Dedication

To Barry and Judy Liu,

with thanks.

Epigraph

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

— WILLIAM BLAKE (1794)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgments

Other Books by Rebecca Lim

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

‘Mercy,’ I hear in the darkness behind my eyelids. ‘Where are you?’

It’s a young man’s voice, achingly familiar.

My eyes flash open, and I raise my left hand to the base of my throat. The fingers of that hand seem to burn with a customary fire, a faint tracery of pain that dissipates almost immediately. The palest, pearlescent glow comes off the surface of my skin.

It’s pitch dark in here, and I remember that I do that — glow — when there are no external sources of light around.

I take a long, trembling breath, expecting to feel a gunshot wound beneath my fingers, its edges ragged, bloody, fatal. But there’s no wound, and no blood.

I lie here whole, and unmarked, breathing easily. Not dying on the floor of a dingy café, blood filling my lungs, crowding my airways, cradled in the arms of a man called … Sulaiman?

I feel my brow furrow. Everything’s out of order; I can’t make things line up. Because when I remember Sulaiman’s stern face bent over mine, I see someone else there, inside him, inhabiting his body, lurking beneath his mortal skin. A shimmering being; one of the elohim: Gabriel.

And I am Lela Neill again, for one kaleidoscopic instant in which I feel the death rattle, the harsh susurration of her breathing. Feel myself mired in her body, which is cold and growing colder. Cold, too, the cracked linoleum upon which I lie.

Every sense is fading, the world turning to sepia before my eyes. Until there is a sensation, a sharp tug, as if some kind of cord has snapped, the bonds between myself and Lela’s body beginning to loosen. I feel myself become something like mist, like fog.

But it is illusory, this confused jumble of imagery and sensation, already memory. That jump-cut moment in which I seem to be two people at once, in two places at once. Because I’m not really there. I can’t be. I know for a certainty, with a clarity that defies logic, that Lela is already dead.

And I give a single, piercing wail, my fingers flying up to my face in horror, the sound escaping before I can stop it. Its sonic aftershock seems to hover in this high-ceilinged room for an eternity. An elegy to the fallen girl.

I’m suddenly flooded with grief, with white heat, with a sensation like panic, and I fight my way out of the featherdown bedding I am inexplicably wrapped in, like a corpse in a winding sheet.

And though the blackness of the room should be impenetrable to my eyes, I see every chair, every ottoman, every vase, tasselled reading lamp, gilt-edged painting, porcelain ornament, every useless, luxurious appointment in this spacious chamber as if it is bright day and not night. Because I can see in the dark, like a cat.

No, I correct myself automatically, better than a cat. No creature under heaven can see better in the dark than I can.

The air in here is cold, the kind of sharp cold that presages snowfall. There’s a window open somewhere.

I slide off the bed and make my way unerringly towards a set of deep curtain-covered windows, touch the plush, heavily embroidered fabric with my fingertips. Shove the whole mass aside until I encounter the icy glass in a partially raised sash window. I study the view over the rooftops of the moonlit city below and see that it is no longer truly night, but the early, velvet morning. Every star in the sky seems etched upon the inky blackness.

There is a catch in my breathing as I study the floodlit church that dominates the view from my bedchamber. I feel the pupils of my eyes contract in shock.

I know this place.

Like a crazy confection, a riot of arches, pinnacles, fretted spires, flying buttresses, statuary and stained glass; like a waking dream, a conundrum, the church is both steadfast and airy, hundreds of feet deep, wide, tall. Monumental. It is the Duomo, one of the greatest cathedrals in the world.

And the realisation hits me a second later that I am in Milan, in Northern Italy.

Milan.

A city of infinite treasures. A city I once loved and wandered at will. Though when, and as whom, I do not know. Again, I feel a brief jolt of dislocation, as if I am caught between past and present, fully inhabiting neither.

Then the sensation leaves me, and I realise that it is two hours before matins, before dawn.

In front of the Duomo, dwarfed by it, is a gleaming Christmas tree at least one hundred feet tall.

Glorious Milan. In December.

Before I can process anything more, there’s a series of sharp taps upon the door.

I do not turn away from the window. Instead, I shake my long, unbound hair over my face, dig the toes of my narrow feet into the soft, plush pile of the carpet and pull the cuffs of my long sleeves over my hands. So that no part of my skin is visible from behind. It’s become almost a reflex these days. Hiding this little light of mine.

The door opens behind me, before I can find my voice.

‘Irina?’ someone says blearily into the darkness. ‘I heard you cry out — you scared me to death! Are you all right?’

Through the curtain of my long hair, I quickly scan the figure silhouetted in the doorway before returning my gaze to the city framed in the window.

A short, slender young woman — in her late twenties? — with jaw-length straight hair cut in a sleek bob stands there. The light behind her casts her face into shadow. I have no idea who she is. But she has a cut-glass accent, of a kind I’ve heard before. English, supplies my inner voice dryly. She’s English.

How do I even … know that?

‘What’s the matter with you?’ the girl mutters. ‘Cat got your tongue? Hard to believe.’

She snaps on a lamp by the door. The sudden flare of light makes the pupils of my borrowed eyes contract into pinpoints, but I adjust to the change in illumination instantaneously, without flinching.

The light of the lamp has extinguished the strange glow of my skin. I turn to face the stranger warily, uncurling my fingers from inside my sleeves, senses on high alert.

Who is she? What does she want from me?

The day can’t come soon enough when I’ll never again have to grope forward through the fog of a stranger’s life, trying desperately not to give myself away.

The girl shakes her head in exasperation and tightens the belt of her patterned, blush-coloured kimono before heading purposefully across the room towards me. She stops a short distance away, looking me up and down critically.

‘You don’t need a PA, Irina, you need a nanny! You’ve got eight hours of fittings ahead of you today, and that’s just for starters. Hours of keeping perfectly still and taking direction, and we know those aren’t your best skills. Now let’s get you back to bed, okay? It’s called “beauty sleep” for good reason, and even people like you need it.’

The girl has unusual eyes, one brown, one blue, and a cute pixie face, strong dark brows, a precision-cut slanting fringe — sleek silent-movie-star hair. But she’s not, strictly speaking, beautiful. Not like … ‘me’.

I’m arrested by the reflection of the long, lean, exotic creature I see in the oval, gilt-framed mirror across the room. Touch the fingers of one hand to my face just to be certain that the young woman I’m looking at is me. Irina. Us.

Irina’s unusually tall — a fraction over six foot, without shoes — with pale, clear, downy skin, large, wide-set, dark, feline eyes and fine features, almost elfin ears. A wide, mobile mouth, a small, heart-shaped face and thick, poker-straight hair the colour of burnt caramel that falls almost to the waist, worn with a blunt-cut fringe that slices straight across her forehead above wickedly arched brows.

Irina’s clad in a fine, ivory-coloured cashmere sweater and bespoke matching trousers, very narrow, like cigarette pants, edged in pale blue ribbon. The most elegant sleepwear I’ve ever seen. Her build is lean and sinuous, narrow through the hips and shoulders, a swan’s neck, collarbones very prominent above the V-neck of the sweater. In the mirror, Irina’s knees appear wider than the midpoint of each thigh, and it’s no trick of the light.

I’m inhabiting a beautiful stick insect. A freak of nature.

Irina’s young. Younger than the stranger with the critical eyes.

But what’s more startling than all this is the reflection within the reflection. There’s another person framed in the mirror, even more preternaturally tall than the first. A ghost girl outlined in stardust, in moonlight. Who looks maybe sixteen on the outside, but seldom ever feels that way. With brown eyes, alabaster skin, a long, straight nose in an oval face framed by shoulder-length brown hair, each strand straight, even and perfectly the same. No will-o’-the-wisp like the other one, but broad-limbed, strong-looking. Stern-faced.

The second self, my true self.

The stranger laughs without amusement. ‘Admiring yourself again?’

It’s clear from her tone that she doesn’t see me — just the human shell I’m inhabiting today. The girl I’ve soul-jacked.

‘I suppose you can’t help it,’ she mutters, ‘with a face and body like yours.’

I think Irina looks like a doll-faced alien with spidery limbs, but there’s a sullen envy in the other girl’s words. She should sooner envy Frankenstein’s monster. For, despite her surface gloss, that’s what Irina is today — a composite being, cobbled together from remnants.

The girl standing there giving me the evil eye isn’t to know that the cycle that blights my existence has begun again: I’ve woken inside a new ‘host’ and am expected to rely on my wits, to hit the ground running, even though my entire world, my entire frame of reference, has shifted overnight. Though I call myself Mercy, I still don’t know what my real name is. And I’m invisible to the world entire. Undetectable to any, save my own kind.

My own kind.

I feel Irina’s brow furrow as I recall Gabriel disguised within the mortal, Sulaiman. The way I’m disguised now.

Eight of my own kind did this to me.

Unexpectedly, I’m assailed by monstrous images —

— of a steep, distant mountainside, a deadly crater upon one lonely slope, the soil scorched for leagues around, every tree, plant, animal and rock in the vicinity reduced to ashes, utterly destroyed.

— of a series of chambers, deep beneath the streets of an old city, piled high with the bones of the human dead. In the midst of this hellish domain — eight men. Each one unnaturally tall, preternaturally beautiful, youthful, ageless. Each one a being of pure fire, casting no shadow. They are gathered around a marble dais upon which something lies — blackened, twisted, burnt beyond recognition, barely alive.

What my inner eye sees there, upon that lonely tomb, brings another ringing scream to my lips.

The English girl covers her ears in pain, shrinking from me as if my cry has sharp edges to it, as if it’s a noise loud enough to wake an entire sleeping city.

‘Christ, Irina,’ she gasps when the sound finally dies away. ‘No need to scream the walls down! Everyone knows you can’t pass a mirror without looking at yourself. It was meant to be a joke, okay?’

My left hand is flaring in agony, and I jam it beneath my elbow, against my right side, so the girl will not see it glow with a pale, white fire.

That burnt and blasted thing I saw? It was me.

