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CHAPTER ONE
SOPHIE stood, holding herself , at the reflection staring back at her in the long mirror of the hotel’s powder room The woman in the mirror looked out at her with the same expressionless stare
She earing a clinging, low-cut satin evening dress, her blond hair slicked with hairspray around one shoulder Her eyes were heavy with glittery make-up, lashes loaded doith coal-blackcrystal, mouth sticky with scarlet lipstick
It isn’t me!
The cry came from somewhere very deep in Sophie Very deep Like a buried place A grave
The grave of the person she once had been
Would never be again
Heaviness lay like a deadweight in her stomach, wound around by revulsion at what she could see in the mirror
‘Excuse me—’
The voice was clipped, i Sophie tothe look of unveiled contempt in the older woman’s eyes as she took her place to inspect her appearance Sophie knehat she had seen Knehy the woain The inside of her lass of water froulping it down as if it could still her turmoil For one final time, she stared at herself bleakly in the mirror Then, with a sudden short intake of breath that cut like glass in her throat, she seized up her evening bag and walked out of the powder rooh they swayed her body despite the rigidity in her aching leg
Across the hotel lobby, in the bar, her client aiting for her
Nikos Kazandros glanced around him The vast, opulently decorated reception roo music and too-loud voices It was exactly the kind of party Nikos avoided—full of louche, hedonistic people in search of kicks that inevitably involved entertainment that ran to little white lines and the indiscriminate use of bedrooms A frown formed on Nikos’s darkly planed face
His reluctance to go in was not echoed by his companion
‘Nik—c’ to be really hot!’
Georgias’s voice was slurred Since his father was a longtime friend of Nikos’s own father, Nikos had taken on the role of er man’s brief stopover in London For Nikos, a show and dinner would have been enough, but Georgias had wanted to party Knowing that if he acted too heavy-handed the kid would cut and run and end up God knehere, Nikos had teias an hour here max, no more, and make sure the only stimulant he imbibed was alcohol
Not that drugs would be the only teirls, the kind who—Nikos’s lip curled in conteer to ias had already been sized up, and atheias take up the invitation with alacrity, turning doith a curt shake of his head the immediate follow-on invite from a brunette who had also scented freshthe wall up, a cynical twist to his ias and get the hell out of here
Girls like those here held no attraction for him Barely one step away from hookers, they made it clear their sole interest in a man was the size of his wallet They traded sex for a lush lifestyle
Their one virtue was that they were perfectly open about it
For a moment Nikos’s face closed fast So to the last their real interest…
So dew, and all the time—
No Autouillotine sliced down
He’d made a mistake Been a fool Worse than a fool But he’d pulled back in ti one, replaced by a hardness that etched the features of his face, set his high cheekbones into relief below his dark, long-lashed eyes