He must have been, although to Zane's best recollection he was actually stealing through the chambers of the palace of Versailles, moving silently from room to room, because it wasn't yet dawn, and he could not reasonably summon his coach and depart before then without raising unnecessary conjecture.
It was never in Zane's best interest to arouse conjecture.
He'd been unable to sleep. His waking mind had become mired in a loop of exhaustive unpleasantness, of tactical arson and bullets, and how many men it would take to flush and ambush a sleeping English village, and how much coin it would take to ensure their utter silence, and what to do about the smoke that would rise and disguise what wasn't smoke—
He could not sleep. He needed to leave, and he could not sleep, and so he thought he'd been exercising one of his very best skills as a distraction: prowling.
He'd wound his way out of the wing of Unpleasant Cells, where most of the official visitors to the king and queen were housed. He'd passed, unseen, footmen nodding off at doorways, and hall-boys flopped about on beds of blankets, their livery and wigs and shoes all placed prudently near to their heads as they dozed.
Padded rugs were better for prowling than bare wooden floors, or—worst of all—marble tiles, so he'd been aiming for those, sliding from salon to salon, most of them unlit, looking close at paintings and sculptures, the intricate gilded friezes, mentally estimating the weight of the chandeliers, or the cost of the ivory and malachite inlay along the walls. There was an entire long gallery of mirrors that had been done up in nothing but real silver: silver chairs, silver pedestals and urns, silver tables, silver cherubs hoisting silver-dipped candles—if he hadn't been so rotten sure his luggage would be searched upon leaving, he might have lessened the unspeakable extravagance of the place a fraction.
As if anyone but the servants would have noticed.
He'd left the gallery of silver untouched. He was in another salon, one of those named after the Roman gods; he could never keep them all straight. He was standing stock-still and looking out the window at the starlit expanse of one of the gardens, and it was at that particular moment that Zane realized he was dreaming, because there was a mist of smoke against the panes, inexplicable smoke, not from a fire at all. It pressed against the glass and found a weakness, some chip in a panel, perhaps. And it poured into the salon and became his wife.
His wife.
He did not move. He only stood there and tipped his head and looked at her, lovely naked Lia, standing motionless as well with a particularly large and saccharine portrait of Diana with a stag hung behind her back.
The name of the room popped into his head. Salon de Diane. Of course.
"Awake?" murmured his wife, with an expression on her face he couldn't quite peg.
"Perhaps," he answered, careful. "You?" "Oh, yes. Bad dreams."
"Snapdragon." He did awaken, then. She was here,here , and not held hostage by a murderous madwoman—
He went to her on his silent feet, his hands at her shoulders, gathering her hard into his embrace. And for a flicker of a second, everything was right, just as it had always been. She fit snug against him and her arms lifted to hold him back, and her hair smelled like wonderful summer roses, and he was so goddamned happy to just have her with him again he felt a burning prickle behind his eyelids that threatened to become something more, something entirely ill-suited to a hard-grown criminal.
But ... there was a resistance to her he'd not felt before, or at least not for a very long while. A definite lack of the trusting pliancy that usually defined her.
It sent a chill down his spine and brought forth another unexpected thought:She knows.
Instead of acknowledging that chill, or even worse, that subtle menacing thought, Zane opened his hands upon the smooth flat of her back and took another breath of roses. Then he released her.
"Did you tell her you were coming here?"
Lia watched him steadily, her hands at her sides. She didn't bother to ask who he meant, and the chill bit into him deeper. "No."
He lowered his voice and spoke very quickly; he wasn't certain they were alone any longer; he wasn't certain of that at all. "Good. Listen. I need you to evaporate for a while. Whatever you do, don't return to Barcelona. Go—go home to the beach house. I don't think she knows about it, we never told her, and—"
"Where will you be, Zane?"
The palace was still and silent, holding its breath, as soundless a place as he'd ever heard.
He took both her hands and drew her back to the wall, to the darkest of the shadows. A basalt bust of a crowned Caesar in a toga smirked at them from its pedestal.
"Zane."
His wife gazed up at him, ignoring the garish chamber and the bust and everything but him, and when she blinked at him—the slow, lazy blink of a predator arising—her eyes had gone to liquid gold.
"Amalia," he whispered, helpless.
"Where do you plan to be?" she asked again, cool and calm despite that gaze. "Where I must," he replied.
Very deliberately, she freed her hands from his. "I had a dream."
"She is here ," he all but hissed at her, desperate. "Do you understand me? She's here somewhere, lurking, and every day she finds me and dangles your life like a carrot on a stick in front of me, and god damn it, Lia, what do you think I'm going to do? She's a Time Weaver! She can be anywhere, anytime. You'll never be safe from her unless I act!"
"No," she said.
"You don't know her now. You don't know who she is. This isn't your precious Honor, this is a beast named Rez, and all she wants—" He stopped himself, forced himself to draw a measured breath. He feared that his hands might be shaking with emotion and so clasped them behind his back, so she wouldn't see.
Lia only waited.
"I love you," Zane said. "You know that."
"I love you as well," his wife murmured to him. "But if you move to harm my family, I'll have to kill you. Surely you know that that would kill me ."
He stared at her, dumbfounded.
"Where is the gain in that?" she added, composed. "I speak to the thief now, to the clever Shadow who never risks without gain. Your death would mean mine. I will not live in this world without you."
Love is a demon that destroys your soul. It eats and eats inside you, it hollows you out, and you'll do anything to keep feeding it.
He was breathing hard through his nose, unable to dig free the words to reason with her or bully her or just flat-out plead with her to go. Violence trembled at the edge of his fingers, half-formed, crazed notions, knock her out, trundle her away, keep her hooded, hidden, safe—
"Go to the beach house," she said.
He shook his head.
"You were right, she doesn't know about it. Go there, straight there, and I will find you." He unlocked his jaw. "Absolutely not."
"Zane," she said, and smiled at him, still with those unholy glowing eyes. "I have a plan. But it won't work if you muck it up."
"I never muck it up—"
"If you go north, toward England, I'll know. If you go south, toward Spain, I'll know. If you go any direction but due west, I'll know. I'll take it as an act of war."
Shit.
"Please," said the creature with the unholy eyes, sounding just like his kindhearted and marvelous wife.
"Please go west. If you do love me at all—" "Stop it. Stop."
"At all," she continued firmly, "you'll listen to me now. You'll trust me."
He sank down into a squat with his back against the silk-and-velvet wall, unable to look at her any longer. He dropped his head into his arms and closed his eyes.
The palace, breathing, and then the sound of her kneeling down before him. Her fingers stroking his hair. "Beautiful thief," she whispered. "My steady heart. I've missed you so much."