THE BILLIONAIRE'S GIRLFRIEND

NINETEEN

"Hey!" Lloyd called out, his brows furrowed. "Fuck off."

Queue Lady had watched the exchange with unabashed curiosity. As soon as the reporter slunk away, she turned to Lloyd and excitedly asked, "Are you famous?"

"No."

A couple of relaxed hours later—which was thankfully free of nosy reporters and strawberries poacher—there was a judder down the line of people, which was snaking so far beyond them Malora couldn't see the end anymore, and they were moving.

Funneled, with surprising efficiency, through door 9, and into the Royal Albert Hall. Lloyd, who had crumpled a tenner and two pound coin already in hand, paid for her.

There were stairs.

A whole lot of them.

No, really, so many stairs.

They finally emerged, Malora wheezing, Lloyd barely winded, onto the gallery. It was kind of otherworldly: a corridor of gleaming stones that curled gently around the entire hall. Lloyd dragged her into a space between two decorative pillars and...Oh God, they were high, the tier of the seats sloping away from them so sharply it made Malora feel as though she was about to topple over. Even though she was clinging to the rail like a lifeline.

Down in the...was it still a mosh pit if you were in a concert hall? The People jiggling about down there were pinheads. And the orchestra might as well have been a flea circus.

Lloyd was stretched out on a travel rug, his backpack under his head. "Are you sitting down?"

"But I won't be able to see."

"It's music. You listen. Trust me it's better that way."

A quick glance around confirmed that, while some people had chosen to stand by the railing, others had brought cushions and blankets of their own. No wonder Lloyd like it here—it was its own secret world.

After a moment or two, Malora laid down beside him and rested her head against his shoulder. Considering they were about to spend an hour or more on the stone floor, it was pretty comfortable, and she could still see through the gaps of the railing—mainly the arches on the ohher side of the gallery, which shine faintly gold, and the strange disks hanging from the ceiling.

"It's like an alien spaceship," Malora said, pointing.

"They're for acoustics. Apparently there used to be an echo, so they put those up in the sixties."

It made sense. Giant floating ceiling mushrooms, the solution you'd come up with if you were high on LSD and sexual liberation.

Various noises floated up to them: the jingle-thonks of the orchestra getting ready and the rustle-creaks of the audience settling down. The light slowly began to dim.

"Hang on." Lloyd thrust a bundle of papers at her. "I brought you a libretto."

"You what—"

And then a deep voice broke across the darkness: Once upon a time, when did this happen? Once upon a time, there was an old story. Where did it happen, within or outside. Then it all begins, me watching you and you watching me.

The music crept through the words, twisted round them like ivy. A gathering sense of foreboding, sobbed softly over cello strings. Then the clarinets...violins...and oh, she was there. In a dark castle, where the walls wept, and the air tasted of blood. It turned out only the prologue was English, and the rest was...um... something else? But Lloyd was right, she didn't need the libretto. Not when she had two voices and a whole orchestra to tell her a too-familiar fairy tale of love and pain.