I’d gone to that place of nightmare to die. Years ago. Centuries. I’d woken, instead, to find my fate in the hands of that righteous cabal: the Eight.

And I’ve been under their absolute dominion ever since.

Let me name them for you, for their identities are no longer a mystery to me. I saw them in my mind’s eye, as Lela lay dying in Gabriel’s arms.

Picture them, standing there, judgment in their eyes, every one. Each as beautiful as the next, but all so different. In form, in temperament, in abilities.

Gabriel, the herald of mysteries. Flame-haired, emerald-eyed. The self-same Gabriel who disguised himself, centuries later, as the mortal, Sulaiman, in order to watch over me.

Uriel: in face, in form, identical to me — the real me — save that he was created male. Which is a mystery in itself, one I have no answer for.

Fearsome Michael, the leader of them all, his flashing eyes as dark as his curling, black hair.

Selaphiel, sandy-haired and serious, absent, courteous, gentle, his quiet blue eyes fixed on things unseen.

Jegudiel with the waving, golden hair and dark, steely gaze, whose weapon of choice is a triple-thonged whip.

Silver-eyed, auburn-haired Jeremiel, who possesses a voice like exaltation.

Dark-eyed, dark-haired Barachiel, whose province is lightning, and whose emblem is a white rose.

And to close the circle of all those who passed sentence on me?

Raphael, the healer. Sable-eyed, dark-haired and olive-skinned. Whose mouth was made for laughter and compassion. The ‘architect’, so Gabriel had said, of my misery. The one whose plan it was, all those years ago, to hide me inside an unbroken succession of human lives. We’d been friends once. We might have been more, given time.

But Luc had changed all that.

I back towards an elegant armchair and perch unsteadily upon one arm as the memory of him takes me over.

Luc. My golden beloved. My day star, I called him, because he outshone all the stars, even the sun.

Luc — the one I have longed for. Whom I can never have, whom I can never find, because the Eight have pursued a policy, over these interminable centuries, of keeping us apart. I don’t pretend to understand their reasons, because my memory has fault lines to it that have never healed, and may never heal.

Luc loved me, more than life itself. This much I know.

And, despite what I have become, he loves me still. He tells me so in my sleep, in my dreams — the only way we can ever be together these days. And Luc warns me, again and again, that the Eight wish me harm, that they cannot be trusted, that I must run from them. Keep running, and never stop.

But the Eight insist upon keeping me from Luc for my own good, the good of all things.

And the way this has been achieved?

I stare at Irina’s remarkable face in the mirror. Touch her long-fingered hands to her extraordinary cheekbones.

There are two sides to every story.

But whose version of the truth should I believe?

Luc’s?

Or Gabriel’s?

Who lies to me? Who lies?

The English girl moves into the space reflected in the mirror, bringing my unwilling focus back. I get to my feet, uncomfortable that there’s no longer any distance between us. She takes hold of Irina’s sleeves impatiently, tugging her hands down, away from her face. Now I see three people reflected in the looking glass, although there are only two people physically present in the room. And even though I should be used to it by now, I feel a chill fall over me.

In the mirror, Irina’s eyes are so dark, they seem almost black. They spark a fresh memory in me, a recent one.

Of a young man, with eyes so dark they had seemed almost black. He’d flown for hours to reach me, he’d been a whole day in the air. His face had been so pale with weariness, but he’d smiled the instant he saw me. That familiar fringe of dark hair had fallen into his eyes, and I’d reached out and brushed it back, as if my touch could banish his weariness. He’d embraced me and swung me about lightly in his arms, as if we were dancing. And I knew that he loved me, too, would have done anything for me. And in that moment, I’d felt an answering emotion.

Luc himself had pointed it out to me once, in a dream: that this mortal boy had somehow, beyond all understanding, fallen under my power, fallen for me, even though he has never seen me. When we first met, I had soul-jacked the body of a girl called Carmen Zappacosta. And when the Eight had so cruelly shifted me out of her life and into Lela Neill’s, that boy had come to me again as if nothing and no one on earth could keep us apart.

But then he’d watched me die, murdered in cold blood right before his eyes.

Or so it must have seemed to him, because I can still hear his screams.

I see him again, staring at me from behind police lines, through the front windows of a coffee shop. Me on the inside, staring back at him, all the longing in my gaze. And I relive the moment when a single bullet from a semi-automatic pistol entered Lela’s body. The memory, the ghostly impact, is so vivid that I stagger backwards where I stand. I imagine I feel Justine Hennessy’s hand in mine once again, hear myself whispering, through blood, through the great, pulsing wound in my chest, ‘Tell him … that Mercy shall come again …’

In the mirror, I see Irina’s expression of shock reflect my own. I watch all the colour leach out of her angular, unforgettable face as I suddenly remember his name. Catch hold of it, say it silently to myself, with reverence — Ryan Daley — as if the two words are a prayer.

And something seems to give way inside me, as if buried memories are struggling to the surface. The ground is shifting beneath my feet; time feels as if it is reeling away from me in all directions, and I must sift through the jumbled memories of five past lives to piece together what I want, what I need.

I remember Ryan. I remember everything about him. The way he looks when he’s feeling impatient, the way I feel when he holds me close: messed-up, buzzy, wired. Like he’s the greatest drug in the universe.

I need him for selfish reasons I can barely articulate. When I’m with him, I feel less like a freak. He makes me laugh. He makes me angry. He makes me feel alive, in the way I once was. But most of all, he gets me. And he makes me feel safe. He’s the only person who doesn’t treat me like a broken toy that must be fixed. And they’re pretty potent things after centuries spent wandering the wilderness that is this earth: alone, deranged, damaged.

Did Ryan get my message? Or does he truly believe me … dead?

Is he grieving? My God, did I cause him grief? Did I hurt him?

I love Luc. That’s a constant. He’s always been there, always. A face in my dreams, a voice in my head. We were meant to be together. We were made to be together. We have a connection that not even time, distance or remorseless exile can sunder. Some day, some day soon, we’ll be together again. I know it. It’s what’s sustained me all along: the thought that one day this might all be over and I might be allowed to go home, to find Luc waiting for me. That hope kept me together, gave me something to steer by, even before I could begin to grasp again who he was, and what he’d once meant to me.

But right here, right now? There’s Ryan. And I’m too afraid to name what I feel for him, because in no universe would someone like him and someone like me ever work out. What Ryan makes me feel is all an illusion, because feelings are for humans, and I’m not human. I know that much. My thing with Ryan can go exactly nowhere. But there’s no crime against wishing, no crime against dreaming, is there? So when I’m with him — when circumstances don’t transpire to tear us apart — I cheat and tell myself to take it one day at a time, to live in the moment.

But I also need Ryan to help Luc find me, if that makes any kind of sense. Because if Ryan and I are together, Luc will finally have some clue as to where upon the surface of this floating, teeming world I am. He had said so himself in my dream. Find the mortal boy, return with him to Paradise and then we’ll be together again.

But I can’t ever tell Ryan any of this. Because maybe then he wouldn’t want to help me any more, and I can’t risk it. If Ryan loves me, really loves me — and not just because I once helped save his twin sister’s life — then I don’t know what that would do to him, telling him he’s got competition from a guy who was created to be peerless and immortal. Who needs to hear that?

He’s been hurt enough for one lifetime.

I need to find him quickly. To apologise. To explain. To confess.

That he just may be my skeleton key, my wild card, my circuit breaker. My way out of this hot, damn mess.

CHAPTER 2

The girl with the two-coloured eyes crosses her arms, trying to catch and hold my gaze in the looking glass. ‘You bloody well didn’t, did you?’ she snarls suddenly. ‘Did you?’

My eyes fly to hers in the mirror and I wonder why she’s so angry.

‘You’ve held it together for six months and now you go and start using again?’ she yells. ‘I’m not interested in all the stupid excuses you always have ready — it just happened to be there; and how could I say no?

‘I warned you! You’re not going to talk me out of it this time, because I can’t do this any more! All the sneaking around for you, all the lying, when it’s obvious to everyone what’s wrong with you. You’re even more out of it than usual. I quit. Hear me? I’m quitting.’

She turns and paces towards the rumpled bed, while I try to work out what I’m supposed to have done.

‘Look at you!’ She turns on me accusingly. ‘You say you’re “clean” but I’ve never seen you so spaced out and paranoid. I don’t know how you got your hands on some, but after today — after those tedious, bloody fittings — we’re done, we’re through. You’re a junkie, Irina. You need to get proper help, before you lose your mind. Or your life. I didn’t sign up for this. I’m not prepared to walk in one day to find you dead on the floor.

‘Are you getting any of this?’ she says, sitting down on the edge of the bed, sounding defeated. ‘And don’t pretend your grasp of English has failed again, because I know you understand me perfectly.’

‘You … can’t … quit,’ I reply with difficulty, the first words I’ve said since ‘waking’ here. Even to me, Irina’s heavily accented voice sounds awkward, almost rusty, although the accent itself seems familiar.

‘Because I’m …’ I struggle to remember the word the English girl had thrown at me, ‘clean.’

I frown, still trying to make sense of the word’s meaning in the context of her accusations. What is it exactly that I’m supposed to have … used?

Her answering laugh is shaky. ‘Good try, but I’ve seen it all before, remember? The zombie eyes, the inability to conduct a logical conversation, the paranoid belief that something’s trying to eat its way out through your skin. You probably woke everyone on this floor with your screaming. You must be coming down like a lead balloon. I still don’t know how you managed it — I never let you out of my sight yesterday.’

Russian, my inner voice pipes up suddenly. Irina’s accent is Russian.

‘Hello?’ she snaps. ‘You’re doing it again — spacing out!’ She waves one hand in front of my face. ‘You don’t even remember me, do you?’ she says softly. ‘Gia? Gia Basso? Hired to make you look good? Hired because I speak enough Italian and French to give you an edge over all the other girls who’d plunge a dagger into your back and step into your shoes in a heartbeat given half the chance.’

‘I am not spacing out,’ I reply, a touch of anger creeping into Irina’s husky voice. ‘I’m thinking. There’s a difference.’

