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Music, for Villanelle, is at best a pointless irritation and at worst a lethal danger. In silence lies safety.
“Without predators, people who can think the unthinkable, and act without fear or hesitation, the world stands still. You are an evolutionary necessity.”
She knew, however, that if she was to escape notice in the world it was essential to wear a mask of normality, and to disguise the extent of her difference.
Oxana had never felt the slightest need to be liked, but it gave her profound satisfaction to be desired.
steganography—the science of concealing secret information in computer files.
“It’s called Villanelle,” said the assistant. “It was the favourite scent of the Comtesse du Barry. The perfume house added the red ribbon after she was guillotined in 1793.”
Over the course of her twenty-six-year lifespan she has acquired a vast repertoire of such expressions. Tenderness, sympathy, distress, guilt, shock, sadness… Villanelle has never actually experienced any such emotions, but she can simulate them all.
Her colleagues know Eve Polastri as a hunter, a woman who will not readily let go.
The joke about narcissistic types like Martín is that they always think they’re in control—at work, in conversation, during sex.
Men make themselves forget women who are unimpressed by them; Konstantin had taught her that.
