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‘I know,’ he says, as Claire cries. ‘I understand.’

He does not understand—how could he possibly understand?—but Claire leans her forehead against his shoulder, feeling the coarse wool of his jacket, and she forgives him for the lie.

‘How did you know?’ she asks him, the words muffled by the fabric. ‘When did you realise?’

‘The bridge,’ he says.

‘The bridge?’

‘You were standing past the midway point: you had left the Château entirely. But you can’t leave this place without permission, not once you’ve been invited. I shouldn’t have been able to move you there—except you weren’t invited, Claire. Genevieve de Vienne was.’

Claire pulls away. Her eyes are bleary with tears; Leander has become a blurred, uncertain figure in the darkness, like a reflection on moving water. ‘Does that mean I cannot win the auction?’

‘You’re here now. If you bid, you can win.’

There is a grim sort of finality in his voice that makes Claire wary—something like a warning in his tone; something like regret.

‘You’ve found your secret,’ she says, with dawning dread. ‘Mine.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you bid with it tomorrow, before I do, you’ll win the auction. Must we race to Lady Reverie, Leander? Will you push me aside to reach her first?’

‘No,’ he says.

‘Am I expected to believe you?’

‘You may believe whatever you like, Claire. It doesn’t change the truth.’

Claire glances at the Château, with its hundred illuminated windows. A firework goes off above them, glimmering gold, reflected brilliantly in the glass. The trees at the far edges of the gardens rustle and whisper in response; their trunks are so slender they sway from side to side as they do so. They are like kings, so tall and mighty and yet so easily cut down.

Leander tells her, ‘You will win this auction, Claire. There is no one else left, apart from you and I, and I will let you win.’

She says, horrified, ‘But then you will be trapped here.’

‘Yes.’

‘You should know my lot, before you promise me that,’ she tells him. She does not know why she tells him. She ought to be glad he is permitting her to win, ought to be relieved. Instead, it feels as if it is all happening again: another person buried by her cowardice. ‘What I wished for is shameful, Leander. I do not deserve it.’

He does not reply. He just bows his head and smiles softly, a beautiful and painful smile, without artifice, without anger.

‘I wished to be Genevieve,’ Claire says desperately, ‘truly and entirely. I wish to forget that Claire Marchand ever existed. To return to England believing my own lie.’

Leander stiffens, his shoulders drawing upwards. His smile drops. ‘Genevieve wouldn’t have wanted that. She wouldn’t have wanted Claire to die alongside her.’

‘I know that,’ Claire says, and she feels like a child reprimanded, aware that she has done wrong but doing it regardless, punishing herself with her own stupidity. ‘I do not care. Genevieve was everything to me. She was my salvation, my identity; I tried to resurrect her by becoming her, but the resurrection will always be incomplete. If the Company cannot bring her back as she was, this is the only way.’

Leander’s voice cracks. ‘It is suicide, Claire, don’t you see that? To erase yourself and live as someone else?’

‘The only sort of death I have enough courage to meet.’

‘It is not courage!’ he snarls, and she has never seen him so furious, never seen an anger like this anywhere before: one that twists someone into something unrecognisable, something almost inhuman. His lips draw back and his teeth sharpen in the half-light, his eyes cold and glinting and opalescent—almost fractal, like cracked glass. ‘It is cowardice; it is surrender. You don’t understand, you don’t—all I have ever wanted is to remember myself, anything about myself. You have that, you know who you are, and you want to forget. That makes me want to despise you, Claire. Don’t make me despise you. It’d hurt too much. I couldn’t stand it.’

‘Think what you want of me,’ Claire tells him. ‘I am so tired of carrying this weight with me, every day, waiting for the moment it will crush me. When I am Genevieve, when I can convince myself I am her—that is when I feel happiness, Leander. That innocence, that sweetness, I want that always. I want to wake up in the mornings and see the sunrise through the window and think, Oh, this is a beautiful day. I want the simplicity, the liberty of it; I want to feel that joy without the horror reaching up from beneath the mattress and pulling me down into the dark. If I am Genevieve entirely, then perhaps I will have that happiness permanently.’

‘That happiness is selfish,’ he barks, feverish in his anger, cheeks flushed. ‘It’s ignorant. You’re so desperate for absolution, you’re willing to destroy what Genevieve did. Her gift to you was ensuring you lived. Now you are refusing it.’

Claire feels the truth of that, the horror of it. She agrees with Leander, she disagrees, she hates him, she adores him; she wishes to die, to live, to understand how in two days he has taken hold of this careful clockwork she has constructed for herself, the delicate mechanism of her survival, and ripped out its gears so that it no longer functions.