Gia snorts. ‘Where there’s smoke there’s always fire. I can’t believe you’d jeopardise your comeback like this! We’ve only been working towards this day for months. Honestly, you are your own worst enemy.’

I feel a surge of irrational fury that makes the fingers of my left hand involuntarily curl into talons. I have to stop myself lifting the judgmental little twerp off the ground by the lapels of her cherry-blossom-patterned kimono and giving her a hard shake. She doesn’t understand how far I’ve come just to get here; how I’ve started to do something that I’ve never been able to do before.

I’m beginning to learn. I’m beginning to accumulate knowledge; to make connections again, however random they may seem to you. Like how I seem to have an immediate geographical fix on where I am right now. And how I’m able to recognise Gia’s accent, even Irina’s. And how I’m walking and talking without feeling an ounce of physical distress. I could have been born in this body. It could be my body. From distal phalanges to metatarsals, from calcaneus to crown, it might almost have been mine, ab initio, from the very beginning. That gap that’s always been present, between thought and deed? It’s dissolving.

But most important of all is the fact that I can remember every second I spent as Lela Neill. She may be alive no longer, save in my memory, but I recall everything that happened when I was her. It’s proof that I’m growing stronger, that I’ve started to circumvent the strange blockages in my mind, those obstacles that the Eight have somehow placed there. In some unholy way, I’ve begun to regenerate. Or mutate. Or evolve. And the process is getting … faster.

I think that, like a machine, I used to be set to delete. That’s why I’ve never been able to remember anything more than impressions really, sixteen, thirty-two, even forty-eight lives out of context. But something’s changed. Some things are beginning to stick.

Or maybe, like acid, like flame, some kind of dangerous contaminant, I’m beginning to burn back through. And what’s more, no one has any idea of the extent to which I’m back. Only me.

No matter how high the Eight might try to build up that wall of thorns around me, from now on, Sleeping Beauty is awake. And she’s angry.

There’s no reason I can’t keep to the plan that I started when I was Lela Neill. The face, the body, even the specifics, may have changed, but there’s nothing to stop me just picking up where I left off. Around me, time always gets misplaced, you know? It runs too fast, runs too slow. I’ve always had a problem with chronology, with the order of things. But starting today, I’m taking control before the sucker gets away from me. I ran out of time when I was Lela, and it’s not going to happen again. As soon as I can get my bearings, figure out what Irina’s story is, work out where the exits are, I’m going to reconnect with Ryan Daley and bust my way out of here.

Gia looks startled when I growl in Irina’s heavy Russian accent, ‘You want to quit? Go ahead. I’m not going to stop you.’

I stalk past her, calling her bluff, and fling open the first door I see. It leads into a spacious walk-in wardrobe containing an ironing board, half a dozen heavy white terry towelling robes, blankets, towels, slippers and umbrellas, all embossed with a fancy, crested hotel logo. You could comfortably house a small African village inside the space, but there’s not a single scrap of clothing I could actually wear. I shut the door disgustedly.

‘What are you, uh, doing?’ Gia says uncertainly, as I try another door to the left of the first one. Again, I don’t bother with the light switch. I don’t need to.

I find myself staring into a luxury all-marble bathroom with its own flat screen TV and built-in sound system. It’s covered in enough personal effects to bury a person alive, but there’s nothing in here remotely resembling anything to wear, and even I draw the line at walking the streets in my pyjamas. Only crazies do that.

I might hear voices in my head, but that doesn’t make me crazy.

I slam shut the bathroom door and turn to face the girl on the bed. ‘Where are my clothes?’ I demand.

Gia starts to laugh so wildly, she sounds like she’s crying.

‘Where are my clothes?’ I say again, fiercely. ‘I need to go out. There are things I have to do.’

Top of the list? Locate one of those all-night internet joints I used to frequent when I was Lela. I need to use that seething, wholly man-made ‘web’ I still can’t get my old-school head around to draw Ryan to me, the way I did before. Across oceans, across time zones.

In all this time, I’ve never been able to find Luc and he’s never been able to find me. But Ryan, at least, has a physical location on this earth. He comes from a small town called Paradise that’s as far from it as it’s possible to get. But it’s a real place, perched on an ugly stretch of beach in a country I don’t even have a name for yet. I’d been forced to leave Lela’s body before I’d managed to find that out.

Even if Ryan hasn’t reached home yet, he’s going to be checking his emails. I can get a lock on him again, I know it.

Gia’s still laughing. ‘Where are my clothes!’ she whoops. ‘Listen to yourself! You sure you’re “clean”?’

I frown, still unable to see the joke.

Gia leads me out of my bedroom and into a massive sitting room that’s decorated in more of the same riotous rococo excess. There are too many occasional tables, mirrors, knick-knacks, table lamps, armchairs, divans, vases of scented, white blooms, hand-knotted silk rugs and footstools for one lone skinny female like me to use.

We pass a coffee table surrounded by deep, winged armchairs, and an elegant dining table with eight chairs around it that’s been placed beneath a set of windows facing out onto the street to catch the light and the incredible view. I’m in part of an old Milanese palazzo, I realise, looking around. The proportions of the rooms are baronial. Beneath all the unrelenting froufrou, the place has old bones.

‘Is all this all … mine?’ I murmur.

‘We’re sharing it,’ Gia says over her shoulder, ‘like we always do. Although you always make sure you give me the smallest room in the suite.’

We come to a stop outside two doors on the other side of the vast sitting area that are painted a discreet olive-grey colour, with inset door panels outlined in gold leaf. Both doors are closed.

Gia points at the one on the right. ‘That one’s mine and it’s off-limits,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘The last time you asked to borrow one of my vintage Jean Desses cocktail dresses, I found myself at Paris Fashion Week staring at a photo of it on the back of one of your supermodel “friends” at a hotel nightclub opening in Miami. You know, the one who always forgets to put on her underwear before she goes out. You swore you had no idea how it got there and when I finally got it back after threatening legal action, the dress had part of its skirt missing.’

I look at her blankly. She’d lost me at the word vintage and she knows it.

Gia sighs, opening the door on the left and flicking on the light. ‘Does this answer your earlier question?’ she says with heavy sarcasm.

I can see why she’s incredulous. The vast room has had all of its furniture removed and is filled with matching bespoke luggage in an expensive-looking black, tan and white chevron pattern. There would have to be sixteen pieces of the stuff at least, and the initials I.D.Z. are emblazoned across the front of each one in large, bright green script, with a matching navy blue and green racing stripe running down the centre of each piece.

‘Flashy,’ I drawl in Irina’s husky voice.

Gia gives me an odd look. ‘These are just your “essentials”,’ she replies. ‘We had a screaming match over the six other suitcases I forced you to leave at home because we’re only supposed to be here for, like, five days.’

Spilling out of every open case is a wealth of coats, dresses, jackets, tops, skirts, trousers, shorts, sweaters, wraps, jeans, leggings, boots and shoes in every colour and texture imaginable, along with handfuls of filmy lingerie. It’s a sea of leather, denim, fur, feathers, couture, vintage and velvet. Irina is clearly not averse to a sequin. The room is like an Aladdin’s cave of high-end apparel. There’s enough clothing here to dress an army of women for a week without anyone having to lift a finger to do laundry.

When I think about Carmen Zappacosta’s one dingy sports bag, her little boy’s clothes and her much-loved flat, grey toy bunny with its fur all worn-down in places, its reattached glass eyes, I feel almost misty. Ditto Lela Neill’s haphazardly stored collection of threadbare second-hand clothing, most of it past its use-by date the first time around and dyed an unbecoming black, green or purple.

How could one person have so many … things?

‘Are these all mine, too?’ I say idiotically, knowing the question is basically rhetorical and that I fully deserve the look Gia is giving me now. The crazy-long inseams on the crystal-studded, low-rider jeans draped across the nearest case are a dead giveaway. Plus, Irina has long, bony, ballet-dancer’s feet that match the pair of towering snakeskin stilettos slung carelessly near the door. Gia’s feet are like something from the days of Imperial China: doll-sized.

‘You know I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,’ Gia replies as she ushers me out of the room and back into the warmly-lit sitting room.

She paces across to an antique secretaire against one wall and retrieves a pile of glossy magazines from it, thrusting them in my direction.

‘You’re Irina Zhivanevskaya, remember? Supermodel, tabloid darling. One of the most recognised faces on the planet? Women all over the world copy the way you dress, the way you wear your hair, the places you hang out. They follow your every move, every disastrous hook-up, with morbid interest.’

I quickly scan the covers in my hands and Irina’s mesmerising face is on every one.

Gia gives a small laugh. ‘You’re one of the “one name” girls — like Gisele or Daria, Elle, Lara or Iman. You can’t just “go out”,’ she says. ‘You haven’t been able to just “go out” for several years. It takes full hair and make-up and a decoy car or two for you to just get up and leave any place. Let alone here. And especially now.’

She takes back one of the magazines in my hands and flicks through it until she finds the cover story and hands it back to me. I frown as I read about Irina’s latest battle with a very public addiction to drugs that’s left her dangerously erratic. I look up to see Gia’s cool eyes on me.

‘It’s mostly just old gossip hurriedly cobbled together because no one’s quite sure how bad it really is, not even me, because you lie and lie. I’ve quit on you three times already and you’ve somehow always managed to lure me back. You always know which buttons of mine to push. And I’m no fame whore, but I still kind of like the crazy shit that happens around you. Nobody else on earth gets a chance to see what you see, be where you are …

‘I expect you’ll sack me now,’ Gia says, looking down at the floor, ‘for talking out of turn like this …’

I shake my head. ‘On the contrary,’ I reply in Irina’s distinctive smoke-and-whiskey voice. ‘I value your honesty.’

I didn’t used to. When I’d first begun to realise there was something really wrong with me — that the face and body I happened to be inhabiting never seemed to bear any correlation to the person I was inside — I was so wound up and brittle, so wary, that I’d truly believed that honesty was for simpletons. But that was then, and this is now, and I could use more of it. The Eight? Luc, even? They’re all keeping something from me, something bad. I can feel it in my bones.

