She dreamed that she was lying on the ground, trussed up like a Christmas goose, listening to some marginally well-dressed man point at her in a threatening way. He was speaking French, but in spite of all her years of its study and her recent lovely conversations with Raphaela Preston, she couldn’t understand a bloody word of it. It wasn’t like those dreams where she found herself standing in a leotard alone on a coffee table where her thighs were just at the right height for everyone to get a perfect look at them. No, this was much more perilous—and apparently being conducted in a foreign language. Her stomach growled and her haranguer stopped his diatribe and glared at her. He said something that she couldn’t make out. Then one of the henchmen she hadn’t noticed standing next to him came over and poked her with a stick. It was then she realized that she wasn’t dreaming. “Ouch,” she said, trying to move away from the stick. She realized very quickly that that wasn’t possible because someone else was standing behind her with his foot on her side.
