The Angel's Game Read Online Free PDF

headboard that looked to me like a huge spider’s web from which hung two candleholders with two black candles burning, giving off that waxy perfume that nests in chapels and at wakes. On one side of the bed stood a latticework screen with a sinuous design. I shuddered. The place was identical to the fictional bedroom I had created for my heroine, Chloé, in her adventures in
The Mysteries of Barcelona.
I was about to try to force the door open when I saw that I was not alone. I froze. I could see a silhouette through the screen. Two shining eyes were watching me andlong white fingers with nails painted black peeped through the holes in the latticework.
    “Chloé?” I whispered.
    It was her.
My Chloé.
The incomparable operatic femme fatale of my stories made flesh—and lingerie. She had the palest skin I had ever seen and her short hair was sharply angled, framing her face. Her lips were the color of fresh blood and her green eyes were surrounded by a halo of dark shadow. She moved like a cat, as if her body, hugged by a corset that shone like scales, were made of water and had learned to defy gravity. Her slender, endless neck was circled by a scarlet velvet ribbon from which hung an upside-down crucifix. I watched, unable to breathe, as she slowly approached, my eyes glued to those lusciously shaped legs in silk stockings that probably cost more than I earned in a year and shoes, pointed like daggers, that tied round her ankles with silk ribbons. I had never seen anything as beautiful—or as frightening.
    I let that creature lead me to the bed, where I fell for her, literally, on my backside. The candlelight hugged the outline of her body. My face and my lips were level with her naked belly and without even realizing what I was doing I kissed her under her navel and stroked her skin with my cheek. By then I had forgotten who I was or where I was. She knelt down in front of me and took my right hand. Languorously, like a cat, she licked my fingers one by one and then fixed her eyes on mine and began to remove my clothes. When I tried to help her she smiled and moved my hands away.
    “Shhh.”
    When she had finished, she leaned toward me and licked my lips.
    “Now you do it. Undress me. Slowly. Very slowly.”
    I understood then that I had survived my sickly, unfortunate childhood just to experience that instant. I undressed her slowly, as if I were pulling petals off her skin, until all that was left on her body was the velvet ribbon round her throat and those black stockings—the memory of which could keep a poor wretch like me going for a hundred years.
    “Touch me,” she whispered in my ear. “Play with me.”
    I caressed and kissed every bit of her skin as if I wanted to memorize it forever. Chloé was in no hurry and responded to the touch of my hands and my lips with gentle moans that guided me. Then she made me lie on the bed and covered my body with hers until I felt as if every pore was on fire. I placed my hands on her back and followed the exquisite line of her spine. Her impenetrable eyes were just a few centimeters from my face, watching me. I felt as if I had to say something.
    “My name is—”
    “Shhhhh.”
    Before I could make any other foolish comment, Chloé placed her lips on mine and, for the space of an hour, spirited me away from the world. Aware of my clumsiness but making me believe that she hadn’t noticed, she anticipated each movement and directed my hands over her body without haste, and with no modesty either. I saw no boredom or absence in her eyes. She let herself be touched and enjoyed the sensations with infinite patience and a tenderness that made me forget how I had come to be there. That night, for that brief hour, I learned every line of her skin as others learn their prayers or their fate. Later, when I had barely any breath left in me, Chloé let me rest my head on her breast, stroking my hair for a long time, in silence, until I fell asleep in her arms with my hand