Silence could be beautiful too. Simone loved the way the night seemed to hold its breath when she joined Evangeline on the sloped slate roof of Château à Pont Allemagne. The wind stilled and the starlight bent a little closer when she took Evangeline’s hand in hers, when she kissed whatever part of her she could reach: a creamy shoulder, a knobbed spine, a mess of hair just loosed from its bun. But Château à Pont Allemagne held many, far more wicked silences in its newly restored walls. Simone hated every one.

She’d grown accustomed to the invisibility cloaked around her when she worked at the château. It was a beautiful architectural monument, Baroque and overflowing with scrollwork, cherubs, marble, and paneled wood. Nymphs and satyrs lurked in the corners of rooms like eavesdroppers, and more than one passageway through the mansion’s interior facilitated the easy, unseen movement of servants and paramours alike. It was a house designed for burying secrets, for speaking the unspeakable so it need never be spoken again.

That was certainly how Monsieur Gaturin used it. It was how he intended for Evangeline to use it, too. She and Simone buried a great many secrets in its walls, confessions that could never have survived in the open, but the château was a wonderland mirror that made even the impossible seem real. Now Simone wondered what further secrets those walls were hiding. If they saw Evangeline undergo the same transformation Simone had, from prisoner to aggressor. If the real Evangeline was hidden in the silence between the dits and dahs of the Magpie. If that Evangeline could ever be coaxed out.

But Château à Pont Allemagne held a strange grip on whoever entered those garish, swirling bronze gates. When you looked out its windows, all you saw were bright and careful gardens. You never saw the snakes.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PHILLIP

After everything they’d seen, Phillip had about decided he liked the forest the least when it was quiet. The quiet was too heavy, too suspicious. The quiet was just a dam getting ready to break.

It took them a few hours of hiking before anyone seemed willing to speak. Simone’s head was swiveling around madly, scanning the rapidly darkening trees for signs of anything that might be hunting them. Helene’s death hung heavy as gunpowder around her. Maybe she thought nothing of it, but when Phillip looked at her, it was all he could see.

Rebeka was harder to read. Whatever ordeal had led her safely out of the church before it became a conflagration, it must have rattled her—hadn’t it? There was a stubbornness to her calm, a determination in the way she trudged on through the densely overgrown forest floor. But there was pain, too. It made his heart ache to see it, the pain etched around this proud girl’s mouth.