I rifle quickly through the other magazine articles about Irina and it’s clear that she may be famous, beautiful and rich beyond reason, but she’s a monster. Irina’s been pulled off an aeroplane for slapping a flight attendant who asked her to get off her mobile, she’s thrown champagne and punches at a love rival in a Berlin nightclub, had nude photos uploaded onto the net by a vindictive ex-boyfriend, been filmed scoring, mainlining and passing out, and already labelled a has-been at the ripe old age of nineteen. She’s a bitch-slapping, hair-pulling, tantrum-throwing piece of work.

As I hand the magazines back to Gia in amazement, she says, ‘The fact you’ve had to give yourself a refresher course and don’t appear to remember the highlights from your own life speaks volumes …’

I’m silent for a long while. There’s no getting around it. Irina must be some kind of highly-strung, celebrity clotheshorse. With a self-destructive streak a mile wide. I’m beginning to see the extent of my problem. Somehow, I need to locate Ryan again, vanish Irina right out of her very public life, and give the Eight the slip so that I can rendezvous with Luc back in Ryan’s hometown of Paradise. Have I covered everything?

I curse the Eight under my breath for their eternal interference, the tests within tests they seem determined always to set me.

‘You know this city better than I do,’ I say cajolingly. ‘I have to go out, I have to find someone. Couldn’t we just go — you and me? Walk out of here right now?’

Gia meets my eyes in astonishment. ‘You’d be screwed,’ she replies. ‘Even though the paparazzi are camped outside your usual hotel, as soon as you set foot outside here, a crowd of ordinary Italians with phone cams will be in your face broadcasting your whereabouts to the entire world. Everyone knows who you are and why you’re in Milan. And they’re all waiting for you to fall flat on your face.’

‘I really am “clean”,’ I say simply. ‘And I really do need your help. Because it’s important I find this guy — you don’t know how much.’

Gia rolls her eyes. ‘They’re always “important” until you leave them begging and broken and move on to your next victim. No way,’ she says firmly. ‘I’m under strict orders from management not to let you out on the street during the hours of darkness. You’re too much of an insurance risk these days. It’s not worth my hide to try and smuggle you out.’ Her eyes soften a little as she stares into my mutinous face. ‘I know it’s seemed like a prison sentence lately, but the arrangements are in place for your own good. You know that, don’t you?’

I feel a surge of anger at her words that makes the fingers of my left hand ache. Why does everyone think they know better than me?

Gia jerks a thumb at the bed. ‘Ask me again in daylight, okay? It can at least wait until after sunrise. Now get some rest. Final fittings begin in about three hours and they’ll be brutal. Giovanni’s already warned me that he won’t stand any more tardiness or attitude from you or you’ll lose the global print advertising contract, as well as the catwalk gig. Remember, you’ve only got this because your management called in all their favours. Somehow, the great Giovanni Re still has a soft spot for you even though you’ve always been a complete bitch to him. No one else is prepared to touch you right now, so don’t stuff this up. Sleep. Now. Capiche?’

I climb into bed reluctantly and she stares down into my face. ‘Let’s just start over, okay? Let’s just get through today as if none of this …’ she gestures in the air between us, ‘ever happened. I still might quit, you know. If I don’t kill you first.’

Gia walks over to the windows and draws the curtains shut again before heading back towards the door. She snaps off the light and closes the door firmly behind her.

I pull the plump, feather-light bedclothes right up under my chin and lie there in the dark, looking up at the ceiling.

It’s covered in an original Renaissance fresco, with lots of fine brushwork in gold and blue and blush pink. Maybe Tiepolo? Definitely in the style of Tiepolo, with all those luminous clouds and long-limbed, vigorous people. Who seem, like so much else, achingly familiar, but so very far beyond my reach.

CHAPTER 3

I’m unable to sleep, even though I want to so badly. In all these years, sleep has been my only source of solace. In dreams, I feel most like myself, capable of anything, not limited by the human face and form I happen to be wearing.

And in dreams, I have access to that most longed-for of things — time with Luc. Though even that, the Eight would deny us, if They could.

When Luc first picked me out of that throng of elohim — each more beautiful than the last — to be his love, he said, to be his queen, some small part of me had refused to believe that it would last. Because when I looked at him, and then looked at me, I couldn’t understand what he saw in me, what set me apart from all the rest. But in a funny kind of way, we have lasted. Though it’s been years since we last touched, or even met face to face.

Gabriel told me himself that while I sleep — when the linkages between soul and body are at their weakest — Luc somehow still has access to my thoughts, access to me. It’s a connection that has persisted despite everything the Eight have done to keep us apart.

And though in my dreams, Luc sometimes seems more angry, more goading, more desperate, cruel and spiteful than I have ever remembered him to be, just the sight of him — golden-skinned, golden-haired, broad-shouldered, snake-hipped, long and lean, with eyes as pale as living ice, like broken water — is like a shot of pure adrenaline to the heart. He’s the most beautiful thing in creation, more beautiful than the sun. Call me shallow — and I’m sure plenty have; it’s just a feeling I get — I’ve always loved beautiful things.

I could use Luc’s devious counsel now. There was no one better at getting what he wanted. No one. But for the past few hours, I’ve lain here, tossing and turning, unable to reach out to him, unable to conjure up the necessary pre-conditions for him to reach out to me. I’ve just been stuck in a kind of waking trance, replaying Lela’s last moments — our last moments together — over and over. Feeling that fatal gunshot, wondering if there was anything I could’ve done differently.

There’s a sudden, sharp rap on the door and Gia Basso enters the room again, dressed in street clothes this time. She marches across to the curtains and yanks them open with a skittering sound. It’s still dark outside but lightening just a little, at the horizon. My internal clock says it’s still very early: six; maybe six fifteen, at most.

Gia’s wearing a tough-looking, black leather jacket with rows of brass studs on the lapels over a bunch of layered, artfully ripped tee-shirts and tank tops and a vintage-looking, beat-up waistcoat; skin-tight jeans and towering black leather ankle boots criss-crossed by a welter of leather straps. There’s jangling silver jewellery at her ears and on her wrists, a couple of long and floaty patterned scarves slung around her neck, and she’s wearing a striking dark purple lipstick and strong, smoky eye make-up combination that somehow work together, even though they shouldn’t. With her glossy, China-girl hair, she’s the most stylish creature I’ve ever beheld, and I say so, admiringly.

She frowns, giving me a sharp look as if she thinks that I’m — what’s that phrase I puzzled over so much when I was Lela? Ah, yes, taking the piss. Making fun of her. I’m not, but she ignores my comment and barks, ‘As soon as people get a lock on your location, a huge contingent will materialise out of nowhere. It’ll be like a flash mob, I guarantee it. You’re “so hot right now” and not for the right reasons. Get ready to run the gauntlet. Breakfast is on its way up. We can plan our route with Felipe while you eat.’

She ruthlessly hauls the coverlet off my body, her eyebrows flying up in surprise when I rise immediately and head into the OTT marble ensuite to splash water onto Irina’s perfectly symmetrical, heart-shaped little face, jumpy with nerves at the thought that Operation Get Me Outta Here is about to find itself back on track.

Gia watches me narrowly, exclaiming in a passable Russian accent, ‘You’re not going to call me a heartless beeetch today?’

I shake my head and look around. Scattered across the enormous stone vanity unit are at least a dozen hairbrushes in as many styles: barrel-shaped, paddle-shaped, oval, square, mini-sized, maxi-sized, natural or synthetic. I can’t move without tripping over a plush white bath towel on the floor, and I pick up each one I come across, folding it quickly and neatly into a precise square, until there is a stack of them on top of the gilded footstool near the basins. Gia folds her arms and leans in the doorway. I feel her eyes follow me around the room.

Next, I pick out a large, flat brush that looks like an instrument of torture and yank it through Irina’s long, caramel-coloured mane, her hair crackling beneath my brushstrokes.

The room is filled with towering floral arrangements, all in white; groupings of half-burnt scented candles with base notes of cinnamon, myrrh and orange blossom; and the heavy artillery of glamour — hair straighteners, large and small, curling tongs, hot curlers, eyelash shapers, hair dryers, tweezers, combs, hairpins, hair spray, lacquer, fudge, gel, mousse, styling wax, treatments for dry hair, damaged hair and coloured hair, bottles of perfume of every size and description, enough make-up to fill a store, not to mention all the gear required to take it off again. Clearly, it takes a lot to be Irina Zhivanevskaya. I frown. She looks okay to me the way she is. How much of this stuff am I expected to use? And how do I use most of it?

As I hesitate, I see that Gia wants to say something, then literally has to bite her tongue to stop herself.

I look back towards the massive stone vanity above which our three faces — mine, Irina’s, Gia’s — are reflected. I meet Gia’s eyes in the mirror. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Gia’s eyebrows disappear into her slanting, razor-cut fringe. ‘What do you mean you don’t know what to do?’ she exclaims. ‘Do what you usually do. Do you know how insane you sound?’

She’s right. Even a junkie supermodel is going to remember how to get herself dolled up for work. It’s clear that I’m going to have to recycle the cover story I’d used when I was Lela. The last thing I need right now is for Irina to be sent back to rehab because she’s making no sense.

‘I’m clean, Gia, I promise you,’ I say. ‘It’s just that I’ve never told anyone this before …’ I lower my voice so that she has to lean forward to hear ‘… but I can’t … remember things. It’s a disease, you know? It’s been happening for a while now, and lately it’s been getting worse. But I’m too scared to have it properly checked out …’

I’m no actress, but I make Irina’s expression as scared and as mournful as I can. Gia looks genuinely shocked and I can tell she believes me.

‘You mean all those times I thought you were strung out, you might actually have been …’

I nod quickly. ‘I haven’t been very good at hiding my … affliction. I have mood swings, you know? I find myself doing things I know I’ll regret later. I’m so afraid I’m going to die that I deliberately do things I know might kill me anyway …’

I have to bite back laughter. Once I get going, I’m pretty unstoppable. Luc used to say that I was almost as good as he was at making things up, that I was a natural. I frown at the sudden recollection.

