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I flinched to a stop. He spoke as softly as ever, but the order was firm.

Get back, Paige, for pity’s sake.A different voice drifted from my past.Why do you never give me room?

‘Okay,’ I said, breaking a painful silence. Arcturus looked away. ‘You pushed yourself too hard.’

‘No.’

‘You lie to me now, do you?’

He winched his gaze back to mine.

‘You have been dreaming for hours,’ he said. ‘If we do not stop, you may begin to lose your ability to distinguish your past from your present.’ He removed his hand from the wall. ‘And I saw no need for you to relive someone touching you that way.’

He was still trying to protect me, even from the past.

‘Sit down, at least,’ I said.

It took him a fair while to move. He returned to the armchair and clasped his hands between his knees.

I should never have approached him suddenly like that, knowing my own fear of touch after my torture.

I went to the window seat. It was too dark to see the water, but I could hear it. After the sea, it should have been nothing.

‘We’ve learned some things about the night of the airstrikes,’ I said, recovering my composure. ‘Cade knocked me out with his spirit and took me to the Hôtel Garuche. He presumably freed Kornephoros, who then – for some reason – freed me. Why would he do that?’

‘In Carcassonne, Kornephoros was tasked with forcing information from me,’ Arcturus said, his face wooden. ‘During one interrogation, he alluded to a favour he had done me, at significant risk to himself, to atone for his betrayal during the civil war. If he had not, Fitzours would have given you to Nashira.’

I thought all of this over.

‘Cade must have captured me to prove his loyalty to Nashira,’ I said. ‘He meant to bring meandFrère to her. It would have shown his willingness to turn on his own kind.’

‘Yes. He knew the fate Nashira had planned for the first dreamwalker she met,’ Arcturus said. ‘To continue to lower his risk of being executed, he sought to offer her a worthy substitute.’

‘Kornephoros threw a spanner in the works, then. Cade must be on thin ice now,’ I said. ‘He’s at the helm of Operation Ventriloquist, flaunting a gift he knows Nashira wants. It’s like putting your head in a noose and expecting it not to tighten at some point.’

Cade was turning into even more of a riddle than Jaxon, and that was saying something.

‘So Kornephoros let me go,’ I said, ‘just as the airstrikes hit Paris.’ If I kept talking, the awful silence couldn’t return. ‘I was close to the Sainte-Chapelle when it exploded, which knocked me out, and Cordier found me by the rubble.’

‘I sensed you both,’ Arcturus said. ‘By then, I was inside the crypt. I believed Cordier had saved you.’

‘She’d already put a tracking unit in me. And faked her own arrest to throw Ducos off the scent.’

‘We can assume that she was the one who betrayed the safe house,’ he said. I nodded. ‘She waited for an opportunity to separate you from your bodyguard, then contacted Scion, ensuring I would not interfere with her plan. From her conversation, she was ordered to bring you to an unknown employer, but entered a negotiation with a third party.’

‘Right. She was trying to exchange me for … a package. The other party is someone who claims to care about me, so I probably know them.’

You’re not the only one who wants her.I went over those words again.I can’t keep them off my back for much longer.

‘Domino has a theory that Cordier was secretly working for an espionage network called the Atlantic Intelligence Bureau,’ I said. ‘A group of strangers tried to intercept me after I woke up. Chances are they’re either the employer or the third party.’

‘But you escaped.’

‘I stabbed Cordier, but she’d already dosed me. When I came round, she wasn’t there to tell me lies. She must have gone for help. I gave the suits the slip and found Maria.’

‘And then you came here.’

‘Yes. We’ve agreed I’ll keep working for Domino until January.’