The reception was held two evenings later.
Angelo had expected something formal — rows of chairs, a receiving line, perhaps a speech. Instead he found a single long room, warmly lit, with perhaps thirty guests scattered in small groups. Diplomats. Ministers. A handful of faces he recognized from the newspapers, though he couldn't place the names.
He straightened his jacket.
"You look like a man walking into an ambush," Elena said, appearing beside him.
"I've walked into worse."
"Have you?"
"No," Angelo admitted. "But I've trained for it."
She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"You're a terrible liar for a princess."
"I'm an excellent liar," Elena said. "I'm simply choosing not to lie to you."
Angelo looked at her.
Before he could ask what she meant, an aide appeared at her elbow.
"Your Royal Highness. The Minister of Foreign Affairs would like a word."
Elena's expression shifted, smooth and practiced, the way Angelo had seen her do only once or twice before — a mask sliding into place.
"Of course." She glanced back at him. "Don't wander off."
"I don't wander," Angelo said. "I patrol."
That, at least, earned a real smile before she was pulled away.
Angelo remained near the wall, a habit he couldn't break — always with his back to something solid, always with a clear view of the room. He accepted a glass of something he didn't drink and watched.
It didn't take long before someone approached him.
"Lieutenant Sanchez."
The man was perhaps sixty, silver-haired, dressed in a dark suit with no insignia Angelo recognized. His accent was Valorian, but careful, like a man who had spent years learning to sound like he belonged in rooms he hadn't been born into.
"That's me," Angelo said.
"Reyes," the man said, extending a hand. "I work with the Ministry of the Interior."
Angelo shook it. "Security?"
"Among other things."
"You have questions."
Reyes smiled slightly. "You're direct."
"It saves time."
"Very well." Reyes lowered his voice, though the room was loud enough that it hardly mattered. "The incident in Sanjara. You arrived alone, correct? No backup, no advance knowledge of the King and Queen's location?"
"That's in the report."
"I've read the report." Reyes's eyes didn't leave his. "I'm asking you."
"Yes. Alone. I heard a shout and I went to see what it was."
"A remarkable coincidence."
Angelo said nothing.
"Three armed men," Reyes continued, "encountering a monarch and his wife on a private, unannounced visit, in a location known to almost no one outside the royal household's closest security circle."
"You think it wasn't a coincidence."
"I think," Reyes said carefully, "that I have not yet decided what I think. Which is precisely why I find you interesting, Lieutenant. You are the one piece of that afternoon that doesn't fit anywhere."
"I fit as a soldier who heard someone in trouble."
"Perhaps." Reyes studied him a moment longer. "Or perhaps you were simply the only piece of that afternoon that went according to no one's plan."
He inclined his head, almost a bow, and stepped away before Angelo could answer.
Angelo watched him go, something cold settling low in his chest.
He found Elena again twenty minutes later, near the far windows, alone for the first time since the reception had begun.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said.
"I met a man named Reyes."
Something flickered across her face — there and gone, fast enough that Angelo might have imagined it.
"You know him."
"Everyone in this room knows him," Elena said, too lightly. "He's been with the Ministry longer than I've been alive."
"He thinks the robbery wasn't random."
Elena didn't answer right away. She looked out at the gardens, dark now, the lake somewhere beyond the reach of the terrace lights.
"Elena."
"I heard you."
"Do you think it was random?"
She turned to him then, and for a moment the careful princess was gone, and there was only a young woman who looked, briefly, afraid.
"I don't know," she said. "But I know my father has stopped sleeping well since it happened. And my father does not lose sleep over coincidences."
Angelo looked past her, toward the room full of ministers and diplomats and careful, watching faces.
"Then maybe it's time someone found out what really happened that afternoon," he said.
Elena met his eyes.
"Maybe," she said, "it's time someone found out why it happened to my parents, in that exact place, on that exact day."
Neither of them noticed Reyes, still near the far wall, watching them both with the patient, unhurried attention of a man who had learned long ago that the truth rarely announced itself. It simply waited to be found by the right person, asking the right question, at the wrong moment for someone else.