no way of exiting completely. It may sound extreme, but once you know the truth, your life will change
irrevocably. There is no going back.”
Verlaine looked at his hands, contemplating what Gabriella had said. Although it felt as if he had
been asked to step over the edge of a cliff—commanded to jump over, in fact—he could not stop
himself from continuing onward willingly. At last he said, “You believe that the letters reveal what
they discovered during the expedition.”
“Not what was discovered but what was hidden,” Gabriella said. “They went to the Rhodope
Mountains to bring back a lyre. A kithara, to be exact. Once, briefly, we had it in our possession.
Now it has been hidden again. Our enemies—an extremely wealthy and influential group—want to
find it as badly as we do.”
“That’s who was at my place?”
“The men at your apartment were hired by this group, yes.”
“Is Percival Grigori part of this group?”
“Yes,” Gabriella said. “He is very much a part of it.”
“So in working for him,” Verlaine said, “I have been working against you.”
“As I told you before, you really mean nothing to them. It is detrimental and extremely risky for him
to be in public, and so he has always hired disposables—that is his word, not mine—to do his
research for him. He uses them to dig up information and then kills them. It is an extremely efficient
security measure.” Gabriella lit another cigarette, the smoke forming a haze in the air.
“Did Abigail Rockefeller work for them?”
“No,” Gabriella said. “Quite the opposite. Mrs. Rockefeller was working with Mother Innocenta to
find an appropriate hiding place for a case containing the lyre. For reasons we don’t understand,
Abigail Rockefeller ceased all communication with us after the war. It caused quite a lot of trauma in
our network. We had no idea where she put the contents of the case. Some believe it was hidden in
New York City. Others believe she sent it back to Europe. We have been trying desperately to locate
where she hid it, if she hid it at all.”
“I’ve read Innocenta’s letters,” Verlaine said, doubtful. “I don’t think they will tell you what you’re
hoping to find. It makes more sense to go to Grigori.”
Gabriella took a deep, weary breath. “There is something I would like to show you,” she said. “It
may help you understand the kind of creatures we are dealing with.”
Standing, she slid out of her jacket. Then she began to remove her black silk shirt, her veined hands
working over the buttons until each one had been unfastened. “This,” she said quietly, pulling first her
left arm, then her right free of the black sleeves, “is what happens when you are caught by the other
side.”
Verlaine watched Gabriella turn under the light of a nearby window. Her torso was covered with
thick, ribboning scars that crossed her back, her chest, her stomach, and her shoulders. It was as
though she had been carved with an exceedingly sharp butcher’s knife. From the width of the damaged
tissue and the haphazard ridges of the scars, Verlaine guessed that the wounds had not been properly
sutured. In the weak light, the skin was pink and raw. The pattern suggested that Gabriella had been
whipped or, worse, sliced with a razor blade.
“My God,” Verlaine said, overwhelmed by the mangled flesh, the horrible yet strangely delicate
oyster-shell pink of the scars. “How did it happen?”
“Once I believed I could outsmart them,” Gabriella said. “I believed that I was wiser, stronger,
more adept than they were. I was the best angelologist in all of Paris during the war. Despite my age I
rose through the hierarchy faster than anyone. This was a fact. Believe me—I am and always have
been very, very good at my work.”
“This happened in the war?” Verlaine asked, trying to make sense of such brutality.
“In my youth I worked as a double agent. I became the lover of the heir of the most powerful enemy
family. My work was monitored, and I was quite successful in the beginning, but ultimately I was
found out. If anyone could have pulled off such an infiltration, I could have. Take a long look at what
happened to me, Mr. Verlaine, and imagine what they will do to you. Your naïve American belief that
good always overcomes evil would not save you. I guarantee: You will be doomed.”
Verlaine could not bear to look at Gabriella, yet he could not turn away. His gaze traced the scars’
sinuous pink path from her clavicle to her hip, the pallor of her skin registering through his body. He