Gia takes me by the sleeve, bringing my attention back. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ she says softly. ‘You let me believe all those awful things about you. If the press knew about this … brain thing of yours, then maybe they wouldn’t make up so much shit about you all the time. You should let me feed the story to a couple of the more sympathetic editors. Make sure it gets around …’

I shrug and look sadly at the floor. But the lie’s worked. A little of Gia’s ingrained wariness around me, her brooding irritation, seems to have dissipated.

‘Come on,’ Gia sighs, leading me back through the palatial sitting area into the room littered with luggage and clothing.

‘Now, you’ve got just over half an hour to pull a look together,’ she says crisply. ‘Clothes first, war paint after. We cannot be late. It’s Giovanni’s fiftieth anniversary in the biz and he’s rumoured to be retiring after the runway show is over, and announcing the new designer who’s taking over from him. Which, if true, is huge news. And he’s picked just you — not the usual battalion of hollow-cheeked fembots — to open and close. So act appropriately. No falling off the catwalk; no lewd or criminal behaviour at the afterparty — not unless you never want to work again.’ She’s already backing towards the door as she adds, ‘And the faster we leave, the more chance we have of avoiding the press.’

She’s on the verge of shutting the door when I call out, ‘Wait!’

Gia gives me a wary look through the gap. ‘What? What now?’

I scan this stranger’s sea of belongings ruefully. ‘Why don’t you … help me?’ I say.

Gia goes incredibly still. ‘Help you?’ she says finally, wrinkling her nose and stepping slowly back through the door. ‘Like, what, physically dress you? I’m not supposed to touch “the presence”, remember? And the last time I suggested you weren’t rocking the outfit you had on, you threw a McQueen armadillo at me.’

I shake my head, bewildered by almost every word that’s just emerged from her mouth, doubly bewildered by the sheer volume of clothing in the room. Working out whether I’m ‘rocking’ my outfit has always been the least of my troubles when I wake up in someone else’s body with no memory of how I got there.

I look around the room, with literally no idea where to start. Most days, I have enough difficulty trying to blend into my immediate surroundings convincingly, without adding ambush photography to the mix.

‘I’m not having a good day,’ I plead, tapping the side of my head. ‘Help me to look —’

‘What?’ Gia shoots back, hands on hips. ‘Like a cashed-up, colour-blind rock chick meets vintage-boho, Euro-princess slut?’

‘Say that again?’ I’m taken aback at the venom in her words.

She shrugs. ‘Well, you asked. And it makes a change from having my opinion completely ignored. The way you dress may have made you famous, but it’s a little too schizophrenic and look-at-me for my tastes. You may have the “best body in the business” to go along with that “face of the century” of yours, but you kind of put too much information out there, if you know what I’m saying.’ Gia’s expression is a weird mix of envious and dubious.

She sighs. ‘You’re right though — you actually do need help. You’ve started appearing at the top of “What’s Not Hot” lists in fashion magazines lately. People are saying you’ve lost your fashion mojo. Bad news in your line of work, darling.’

She moves through the sea of cases and bags with a critical eye and picks out a narrow pair of soft, leather trousers, low-rise, long and lean, in a warm chocolate colour. Then she rifles through some kind of jumbo-sized duffle bag on wheels and pulls out a crew-neck, long-sleeved, body-skimming, dusky-olive cashmere tunic that falls to mid hip. ‘These will have to do.’

She comes to a standstill and scans the room for several minutes until she finds what she wants — a hard travelling case that comes up to just above her waist, filled to the brim with shoes stored in neat pairs. ‘Just what I was looking for,’ she says as she draws out a gleaming pair of black patent heels — so shiny, I can see my face in them — with criminally high heels, six inches at least, and bright red soles.

‘I can’t move in those,’ I protest. They look like the claws of some alien creature.

‘You’ll have to,’ Gia replies, distractedly. ‘You know as well as I do that flat shoes won’t lift the ensemble the way these will. Plus, you’re Irina, and Irina never wears flats. Wedges maybe, clogs at a stretch.’ Gia wrinkles her nose at the idea.

‘Always something with a heel,’ she insists, ‘to make you seem even less like the rest of us mere mortals when you stalk by with your head in the clouds.’

‘Where is it?’ Gia mutters, as she grabs a matched set of silky, floral-print lingerie and throws it at me, too. ‘Did we pack them in the medium trolley case? Or cram them all in the hatbox?’ She laughs triumphantly as she unclasps the fastening on a hatbox as big as a bass drum and draws out a midnight-black felt cloche hat with intricate pleating extending over one ear so the leading edge extends upwards slightly, like a bird’s wing.

‘Perfect. It’ll look fantastic against the warm, neutral tones and all that long hair of yours. And let’s finish it off with that long, black, military-style shearling overcoat Andreas sent you from his studio in Madrid last winter. It’s the only one he ever made in that particular design. You’ve never worn it and I know that hurt his feelings enormously. When I ran into him backstage at the London shows this year, his lips were practically trembling as he asked after you.’

Gia locates the overcoat in a huge case that opens outwards like a mini wardrobe complete with hangers. She drapes it over her arm with the other pieces she’s selected for me, the little hat perched over one small fist. ‘Hop to it,’ she says, wending her way back through the cases and holding her selections out to me.

‘What?’ I say, startled. ‘Right now? Here?’

It’s Gia’s turn to look shocked. ‘You’re, like, a model?’ she exclaims mockingly. ‘You stand around in your underwear all day — if you’re lucky — while fifteen people work on your hair and make-up and shove fabulously expensive clothes over your head. I’m the one who’s always telling you to put some goddamn clothes on, remember? So, needless to say, I’ve seen it all before. But I’ll look away from “the presence”,’ she snorts loudly, ‘if that’ll help.’

I have no choice but to scramble out of the cashmere sleep suit I’m wearing and into the things Gia’s chosen for me, in record time. She looks at me clinically when I’m done, turning me in the direction of a full-length mirror set up in the corner of the room. The colours she’s selected highlight Irina’s cream and roses complexion, her toffee-coloured hair and huge, wide-set, dark eyes fringed by extravagant dark lashes.

Gia tugs the black cloche hat onto my head, twisting and pulling at it until she’s satisfied with the angle of the delicate bird wing arcing above one brow. She pulls a set of bobby pins from a large, monogrammed vanity case and secures the hat firmly.

‘Fabulous,’ she murmurs as she jams the last pin in place. ‘And put these on when we get outside or you’ll be sorry.’ She hands me a soft, sleek pair of short, hand-stitched, shearling-lined, black leather gloves.

I shove them into a pocket of my ankle-length coat and climb reluctantly into the shoes, feeling as if I’m going to tip forward onto my face at any moment.

‘I can’t do this!’ I exclaim, screwing up Irina’s small and exquisite nose.

Gia frowns as she takes in my awkward, slump-shouldered, turtle-necked posture. ‘What you mean is, you can’t do this unmedicated. Well, tough, because it’s not my job to facilitate your self-harming tendencies. Stand up straighter, and it won’t seem like you’re falling downhill. You need to redistribute your weight. I can’t believe I’m telling you this — your memory really must be shot to hell.’

I make subtle adjustments to Irina’s posture until Gia stops frowning.

‘That’s better,’ she says. ‘It’s perfect. A little bit rock and roll, a little bit minimalist-with-an-edge, and the hat is just quirky enough to signal that you’re a fashion insider, you speak the language. You couldn’t take a bad photo in that outfit. From any angle.’

‘It feels like torture,’ I respond dryly, feeling my feet going numb.

Gia laughs. ‘Beauty hurts.’

She’s about to say something else when a doorbell peals so loudly, I almost jump. I’m reminded of the small matter of locating Ryan Daley, which completely slipped my mind during the insane amount of time it took us to find me something to wear. Irina’s heart gives a sudden lurch.

‘You promised you’d help me find him, find Ryan,’ I remind Gia.

She shakes her head warningly, already heading towards the door. ‘Not now,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘That will be Felipe, and Felipe is not accustomed to being ignored.’ Her tone is derisive.

I trail awkwardly after her in the crippling, shiny heels she picked out for me to wear. When she flings open the door to my suite, I see a handsome, sun-bronzed, strong-featured young man standing there. Mid to late twenties, with black, slicked-back hair. He’s shorter than I am in my absurd footwear, and broad-shouldered, muscular, powerful-looking. He’s wearing a single-breasted charcoal grey suit over a black turtleneck, a camel-coloured overcoat and expensive-looking, spit-and-polish black lace-up brogues. He’s carrying a pair of cream and tan, perforated leather driving gloves in one hand. As he follows Gia into the stately sitting room of the suite, I see open admiration in his dark eyes. For me.

Even though I consider myself impervious to all forms of flattery, I find myself blushing suddenly under his appreciative and unblinking scrutiny. Even Ryan never looked at me the way this guy’s doing now. Like I’m good enough to … devour. I don’t know whether to feel pleased, or revolted.

‘¡Querida!’ the young man murmurs in a low, musical voice like an auditory caress. ‘Cómo ardo al pensar en su belleza, a pesar de su maldad infernal.’

Gia shoots Felipe a scandalised look.

I feel Irina’s face suddenly flush with a strange, hectic blood, her heartbeat kick into higher gear. It’s Spanish. I actually recognise it.

But I don’t recall any past facility with Spanish at all. So where is this coming from?

Literally, the guy had said —

Darling! How your beauty sets me on fire, despite your infernal evil.

I don’t know how it’s possible, but when I reach out for the words I need, the words I want to use, they’re somehow there.

‘Qué simpatico … como siempre, querido Felipe,’ I reply tersely. ‘But let’s speak English, for Gia’s sake, ¿le parece bien?’

There are accents on all the wrong places, accents where there shouldn’t be any, but from the looks on both their faces, I’ve just made perfect sense in a language I shouldn’t even know.

‘You’re speaking English for my sake?’ Gia says disbelievingly.

The confident smile on Felipe’s handsome face falters for a moment, before it’s smoothly re-established. ‘Your Spanish, Senorita Zhivanevskaya,’ he says, his perfect white teeth showing, ‘he has improved very much.’

