Assassin Read Online Free Page A

bar she’d found in the man’s apartment — push-ups, tricep dips, pull-ups — and her thin arms appeared uncharacteristically ropey and tight. Her breasts were full and round, but beneath them were the first signs of increasingly taut abdominal muscles and the hint of ribs. The soft taper of her hips had been reduced to angles and hipbones, something she had not seen in her mirror since her early days as a fashion model over a decade earlier. She’d dropped a dress size, maybe more. Mak preferred her softer, curvier self, butweight was sliding off her like water. It’s stress , she told herself. She’d have to fight to keep weight on, to stay fit. She needed her strength. Displeased, Mak leaned in, tilted her head down and pressed her clean fingers to the part in her hair. A pale band of dark blonde roots already showed through. In only another week it would be obvious, the part giving the unsettling effect of a bald stripe. She’d need to dye her hair again. She had resisted the urge to give herself a short chop, such was the identifying flag that had been her once blonde mane. But long hair provided some semblance of cover, she had decided; and, after it had been dyed and chemically straightened, she felt it bore no resemblance to her former style. The black hair hung like a curtain, casting new shadows on the angles of her high cheekbones and falling straight and shiny past her freshly muscled shoulders, contrasting with fair, unblemished skin.
    Unblemished, except in the places where she had scars.
    The thin, raised cicatrices weren’t obvious unless you knew where to look. Unless you knew what they meant.
    That Mak had managed to turn the tables on her would-be assassin might have given her some sense of satisfaction were she in a movie. Instead, it only filled her with numbness. She’d sacrificed a great deal of herself to get him in a vulnerable position down in that cellar out in the remote French countryside, that makeshift prison where she’d been kept for days. She’d sacrificed so much to live. There were things she couldn’t undo, couldn’t un-know. The man named Luther Hand would not be coming back here, would not be coming for her, could never touch her again. But there would be others to take his place. There was no doubt of that. With a half-million-Euro price on her head she didn’t dare stay in one spot for long now. She hoped the contract had been put out tointernational freelancers only because the Cavanaghs did not know whether she was alive at all. What easier way to tie up the loose ends than demand her dead body for a price? Perhaps she really had successfully disappeared? Perhaps this was a last-ditch effort to wipe the earth clean of her? A desperate move?
    Now that this new price was on her head, it felt like the woman marked for death could not possibly be her, and in some ways the inconveniently living woman they sought to erase was not her, in fact no longer existed at all. She was now a woman without a name, without a life, without a home. She’d tried to imagine starting again. She’d changed her appearance, was learning Spanish from books and CDs, trying to get the accent right. On good days she’d toyed with the idea of a new life, dared to dream of somehow putting all the violence and death behind her. But they wouldn’t allow that.
    Mak? Are you still in there?
    She stared down her own feverishly bright, hollowed-out eyes and barely recognised what she saw. The arrangement of her even features and her tall, feminine build meant she was still beautiful, despite the weight loss, the terrors, but she was visibly haunted as well. She carried a new darkness. Mak had once read about a study where rapists and sex-murderers were given the plain, black-and-white headshots of a number of women. They were asked to choose which ones they would target. Each of the men picked the same ones. Why? It was something in the eyes, they said. A disturbing thought. Mak pondered what it was in