The Hidden Assassins Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Let’s see you move. You look as if you’ve got a decent pair of legs on you.’
    She was shocked to hear him use her name. Terror slashed through her insides, tugging something strangely exciting behind it. Muscles quivered in the backs of her thighs. Disparate thoughts barged into each other in her mind. Why the hell had she put herselfin such a position? She wondered how rough his hands would be. He looked strong—potentially violent.
    The sheer perversity of these thoughts jolted her back to the reality. She had to get away from him. She veered off down a side street, walking as fast as her kitten heels would permit on the cobbles. He was behind her, steel tips leisurely clicking.
    ‘Fucking hell, Doña Consuelo, I only asked you for a dance,’ he shouted after her, a mocking inflexion on her title. ‘Now you’re leading me astray down this dark alley. For God’s sake, have some self-respect, woman. Don’t go showing your eagerness so early on. We’ve barely met, we haven’t even danced.’
    Consuelo kept going, breathing fast. All she had to do was get to the end of the street, turn left and she’d be at the gates of the old city and there would be traffic and people…a taxi back to her real life at home in Santa Clara. An alley appeared on her left, she saw the lights of the main road through the buildings leaning into each other. She darted down it. Shit, the cobbles were wet and all over the place. It was too dark and her heels were slipping. She wanted to scream when his hand finally landed on her shoulder, but it was like in those dreams where the need to yell the neighbourhood awake produced only a strangled whimper. He pushed her towards the wall, whose whitewash hung off in brittle flakes, and crackled as her cheek made contact. Her heart thundered in her chest.
    ‘Have you been watching me, Doña Consuelo?’ he said, his face appearing over her shoulder, the sourness of his winy breath in her nostrils. ‘Have you been keeping a little eye out for me? Perhaps…since you lost your husband your bed’s been a bit cold at night.’
    She gasped as he slipped his hand between her bare legs. It was rough. An automatic reflex clamped her thighs shut. He sawed his hand up to her crotch. A voice in her head remonstrated with her for being so stupid. Her heart walloped in her throat while her brain screamed for her to say something.
    ‘If it’s money you want…’ she said, in a voice that whispered to the flaking whitewash.
    ‘Well,’ he said, pulling his hand away, ‘how much have you got? I don’t come cheap, you know. Especially for the sort of thing you like.’
    He took her handbag off her shoulder, flipped it open and found her wallet.
    ‘A hundred and twenty euros!’ he said, disgusted.
    ‘Take it,’ she said, her voice still stuck under her thyroid.
    ‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ he said, dropping her handbag to his feet. ‘But that’s not enough for what you want. Come back with the rest tomorrow.’
    He pressed against her. She felt his obscene hardness against her buttocks. His face came over her shoulder once more and he kissed her on the corner of her mouth, his wine and tobacco breath and bitter little tongue slipping between her lips.
    He pushed himself away, a gold ring on his finger flashed in the corner of her eye. He stepped back, kicked her handbag down the street.
    ‘Fuck off, whore,’ he said. ‘You make me sick.’
    The steel tips receded. Consuelo’s throat still throbbed so that breathing was more like swallowing without being able to achieve either. She looked back to where he’d gone, confused at her escape. The empty cobbles shone under the yellow light. She pushed away fromthe wall, snatched up her handbag and ran, slipping and hobbling, down the street to the main road where she hailed a cab. She sat in the back with the city floating past her pallid face. Her hands shook too much to light the cigarette she’d managed to get into her mouth. The