‘Yes, “he” has,’ Gia mutters. ‘Out of sight. So tell me again, Irina, why you insisted on hiring that creepy translator for the Costa Rican swimsuit shoot last month?’

From the look on Gia’s face, it’s clear that the only languages Irina’s supposed to have are Russian and bitchy conversational English.

‘Sit,’ I tell Felipe, still pretending I didn’t hear Gia’s question. I gesture at the two pairs of elegant winged armchairs facing each other either side of a monumental glass and steel coffee table bearing porcelain cups and saucers and a sleek, silver, lidded jug.

Gia and I take our places across from Felipe and, for a moment, I do not hear the icily correct small talk that the two of them are exchanging. Lela Neill hadn’t spoken Spanish. Neither had Lucy, or Susannah. Or Ezra before them. But with a name like Zappacosta, I’m guessing that Carmen might be able to. And now I can, too? Even though I passed through Carmen’s body … two lives ago? Or does this ability come from somewhere else, some when else? Some ‘life’ even further back than the time I was Carmen?

The cool-hued room seems to tilt. There’s a sudden sensation that I’m freefalling, though my physical body sits here, unmoved. What’s inside always so very different from what’s outside.

As if from very far away, I hear Gia enquire frostily of our guest, ‘Tea?’, before picking up the silver thermos and pouring a shot of hot, dark amber liquid into one of the crested white teacups on the table before her. It’s a trait so peculiar to the English, and as I direct my unfocused gaze at the steam coming off the surface of the drink, I can almost make out every particle rising.

Felipe shakes his head dismissively, unfolding a road map from a pocket of his overcoat. He spreads it out on the table between us with his tanned, long-fingered hands, before uncapping a gold and onyx fountain pen.

Something tugs away at my subconscious, begging to be made plain. That small voice inside me, that’s always one step ahead of my waking self, murmurs: Gabriel, Uriel, Michael, Jegudiel, Selaphiel, Jeremiel, Barachiel, Raphael.

Eight names more familiar to me than my own. Eight names that could be a poem. Or … a prayer.

Inexplicably, that YouTube clip of Uriel walking on water, the one Ryan had told me to look at, replays itself in my head. He was gliding across the surface of an icy Scottish loch, searching for something or … someone?

And on the heels of that thought — the recollection that when I touch someone — someone unguarded, someone human — their thoughts and emotions, even their memories, become like an open book to me.

How are these things even remotely connected to the fact that when I’m pushed to the brink I can hurt people with my bare hands?

Twice now, I’ve almost torn myself free of the body I’ve been placed in. It happened once when I was Carmen, when I was wild with fear and anger. It happened again when I was Lela. I’d placed a hand upon Lela’s mother as she lay dying and had somehow seen inside her cancer-ridden body. I’d even tried to heal her from the inside out — before I’d been forced to return into Lela.

I hadn’t been able to save Karen Neill, because Azraeil had already marked her for his own.

Azraeil. I frown.

Like the Eight, he’s one of the elohim. But one thing sets him apart from the others. His touch can bring … death. Or restore life in equal measure.

Traits. They’re all traits, I realise suddenly. These things I can do that I can’t explain. Even that strange ability Azraeil has, which no one else possesses — mastery over death itself. All these are traits. Peculiar to our kind. In us, when we were first … created.

I squeeze my eyes shut, chasing down thoughts that refuse to come clear.

Gia turns to me and queries, ‘Irina? What do you think of braving Via Broletto today? Too risky?’

I shake my head blindly, waving at her, at Felipe, to decide.

When I was Lela, I met a rogue malakh — a kind of supernatural messenger — who’d chosen exile on earth rather than fulfil the task for which it was created. Somehow it had glimpsed me inside Lela’s skin; had claimed that it could detect the protective mark of the elohim upon me. It had begged me to intercede with the elohim on its behalf because it needed a human body in which to live out its days. For in turning away from its original purpose, it had doomed itself to an eternal and painful half-life as a wandering, formless spirit.

It had envied me — me! — and the fact that I was constantly being reborn in a succession of mortal bodies.

Elohim. When I was Lela, even probing the meaning of that word had caused me unimaginable pain.

But now, that small voice inside me, which is always, always, one beat ahead of my waking self, whispers: Most holy, most high. Together with a thousand others that no mortal alive has ever seen, or could ever give name to. Whatever you may be now, however estranged you have become from each other, you were all once created … equal.

And to you all: the ability to speak in tongues, both new and ancient.

And to you all: the power to bend matter and spirit, the laws of nature, to your will; to suspend time, move matter, occupy objects both animate and inanimate; mimic both the living and the dead; transport yourselves from place to place in the space between two heartbeats.

The very embodiment of paradox.

My eyes fly wide as I finally see — what I should have seen all along.

Grief enfolds me suddenly in its wings, grasps my borrowed heart in its black talons. When I lost Luc, when I lost any notion of context, of history, of ‘home’ — that casual ability to bend the laws of nature to my will — I lost my way. In one moment, I lost everything.

All of us were created with extraordinary abilities no human being could ever comprehend. And most extraordinary of all these? The ability to atomise and re-form at will. Like water, like an unstable element that can shift between phases, I should be able to change states in a heartbeat. To become permeating yet impermeable, boundless yet infinitesimal.

It’s much, much more than just the ability to possess another living creature or to shape-shift. It’s — how do I put it? — the ability to turn the burning matter of which I am made into a weapon, a living sword, pure and directed energy. Will it and it is done.

It’s something unique to all of us. We who are unkillable and immortal, unless one of our own kind seeks to destroy us.

Ah, yes. The rules — and there are rules, one must know them in order to contravene them — come back to me, unexpectedly, from some long buried oubliette in my mind.

The Eight. Even Azraeil. What they are, I am. What they are, Luc is, too.

We elohim.

We High Ones.

We … archangeli.

Archangels. It’s the name for what I am.

At the realisation, I seem to catch fire within, and I wonder how it is that Gia and Felipe cannot see me burning.

What happened to me?

CHAPTER 4

Gia and Felipe continue to argue over potential routes and traffic conditions, road surfaces and the forecast for rain, while inside Irina’s slight and mortal frame my spirit burns and burns.

How had I not seen this before?

How am I able to see it now?

When I was Lela, it was as if certain things had been placed off limits by the Eight, were deliberately ringed around, in my mind, by fire. Just probing the meaning of the word elohim, even the name Carmen Zappacosta, had caused an electrical storm in my head, raw and immediate pain.

But not … today.

And soon, maybe, I’ll again be able to control that strange process of atomisation that happened to me once when I was Carmen, and once when I was Lela. And when I’m able to do that? Nothing will ever stop me again.

I’ll be free.

I’m suddenly gripped by a ferocious urgency. Luc thinks that I need negative emotions like rage or fear to trigger the process of atomisation, of unbecoming. But what I’m feeling now? Is a terrible sense of hope, of … possibility. And maybe that’s enough.

While Gia and Felipe continue to argue, I turn inward, seeking to separate the burning strands of myself from the mortal vessel I’ve been forced into. I follow them down.

Down.

I am as a dark maze, a tangle of roots. Disorder masking some kind of pattern, deliberately broken, deliberately … twisted.

Behind Irina’s eyes, within her rigid body, I’m shivering into a billion pieces as I reach out for that strange, dissociative state in which I seem capable of anything.

Felipe’s and Gia’s voices, the contours, textures and colours of the real world, begin to bleach out as I dissolve inwards, fade down, even though concrete reality is in evidence everywhere around me — in the seated figure to my right lifting the teacup to her purple-stained mouth, in the museum-quality furnishings, the lovely costly floral arrangements that already smell, to me, as if they are in a state of advanced decay. My perspective grows hazy and the room, the voices, seem to stretch and warp in different directions around me as if time, space, light, sound, all can yield, all can bend.

And I know that it’s happening again, that I’m actually pulling it off, and it’s no accident. I’m beginning to atomise. I’m following the linkages, the switchbacks, the false trails and complex whorls and spirals, the broken pattern that the Eight have somehow cast me into. As if I am a cave diver, a pearl fisher, seeking a source.

And I find it. All paths lead to a point that cannot be followed further, cannot be unravelled. Irina’s body slumps against the seat back as I reach towards that anchor point and try to pull myself free.

But, though I’m like mercury now, like vapour, some part of me remains knotted tightly in place, tethered to Irina’s body, by some diabolical means I cannot unravel. Though I gather myself over and over with increasing desperation, I cannot sunder the knot that keeps me chained to her. And I know that it is the vital part, the part that is keeping me earthbound.

A small choking sound escapes Irina’s lips.

So small that Gia’s cup pauses only momentarily on its way to her mouth, before she completes the action and leans forward to point at the map spread out before her.

As I rage through the nerve endings and sinews, the flesh, wet matter and bone that Irina is made of, seeking a way out, a flaw, a loophole, I feel Irina’s soul in here, too. Locked away tightly, like a kernel, a hard knot, her soul twisted and turned in on itself, like a möbius strip. To keep it out of harm’s way. To free up this vessel for my use.

And if I am released? I have to hope that her soul will be freed at the same instant. Or the body will die.

Abruptly, the weird sensation of unbecoming reverses, as if I am pulled back by a cord, by an elastic band, and I coalesce again inside Irina’s skin, behind her eyes, as if I am her, and she is me, and there is no gap, none at all, between us.

How long have I been gone? A heartbeat, maybe. Surely nothing more. But I’m breathing heavily and my sudden anguish burns so fiercely and so bright that I must jam my aching left hand inside my coat so the others in this room will not see it glow with that telltale flame that is as corrosive as it is lovely.

But Gia sees that something is amiss — from Irina’s posture? The muscles of her face? — because Gia has sharp eyes and is paid to see everything about her employer.

‘You look so pale!’ she exclaims. ‘What’s the matter, Irina? Are you unwell?’

Unwell?

I have to cover my mouth with my right hand so that the scream building inside me won’t escape and destroy the physical world.

