# Chapter 12
Reyes did not contact Angelo again through official channels.
He simply appeared, three days after the reception, seated on the same bench by the lake where Angelo had first spoken with Elena.
"You walk here every morning," Reyes said, without turning. "It's a predictable habit for a soldier."
"I'm not hiding from anyone."
"No." Reyes finally looked at him. "That's precisely why I chose it."
Angelo sat, keeping a careful distance.
"You said the robbery didn't fit anywhere," Angelo said. "Have you decided what you think yet?"
"I've decided what I don't think." Reyes folded his hands. "I don't think three opportunistic thieves happened upon a King and Queen travelling with a reduced security detail, in a foreign country, on a route known to fewer than a dozen people."
"Who knew the route?"
"That," Reyes said, "is the question that has cost me several nights of sleep."
Angelo waited.
"The King's private secretary. Two members of the royal security detail. The Queen's lady-in-waiting. And whoever any of them may have told, in confidence, believing it would go no further."
"You think someone talked."
"I think someone was paid to talk." Reyes stood, brushing invisible dust from his coat. "Whether they understood what they were selling is a separate question."
"Why tell me this?"
Reyes studied him for a long moment.
"Because you are the only person in this entire affair with nothing to gain from any version of the truth," he said. "Everyone else in that palace has a title, a position, a marriage, an inheritance resting on how this story ends. You have none of that. You simply want to know what happened."
"That's not entirely true anymore," Angelo said.
Something in Reyes's expression sharpened.
"No," he agreed. "I don't imagine it is."
He walked away before Angelo could ask what he meant.
---
Elena found Angelo an hour later, still sitting by the lake.
"You've been talking to Reyes."
"How did you know?"
"He has a very distinctive way of leaving people looking troubled." She sat beside him. "What did he say?"
Angelo hesitated only briefly before telling her everything — the route, the short list of people who had known it, the money that may have changed hands.
Elena's face grew still.
"My father's private secretary has served him for eleven years."
"I know."
"He wouldn't."
"Someone did."
Elena looked out at the water. "You believe him. Reyes."
"I don't know him well enough to believe him," Angelo said. "But I don't think he's lying."
"Then what do we do?"
Angelo turned to her. It was the first time she had said we, and he noticed it the way he noticed small tactical shifts in a room — quietly, and with more weight than the moment probably deserved.
"We find out who else knew," he said. "Quietly. Before whoever arranged it realizes someone is looking."
"You make it sound simple."
"It's not simple. It's just clear." Angelo looked at her. "There's a difference."
Elena managed a small smile. "You really do think like a soldier."
"It's the only way I know how to think."
For a moment neither spoke. The lake was still, the morning mist just beginning to lift off the water.
"My father is not well," Elena said suddenly. "I don't mean the injury. I mean — something else. I've felt it for months. He tires faster. He forgets things and pretends he hasn't. He looks at me sometimes like he's trying to memorize my face."
Angelo said nothing, though the King's unfinished words from days earlier moved through his memory. *My time here is getting shorter.*
"I don't know what any of this has to do with the robbery," Elena continued. "But I have this feeling that it's all connected. That someone is moving pieces I can't see."
"Then we'll find the pieces," Angelo said.
Elena looked at him, and for once there was no princess in her expression at all — only a daughter, frightened for her father, and grateful, in a way she didn't fully say, not to be frightened alone.
"Why does it matter this much to you?" she asked quietly. "You could have gone home weeks ago."
Angelo considered the question honestly before answering.
"Because your father asked me a question, the first day I met him," he said. "He asked if I believed a man's word meant something, even given to a stranger. I told him yes."
"And?"
"I think somewhere along the way, you all stopped being strangers."
Elena didn't answer. She didn't need to. The look on her face said enough, and Angelo found, not for the first time since arriving in Valoria, that he was no longer entirely sure what he was doing there — protecting a promise, or protecting something else that had quietly become just as important to him.
Behind them, unseen, a curtain shifted in a palace window. Someone had been watching the two of them by the lake for longer than either realized.