Chase would be arriving tomorrow, and he’d have a bigger chance of getting them a room. Hotel managers would be lining up to accommodate him. She had texted him that she wouldn’t be able to arrange a room for him at The Medeia. It was full. It would be better for his personal assistant to book a room somewhere else.
She didn’t tell him that she was persona non grata and that she had no place to stay for the night. Chase would pry the story out of her, and she still felt raw about the whole thing.
Maybe this alley had something to offer, seeing as how out of the way it was to pedestrian traffic. Just one last try before she admitted defeat and made her way downhill.
She pulled on her abused carryall once more, the wheels scraping harshly on the stones. No one poked their heads out of the windows to investigate the racket she was making. The alley was deserted.
Cigarette butts littered the gutter. Graffiti defaced some of the stone walls. She stifled a shriek as a rat as big as a kitten scurried right across her path. It had probably been disturbed by the wheels of her luggage. A gust of wind slapped a piece of paper on her cheek. It was one of those royal pennants.
A low laugh alerted her that she had been wrong in her assumption about the alley being deserted. The shadow of an awning of one of the deserted restaurants had camouflaged his presence. He stepped into the light.
Sabrina saw it was a young man. A teenager. His body was young, but his eyes were old. He spoke in a strange language, probably the local dialect, and another man came out of one of the abandoned establishments, this time older and meaner looking.
The older man, scraggly and bearded, leered when he saw her. Sabrina felt naked in her flimsy tank top and shorts.
She was halfway the length of the alley. If she ran for her life and screamed like the devil was after her, her pursuers would surely back off once she reached the more populated street.
She couldn’t abandon her carryall though. Her passport was there. Plus the letter. The only claim she could show Markos Konstantinos. Not that she would be probably showing it to him anytime soon, she thought dispiritedly.
She didn’t need anyone’s validation, she realized that now. If they didn’t want anything to do with her, then she didn’t want anything to do with them too. It was probably not the best time to have these realizations when thugs were bearing down on her.
“Hi guys.” She smiled and waved her hand in a friendly gesture. Surely her acting deserved an Oscar nomination. Her heart was thudding so fast she was sure the individual beats were tripping on each other.
The thugs appeared flabbergasted. They stopped in their tracks. They looked at each other in disbelief, as if saying “I can’t believe this foreigner’s so dumb that she doesn’t recognize when she’s about to be robbed/raped/beaten/killed in an alley. Aren’t we giving off the right vibe here?”
That was when Sabrina made a run for it. She had the element of surprise on her side. Hopefully.
The thugs blinked, then yelled and dashed after her. She could hear the pounding of their footsteps above the frightened boom boom of her heart. Her luggage bounced roughly along the uneven stones, hampering her escape, but she would not leave it.
The strap of her flip-flop gave way and she kicked it off. They were only a few feet away from her when she rounded the corner of the steeply curved slope. Her momentum sent her careening down the steep curve. She screamed, spotting the lamppost at the bottom of the street that would break her fall. It might also break a few of her bones once she slammed into it. She veered to the middle, putting her directly in the path of the intersection at the end of the street. There were a few cars crossing it. Hopefully they’d be at a red light once she reached it.
She lost her grip on her carryall. It banged at her heels, pitching her headlong. Her hands wind milled as she desperately tried to slow her descent. Ultimately, gravity prevailed. She screamed as she went tumbling down the sloping street, and she closed her eyes and prayed. That was the only thing she could do at that point.
Chapter 15
“Miss Konstantinos told me she wanted to do an ocular of the yacht for the fundraising party.”
Luca took a deep breath. It would do no good to lose his temper with Antonia, not when she didn’t know the House of Argenti had not hired Eleni’s PR firm for the job.
Deceitful, lying little bitch. It seemed it was his fate to be surrounded by them.
“She looked around the yacht and then she asked to see Miss Connelly in the salon,” Antonia said in Italian hesitantly, somehow sensing that this fact would not go over well with him.
It was never a good thing when your former lovers met behind your back.