I want to tell them that I was never supposed to be here, that it’s all some terrible mistake. That I’m still paying for something I did once, a long time ago, that I can’t even remember.

And the ones who are making me pay are the eight most powerful beings in the universe, the highest among us all that were first created, the ones to whom all but Azraeil must bow down, because death bows to no one, death is a force unto itself. Only these eight archangels might guess at what is in the heart and mind of our absent creator, for They were formed to be His regents, His princes, and to call us all to order. It is They who have done this to me.

I hear Gabriel’s voice again, as clearly as if he were here, now, in this room: I would rather have been put to the sword myself than endure what you have.

What crime? What crime did I commit to deserve this?

I want to tell Gia all of this, but there’s no point, because she would never understand. Never believe how it could even be possible for a vessel as small, as narrow, as a human body to contain everything that I am, everything that I was before. I’m like a centaur, a gorgon, a harpy. Something ancient, mythical, made up. A cautionary tale, a fable. Unreal.

I’m bent over my burning left hand, struggling to contain the pain, and Gia reaches out to me, but I pull away sharply. When I’m feeling this way, I’m dangerous, and people invariably get hurt.

Once — two lifetimes ago — I made myself a promise that my time would soon come. That one day, not too far away, it would no longer be about just surfing the next wave, just holding on, just surviving; it would be about me. And that time is now. Because staying safe, doing nothing, keeping out of sight, has never been my way. I know it now for a truth. The Eight have forced me to be so many things that I’m not, for far too long.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ I tell Gia and Felipe fiercely through my pain. ‘If I don’t get out soon, I’m going to go mad. You both work for me, right? I hold the purse strings, I call the shots?’

Gia nods, frightened by something in Irina’s expression. Felipe is very still, watching guardedly with his dark, arrogant eyes.

‘So you’re going to start doing things my way,’ I rasp. ‘I’m done with waiting. I don’t care how you do it, or what it costs to make it happen, but I want you to find someone for me and bring him here. Now. His name is Ryan Daley.’

Gia’s unusual eyes widen at the unexpected request, and her dark brows snap together as I rattle off Ryan’s mobile number — committed to memory two lives ago — and the URL for the social networking site Lela Neill befriended him on.

‘Bring him here? Now?’ Gia mutters. ‘With the schedule you have?’ She pulls a slim, black device out of a pocket of her leather jacket and inputs all of the information I’ve thrown at her, jabbing furiously at the device’s seamless face. ‘What if he won’t come?’

‘Make him,’ I snap. ‘Tell him: Mercy is alive and badly needs your help — use those exact words and I guarantee you’ll have his immediate and undivided attention. Book him on the next plane out of wherever he is. I mean it. The next plane. Got that?’

Gia stops tapping for a moment, her eyes mystified. ‘He really is that “important” to you?’ She makes talking marks in the air with her free hand. ‘I didn’t think you were serious. Everything’s always a matter of life and death with you, even when it isn’t. You go through guys like they’re bottled water, like they’re completely disposable. It honestly can’t wait until after we leave Italy? It’d be a lot less complicated to set up.’

I shake my head. ‘Find him for me. It’s the most important thing I’m ever going to ask you to do. Ever. So don’t mess it up.’

Gia’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘But we’ve got three more full days of commitments here in Milan. Final fittings; dress rehearsal; runway show; dinner and afterparty. Even if we get the guy here, like, today, you can’t just walk away from this thing. You’ll never work again. You know that, don’t you?’

I give a short laugh, half-way between amusement and despair. ‘Just get him here, and Irina Zhivanevskaya shall meet her commitments.’

Gia gives me an odd look before nodding and jamming the hand-held device back into her jacket pocket. She turns to Felipe.

‘Irina’s right,’ she says briskly. ‘We need to move. I can go looking for this Ryan guy as soon as we’re on the road. The sooner we leave, the better. We’ll take the route I marked out originally, no arguments. You weren’t Irina’s driver the last time we were here. I know what I’m talking about, so you may as well put the map away.’

Felipe’s eyes clash with Gia’s as he angrily gathers up the road map and shoves it back inside his overcoat along with the status pen. He rises to his feet with barely concealed irritation.

Gia turns to me and says reassuringly, ‘Okay, the deal is: we get through today, then the next day, and one more day after that, and then we’ll go home. It’s nothing, right? We’ll pare back your schedule after this job, I promise. I’ll talk to your management — they’ll have to listen if they know what’s good for them. No sense killing the golden goose, right? And if they don’t? We’ll find someone else who will. You’re Irina. Everyone wants you, everyone loves you. This feeling you’re having … it will pass.’

She’s only being kind, but I can’t stop myself from snarling, ‘Do your job. Find him. What are you waiting for?’

‘Straight onto it,’ Gia says soothingly, ‘I promise. As soon as we get to the cars.’

I don’t need to touch her to know I’ve hurt her feelings, but I’m no good at modifying my behaviour when something I want is almost within reach.

‘Felipe,’ Gia snaps. ‘Your car has to be waiting by the emergency exit. I need Irina to be inside and on the move before anyone gets a good look at her. Giovanni’s security team can handle things from his end, but we can’t be seen to be arriving a second late or she loses the booking. It’s in the contract. Fast, fast, fast today. No dawdling, no unscheduled stops.’

‘It is understood.’ Felipe’s tone is now openly hostile. His dark eyes flick to her face for a second before he resumes studying the gilded frescos on the ceiling, his mouth a sulky line.

Gia continues to badger him. ‘And you’ve spoken to Bertrand? He’s clear that Natasha’s to leave Irina’s usual hotel an hour after we leave here, wearing the wig and dark glasses? And he’s to drive her all over Milan so she gets to Atelier Re well after we’ve gone inside?’

‘Sí,’ Felipe says, not bothering to hide his boredom. ‘The decoy, she is ready. We have been through it many times. You must think us stupid, Senorita Basso.’

Gia doesn’t bother to refute him. ‘And Irina’s security detail? Have you confirmed the personnel, the numbers?’

Felipe’s reply is sullen. ‘It, too, is in hand. Gianfranco recommends three cars today. One to go ahead, one to follow. You will travel in the last car, Senorita Basso, with Carlo and Jürgen. Myself and Senorita Zhivanevskaya in the second car, and Angelo and Vladimir in the first car. To give her enough time to get inside without unnecessary … complication.’

Gia’s expression is suddenly furious. ‘Complication? Is that what you think of me? And what? Separate us? Whose idea was that? Look at the condition she’s in today — I can’t leave her alone! Especially with the mob scene she’ll have to endure outside Atelier Re. She’s too fragile. We can’t risk a relapse.’

Felipe shrugs, his expression unreadable. ‘Do not ask me. It is Gianfranco’s orders. I am just the driver. Ring him if you like.’

‘Just the driver!’ Gia expostulates. ‘What are you plotting, Felipe?’

Felipe studies the fingernails of one tanned hand. ‘If that is all, Miss?’

The doorbell peals again, and Gia looks up sharply. ‘That’ll be breakfast. Finally. When I call down, Felipe, have the engine idling. Hotel security has organised for us to exit through the basement levels. There’s to be no waiting time. None at all.’

Felipe gives a mocking half-bow in Gia’s direction. ‘You worry too much, Senorita Basso,’ he replies insolently. ‘She is in good hands. The best, no?’

He gives me a lazy, lascivious wink and walks quickly to the door of the suite with long strides.

‘You’ll find Ryan?’ I remind Gia again, feeling strangely uncertain. ‘Bring him to me?’

She nods and I can feel my heart rate begin to slow, my breathing even out, my left hand stop aching. I flex my fingers gingerly and take my hand out of my pocket, sit straighter in my armchair.

At the door, Felipe lets in a dark-eyed young woman with dark, curly, chin-length hair wearing a crisp white shirt and sober, maroon skirt suit with the hotel crest picked out in gold thread on the jacket’s front pocket. She’s pushing a linen-covered trolley bearing a raft of breakfast things, including two dome-covered plates. She’s so flustered at the sight of me that she runs over her own foot in her hurry to get the trolley to the graceful dining table near the street-facing windows of the sitting room.

The woman takes a pot off the trolley, lifting the lid with unsteady hands to show us the hot coffee inside, before repeating the action with the second pot, containing boiled water. There’s a small dish with slices of lemon arranged on it in a pretty pattern, and another with butter and two small pots of different varieties of jam. She places these on the table, darting quick, self-conscious glances in my direction.

She lifts the first silver dome, revealing a plate of mixed warm pastries and toasted bread. Under the second, there’s a small white bowl with a couple of tablespoons of dry oatmeal in it, mixed in with a type of seed and dried berries I can’t identify. She sets these down, blushing beneath my scrutiny, then unrolls two heavy, linen placemats and lines each one up with a dining chair.

Out of the warming area inside the trolley, she pulls a plate bearing a lavish, English-style breakfast — scrambled eggs, fried bacon, grilled sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms — and places it on one placemat. Then she pulls out another plate, which appears to hold a couple of tablespoons of scrambled egg-white and sets it on top of the other mat. Finally, she removes a small jug of hot milk.

The woman clumsily lays out two sets of silver cutlery, puts a folded cloth napkin beside each plate before practically bowing her way backwards out of the room. Her eyes are fixed on me so attentively as she lets herself out that she bounces off the doorframe and almost falls in a heap in the hallway outside. Blushing furiously, she staggers upright and shuts the door to the suite behind her with one last anguished look in my direction.

‘What was that all about?’ I say.

Gia follows the direction of my astonished gaze and shrugs. ‘Just another case of insta-girl-crush. People are more accident-prone around you. Remember that reporter from the Argus who followed you around during the London shows three years back when you really began to take off? He wrote an article about it; said you were the human equivalent of walking under a ladder. Total bad news from start to finish. And I should know!’ She gives a burst of genuine laughter before her expression grows wary again, as if she’s said too much and can’t understand how it keeps happening.

The smell of the food is strangely welcome. I don’t often feel hungry, but today, for some reason, I’m ravenous.

‘Let’s eat,’ I say, pulling out the dining chair in front of the loaded, cooked breakfast plate.

