And I couldn’t turn the Bitcoin into notes without going to an exchange and producing ID—and I was pretty sure that as soon as I did that, the database would light up, some kind of wanted-criminal klaxon would sound, and I would find myself in cuffs.
No, the Bitcoin was as worthless to me right now as my frozen bank accounts. And I wasn’t sure how much the train ticket was going to cost, but I could tell it was going to take me right down to the wire.
In the end I simply nodded, took the veggie deluxe, and said thank you.
The ticket, when I finally got to the station, did indeed use up almost all of my remaining cash, but at least, I reflected as I sank into a vacant seat, smiling apologetically at the older woman sitting opposite, it gave me access to hot water and a plug, two things I sorely needed. I washed my face in the toilet and combed some of the leaves and twigs out of my hair, trying to look a little less like someone who had slept in a field. And then I plugged my phone gratefully into the outlet beneath the seat and watched as the battery ticked up with painful slowness. The rocking of the train was making me feel almost unbearably sleepy, but I couldn’t afford to nap. Still, I kept finding my head lolling and my eyes drooping as we traveled south.
“Are you okay, love?” the woman opposite me said as we approached King’s Cross. She was looking at me with concern, and I realized there was a trail of drool coming out of the side of my mouth. I must have dropped off for a moment. I wiped it as surreptitiously as I could, and she added, “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you don’t look at all well.”
“I’m fine,” I muttered. But suddenly the sleepiness had gone, replaced with the prickling watchful nerves of earlier. There was something in her expression, something in the way she was staring at my face, with a kind of worried curiosity. I didn’t think she’d recognized me—her expression didn’t look like someone who’d spotted a wanted fugitive—but it wasn’t impossible that she would watch the news later and remember the woman slumped opposite her, with the cap pulled down over her face.
“Are you sure? You’re terribly pale. And you’re shivering.”
“I’m fine,” I said with more emphasis, though it was true that I was far colder than the overheated winter carriage really justified. I forced a smile I hoped was convincing. “Thanks.”
I stood up and began packing away the phone, then I prepared to swing my bag up onto my shoulder, wincing preemptively at the wrench of pain that I knew the sharp movement would cause. When it came, it was worse than I had even imagined, and for a minute I couldn’t do anything except stand, breathless with the pain, holding on to my side and the strap of my bag and trying not to vomit. There was a ringing in my ears and I could hear the woman opposite me chattering with concern, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Sit down, I heard, and … call someone for you?
“I’m fine, will you please just leave me alone,” I gritted out, ignoring her shocked, hurt expression, and then as the train began to slow, I moved away down the carriage, feeling my face flame with the aftermath of the shocking pain and the shame at the person I had turned into—a person who spat into the face of concerned strangers, who couldn’t trust the smallest kindness. Who was I becoming? I was no longer sure.
By five to seven I was in position—on the upper floor of one of the stores overlooking Piccadilly Circus. From there I could see down to the fountain in the center, topped with the familiar cherub with his bow and arrow.
It’s not actually Eros, you know, I heard Gabe’s voice in my head, as clear and punchingly unexpected as if he’d just whispered the words in my ear. It’s his twin.
The memory made my throat close with unshed tears. I had forgotten, when I chose this spot, that it had been where Gabe and I had met on one of our earliest dates. Eros, I had said, nodding up at the statue that Gabe had picked for our meeting point. God of love, huh. Are you trying to tell me something? And that was when he had explained. Not Eros, but Anteros—the god of requited love.
From someone else it would have come over as a dick move—a mansplaining I think you’ll find of the worst order. But from Gabe… maybe it was his smile, or the fact that I already fancied the arse off him. Or maybe it was just that he so transparently didn’t mean it that way, that he was just someone who liked sharing cool snippets of knowledge.
Whatever the reason, it was a mark of how comfortable I’d felt with him, right from our first meeting at a security conference, that I’d felt able to joke about something that for a while I had thought I would never trust again: love. What I’d felt for Jeff… well, I had called it love, once. And I was still reeling from how unbelievably wrong I had been. It had taken me a long time to trust again, longer still to use the L-word to anyone but Hel. But Gabe… somehow within a few weeks of knowing him, I had found myself thinking that word in the secret moments when I was alone, and my thoughts were filled with him and his body and the touch of his hands. I had found myself daring to hope. Love. It could happen. And this time it could be real.
