“Well…” Of course, the answer would be yes, but what about all her… you know, other stuff that she had going on? She couldn’t very well let Vivika in on any amount of it without compromising something. And that warning that Patrick… err, Victor… whoever he was right now… had given her; Lena had tried trusting before. First with Hans, then with Grandfather, then with Patrick, then with… then with…
Sure, Hans hadn’t technically been a spitzel; Grandfather hadn’t lied about anything per se; and Patrick was just doing his job (and he had been open with her once they had gotten to know each other). Sure, her band had been spying on her; but that was just the way things were. Vivika had even come clean about it. Sure, Matt wasn’t the person he had initially led her to believe; but he and Mr. Collins had been honest with her as soon as they were in private. And Mr. Müller… well, Lena had been spying on him too, so she couldn’t really begrudge him that.
But how much did she actually know about the things she thought she did? Heck, even the peripheral people that Lena had met were deceitfuclass="underline" all of the bands that Leibensmude had played with; likely half (if not more) of their fans; the pretty bartender from the Interhostel—It seemed that the only person Lena knew that had ever been completely honest was the pot-head sound engineer from the venue in West Germany. Everyone else—literally everyone else Lena knew—was holding back or massaging some aspect of their doings and dealings. Even Lena—perhaps even especially Lena—was doing the same thing on so many fronts, it made her head spin.
“God, is everyone a liar or a spy?!” she thought to herself. Yet she had to trust someone, or else she would go insane. She felt she could probably trust Matt and Mr. Collins, and she could probably trust Grandfather (with some things, of course), and it seemed that she could trust Vivika. But she knew she could trust Patrick, because he had trusted her with his most personal secrets. And he had explicitly warned Lena about trusting Vivika. “Oh, bother it all!” Lena shouted inside of her head. Suddenly, she realized how hard being a master of espionage could be.
“Look, I know you’ve got to keep some things hidden from me.” Vivika volunteered. “I don’t know what those things are, and I don’t particularly care.”
“Vivika…”
“Honestly, I mean that.” she interrupted. “I don’t want to know. I really, really, really don’t want to know. Everyone I know is a better liar than I am, and they got that way by practicing on me. I’m sick of being lied to… but if that’s what it will take to feel safe, then lie to me. Lie your ass off, I don’t care. I’ll keep my secrets from you, and you can keep yours from me. That’s just how we’ll live from now on, because that’s just the way relationships are now.”
She looked at Lena then, with a fearful, wide-eyed stare that bordered on hysterics as she added, “Just please, for the love of god, don’t leave me alone.”
As Patrick walked through Dragon Lady’s front door and into her small apartment, he tried to stifle the feeling of nervousness. He hated coming here; and not just because of its lone occupant. Besides the mattress on her bedroom floor and a desk in her living room, the apartment was completely devoid of furniture. She was finicky about cleanliness to an unhealthy degree, and preferred to have as few things to clean as possible. The first time he had been over, he had shivered from the cold (she kept her apartment precisely at 14-degrees Celsius to stem the circulation of airborne toxins) while she spent almost thirty minutes readjusting her desk. She swore that it was not precisely 90-degrees perpendicular to the nearest wall, and wasn’t equidistant from all walls that it should have been equidistant to.
Her walls in turn were covered in chalkboards and pictures of her informants, as well as their friends, lovers and habitual locations. All of these items were precisely positioned. Patrick knew from experience that her closet had tarps she would place underneath the pictures when she cleaned or wrote on them to catch every spare speck of chalk or any other matter that may fall on to her floor. She also kept several medical masks nearby so that she wouldn’t breathe in any of the chalk fragments.
In and on her desk, she had various wires, connectors, soldering irons and other items (all precisely positioned from front to back). He knew these to be her singular hobby besides torture: making explosives. She was extremely knowledgeable about bombs—to a degree that would exhaust most men in the Army—and she was known to launch into protracted exposés about RDX versus PETN, and why Semtex was the explosive of choice for the IRA in Ireland. Patrick found all of it quite boring, excluding the general fear he had over such a terrible person having weapons even more destructive than anything she already had at her disposal.
“Well, hello pussycat.” her voice taunted from the other room.
“I hate it when you call me that.” Patrick said, swallowing the lump that caught in his throat.
“Well, stop being one, then.” she replied, walking fully into view.
As always, she was completely naked. And as always, Patrick shivered—as much from the cold as from being alone with her. It wasn’t that she was ugly; the reality was quite the opposite as a matter-of-fact. She had the wiry frame of an athlete, and sharp features that accentuated her tight muscles. Her skin was very white, and eerily un-marred by any moles, freckles or other defining imperfections. A pair of perfectly-formed and sterile-looking breasts bounced lightly with her step, and Patrick couldn’t help but notice that she was shaved everywhere, arms, legs and… well, you get the idea. Dragon Lady hated body hair. She felt that any body hair immediately attracted microscopic organisms, and she would go to great lengths to avoid them.
Yes, Dragon Lady was otherwise beautiful by the standards of most men. To him, however, she looked like a vampire—a degenerate creature addicted to blood and pain, and perfectly prepared to extract blood in the most painful way possible. To most men, she looked fully predisposed to nights of wild and heart-pounding sex. To Patrick, she looked fully prepared to slit a man’s throat and bathe in the remains. He trembled at the thought of either fate. The thought of having this albino freak slide her skin against his was almost worse than the thought of being exsanguinated by her.
“Oh, poor, poor pussycat,” she teased, grabbing herself in a few areas that Patrick preferred not to think about. “Does he need some milk?”
“Would you please stop that?” he asked, less sternly than he had hoped. “I don’t like it when you talk like that.”
“Well, I like it. Mostly because you don’t. Now, let’s get down to business.”
“Would you at least put some clothes on first?”
“No. I want you to look,” she smirked. “Now, I called you here because I wanted you to know that I know your secret.”
Patrick swallowed yet another lump in his throat. Not just because he had one secret to keep… but because he had many, many secrets, and all of them he wanted kept from her specifically. He knew very well the sadistic power she wielded when she knew things people didn’t want her to know—that was the reason he had been compelled to keep coming to her for the past year, after all—but now that she knew something else (and he didn’t doubt for a second that she did), he could only guess as to what that was. He wanted her to know as little about him as he could manage. And there were certain things she must not know under any costs.
“And what the hell is that?” Patrick asked, still trying not to notice that she was completely shaved.