Gia clears her throat. ‘Uh, that would be mine? You’re the one with the agent who insists you limit your daily calorie intake to keep you “competitive”. Your definition of breakfast is two tablespoons of raw oats, linseed and goji berry, slightly wetted with hot, soy milk, capped off with some cooked egg-white washed down with hot lemon water.’ She pulls a face. ‘Yummy.’

‘I don’t do starvation diets,’ I exclaim. ‘And the pastries?’

Gia’s expression is half-sceptical, half-amused. ‘Um, they’d be mine, too. But I’m happy to share.’ She grins. ‘If, for a change, you do as you’re bloody well told.’

We split the pastries and hot breakfast down the middle, returning Irina’s usual cheerless fare to the trolley. As we eat, I can feel Gia’s eyes on me. But whenever I look up, she glances away.

‘Coffee?’ she asks, pouring herself a cup.

I wrinkle my nose and shake my head. ‘Can’t stand it.’

She stares at me for a second. ‘That’s not what you usually say.’

I shrug.

‘You know,’ she says finally, when we place our cutlery down, having eaten our way through everything worth eating, ‘you seem so different today. I can’t put my finger on it. But I like this version of you. Much as it pains me to say it, you seem more in touch with your … humanity today. You seem more like the rest of us.’

I laugh, genuinely amused by her words.

She can’t help giving me an answering grin. ‘You look startled by the suggestion.’

‘You have no idea how much!’ I grin back.

Then Gia’s smile dies, and she pushes her plate away firmly, as if she’s about to walk into battle. ‘You ready?’

I lift Irina’s narrow shoulders again in a shrug, let them fall. How can one ever be ready to live another person’s life? To go forth into another person’s day?

Gia stalks over to the gilt-edged console table by the in-room surround-sound system, her silver jewellery jangling. She picks up the house phone, dials a number and says curtly into the receiver, ‘We’re coming down.’

After replacing the handset, she walks across to an elegant, button-back armchair near the door and picks up a huge, tan-coloured, crocodile-skin carryall, holding it out to me as she picks up her own shiny, black patent-leather tote off the floor. It’s bristling with external pockets and silver buckles. ‘Okay?’ she says. ‘I mean it, are you ready?’

I loop the handles of the holdall over one thin shoulder. ‘As ready as I’ll ever be, darlink,’ I say in Irina’s husky voice, as Gia holds the door open to let me through into the hotel corridor.

CHAPTER 5

As I teeter down the hallway after Gia, my eyes feel grainy and the ground seems wavy and distorted and way too far away.

I should have slept last night, but I couldn’t. Sometimes I forget that the human body — as miraculous and complex as it is — is not a machine and cannot be dictated to. Not in the ways that really matter.

We stalk down miles of lush royal blue and gold patterned carpet, beneath enormous hand-blown Murano glass chandeliers of breathtaking beauty, past hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of original art, statuary and antique demi-lune tables with delicately carved clawed feet, like the feet of predatory animals. As we move closer to the lifts, I see a man holding a lift door open for us with a hand the size of a dinner plate. His eyes seem to linger just a fraction too long upon my face.

He’s dressed like a suit, though he looks like a thug made good, with a heavy-set frame and a nose that’s slightly left of centre. He’s sporting a five o’clock shadow that must be pretty much around-the-clock, has scarred facial skin and a serious case of perma-tan. His long, thick, unnaturally black hair is pulled tight into a low ponytail and he’s wearing an earpiece. He’s taller than average, and it’s clear from a quick visual inspection that he enjoys a workout. Big head, big hands. Bull-necked. Neat, clipped nails. Expensive gold watch. Expensive shoes for someone in his line of work.

With a nod, the man indicates we should enter the lift. ‘Irina,’ he rasps, his Russian accent unmistakeable. ‘Zdravstvujte.’

Hello, he’s saying, and I don’t know how I know this, but it’s the formal way. The way an employee, say, would address his employer, even though this guy has thirty years and about two hundred pounds on Irina, at least, and looks like a wise guy, a hit man.

‘Vladimir,’ I reply, thinking back quickly to the names that Gia and Felipe had bandied around. That was the only Russian name they’d mentioned.

I don’t recall ever speaking a word of Russian, but it’s Irina’s first language and it seems to be making perfect sense to me so far. So to hell with it — what have I got to lose? It’s like how Carmen could sing, and Lela was good with people; and when I was them, I could somehow do those things, too. Because some things the body just remembers.

A fine sweat breaks out on my forehead as I close my eyes and channel myself inwards, chasing the words I’m looking for down the unreliable pathways of Irina’s brain. When I open my eyes again, it’s like I’ve always known them.

‘Kak … tvoyo zdorovie?’ I say — accents on all the wrong places, accents where there shouldn’t be any — testing the unfamiliar weight and feel of the words on my tongue. I think I’ve just said: How’s your health?

The man-mountain nods slowly, gratified that I seem to remember him. ‘Neplokho,’ he says, shrugging. Not bad.

I feel a surge of elation, a chemical rush. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the human body is a machine that may be harnessed, after all. If you just work out how.

Gia’s eyes are on me again as we take our positions at the back of the high-shine mirrored lift. Perhaps Irina’s voice sounded weird. Hell, maybe I forgot to conjugate a verb properly and Gia zeroed in on the error. But at least Vladimir understood what I was saying. I casually flip Irina’s unbound caramel-coloured hair back over her narrow shoulders, hitch her handbag higher and pretend not to notice Gia staring. The lift doors slide shut and we begin our descent.

Vladimir addresses something small and round pinned to the lapel of his killer suit. ‘I have them,’ he says, tilting his head to one side as he listens to an answering voice in his almost-invisible earpiece. I watch his small, pale blue eyes watching the numbered wall panel light up in descending order.

We sink down past the ground floor without stopping and on past the basement into the lower basement. The lift doesn’t even stop on the way; not a soul tries to get in. Clearly, being a world-class bitch can come in handy.

‘Coming up through the laundry in five,’ Vladimir mutters into his mic as the doors glide open.

Another of Irina’s hired security goons is standing there — the man’s colossal build, tiny earpiece and bespoke-tailored suit and expensive shoes are a dead giveaway, although I have no idea if it’s Carlo, Jürgen, Angelo or even Gianfranco himself that I’m looking at. The guy’s got a platinum-blond buzz cut and a face like hewn granite. When his cold, grey eyes meet mine, something seems to leap in them, even though the muscles of his face remain motionless.

Everyone wants you, everyone loves you, Gia said. And I see that it’s true.

I study the large space before me with fascination. It’s filled with steam, shouting and mechanical noises, the smell of soap powder mingled with disinfectant and wet wool. Everywhere I turn, there are laundry bags and open trolleys piled high with dirty linen or clean, folded linen. An automated drying and sorting system snakes its way around the perimeters of the cavernous room, and almost all the clips are filled. The space is packed with busy migrant workers in disposable headgear and identical hotel uniforms.

Vladimir leads the way through the vast, humming room at a brisk pace, the second guy falling in wordlessly behind Gia and me.

Much the same way the woman who served me breakfast did, every single person in the place turns to stare at me as if I’ve just descended from the sun on a golden chariot. Dazzled. That’s the way I’d describe the universal reaction to Irina’s presence; although they’ve all clearly been ordered not to approach or address her because when I try to meet anyone’s eyes, they look away immediately.

Still, there’s talk, talk, talk in at least a dozen different languages. And in every accent I hear the word Irina repeated and amplified until it seems to break in a wave against the heavy beams of the ceiling that separate this stifling underworld from the gracious apartments above.

One law for the lion and ox is oppression. The words come to me unexpectedly as I look around at all the busy worker bees in the room. It’s so true. And such a sad truth. I mean, I should know; who better than I? But still it bothers me that we can’t all be lions, or all be oxen; that equality was not one of the necessary pre-conditions of the closed system that we know as the universe. Because how is that fair? It’s just asking for trouble from the get-go.

Our tight, mismatched little group has almost made it to the exit across the room when a starstruck middle-aged woman spills a huge bag of dirty laundry straight onto Vladimir’s expensive shoes. We’re forced to stop as she gets down on her hands and knees in front of us, desperately trying to stuff an avalanche of wet towels back into the bag.

‘Jürgen!’ Vladimir snaps and the platinum-blond giant immediately scans the room for threats.

‘Didn’t I tell you you were bad luck?’ Gia murmurs out of the side of her mouth as Vladimir starts shouting at the woman in English to get out of our way.

‘Vladimir, dostatochno,’ I caution. Enough.

He glowers at me, growling into the mic on his lapel, ‘There’s a delay.’ He kicks out at the soiled laundry nearest his feet as he listens to the reply.

I stamp my own feet in my towering, alien heels. It feels as if my legs are dying from the soles upwards.

Gia shoots me a warning look. ‘Don’t get involved!’ she hisses.

Vladimir insists loudly, ‘No, no, I’m handling it.’

What he isn’t handling is the dirty laundry, and I can feel the worker’s mounting distress. It hangs about her like a detectable odour, like a cloud, as she scrabbles desperately at our feet. I wonder how it is that people like Irina and Gia could become so divorced from ordinary life. I catch everyone by surprise when I dump Irina’s oversized croc-skin holdall against Jürgen’s knife-pleated trouser leg and crouch down, reaching for the nearest towel.

Jürgen kicks the handbag out of his way with unnecessary force and a gold-plated mobile phone falls out with a sharp clatter onto the ancient, stone-flagged floor.

‘Irina, nyet!’ Vladimir roars over my head.

The laundry worker lets out a wail and rips dirty towels out of my hands as fast as I can pick them up.

‘That’s a two hundred thousand dollar, one-of-a-kind bag,’ Gia says to Jürgen mildly as she bends down and gathers up Irina’s things. ‘But of course you’d know that.’

Workers begin darting over from everywhere to help the woman and me repack the laundry bag. Though I pretend not to notice, I feel their hands brush mine deliberately, feel their eyes raking my face. Everyone wants you, everyone loves you. It’s making me feel kind of queasy, all the attention.