Damian found a corner near the service station and stayed there for two minutes longer than he needed to.
He told himself he was restocking the tray. Straightening the glasses. Doing something useful with his hands so no one would look at him and see a person who was quietly falling apart at a catering job.
It was nothing, he thought. He caught a glass. He asked two questions. That's it.
Except powerful men didn't ask two questions and then look at you like that.
Like you'd interrupted something important inside them without meaning to.
Damian pressed the edge of the suppressor patch once, firmly, just to feel it hold. Still secure. Still working. He exhaled and picked up the tray.
Deliver drinks. Stay invisible. One more hour.
He stepped back into the ballroom.
The room had shifted slightly in the time he'd been gone — guests drifting toward the stage area now, anticipating the announcement portion of the evening. Damian used the movement to his advantage, slipping between groups, offering glasses, collecting empties. The rhythm of it settled his nerves the way it always did.
Step. Offer. Move.
He was almost calm again when he felt it.
Not Kendrick's presence this time. Different. Sharper. The kind of alpha awareness that didn't announce itself — it simply arrived, and suddenly the air had an edge it didn't have before.
Damian kept his eyes down.
A man he didn't recognize moved through the crowd near the bar. Tall. Expensive suit. The easy confidence of someone who had never once walked into a room and wondered if he belonged. His gaze swept the ballroom the way a chess player studied a board — not looking for what was there, but for what could be used.
It passed over Damian without stopping.
Damian breathed again.
Good. Keep moving.
He turned toward the next table.
Victor Hale had come to the Walker engagement party for exactly one reason.
Information.
Not the kind that made headlines — he had people for that. The kind that lived in the spaces between conversations. In the way a man held his champagne when he thought no one was watching. In the small tells that powerful people believed they had trained out of themselves.
Victor collected those tells like currency.
He had been in the room for eleven minutes and had already identified three things worth knowing. Richard Walker was angrier than the evening suggested. Alehandra Peters was performing contentment she didn't entirely feel. And Kendrick—
Victor's gaze found the Walker heir across the room.
Kendrick was talking to someone. A man in a catering uniform, tray in hand, clearly staff. Nothing remarkable about the interaction on the surface.
Except Kendrick Walker did not talk to catering staff.
Victor lifted his glass and watched.
The exchange ended. The staff member walked away. And Kendrick stood exactly where he was for three full seconds — which was two seconds longer than a man with his discipline should have needed to return his attention to a room full of people who wanted things from him.
Interesting.
Victor began moving.
"You're distracted."
Alehandra's voice was low enough that only Kendrick could hear it. Her smile didn't change. Neither did her posture. To anyone watching, she was simply leaning slightly toward her fiancé in the comfortable way of two people who knew each other well.
"I'm thinking," Kendrick said.
"About what?"
He didn't answer immediately.
Alehandra followed his gaze — not toward the investors, not toward his father, not toward any of the three hundred people in this room who actually mattered to his future.
Toward the far side of the ballroom.
Toward the catering staff.
"Kendrick."
"I heard you."
"Then answer me."
He turned to look at her then. And she saw it — that slight tension around his eyes that meant something had gotten under his skin.
"It's nothing," he said.
Alehandra held his gaze for a moment. "You have never in your life been distracted by nothing."
She didn't push further. That wasn't her style. But she turned, quietly, and found the person her fiancé had been watching.
Staff member. Dark hair. Slight build. Moving between tables with the careful efficiency of someone trying very hard not to be seen.
Alehandra studied him for three seconds. Then she looked back at Kendrick.
"You spoke to him," she said. Not a question.
"Briefly."
"Why?"
Kendrick picked up his champagne. "He dropped a glass."
"And?"
The pause before his answer was small. Almost undetectable.
"And nothing," he said.
Alehandra smiled and turned back toward the room.
She didn't believe him.
Damian was offering drinks to a group near the east wall when someone stepped into his peripheral vision and stayed there.
He finished the exchange, turned to move on — and nearly collided with a chest.
He caught the tray this time. Barely.
"Careful."
The voice was pleasant. Easy. The kind of voice that was accustomed to making people relax before it needed them to.
Damian looked up.
The man from the bar. Up close, he was sharper than he'd seemed from a distance — jaw precise, eyes the particular shade of calm that wasn't actually calm at all. He held a glass of something amber and wore his suit the way men did when they'd stopped noticing how expensive it was.
"I'm sorry, sir," Damian said. He stepped to the side.
The man didn't move.
"Long night?" he asked.
"Just busy." Damian kept his voice even. "Can I get you anything?"
"I have a drink." The man tilted his head slightly. "You've been on your feet for what — four hours?"
"About that."
"And you still move like you're trying not to leave footprints."
Something cold brushed the back of Damian's neck.
Don't react.
"Just doing my job," Damian said.
The man smiled. It was a good smile. That was the problem with it — it looked genuine, and something about that made it worse.
"Victor Hale," he said, as if Damian had asked.
Damian hadn't.
"Damian," he said carefully, because giving a first name to someone who'd already offered theirs was less suspicious than refusing.
Victor's eyes moved over him once. Not aggressively. Almost clinically. The way someone looked at a thing they were trying to categorize.
"You're not from any of the usual staffing firms," Victor said.
"I'm contracted through a different agency."
"Which one?"
Damian met his gaze. "I don't think that's information you need, sir."
A beat of silence.
Victor's smile widened slightly.
"No," he agreed. "I suppose it isn't."
He stepped aside, finally, leaving the path clear.
Damian moved past him without hurrying.
"You know," Victor said, almost as an afterthought, "you have a very unusual quality about you."
Damian kept walking.
"Most people in your position work very hard to be agreeable," Victor continued, pleasant and unhurried. "You don't. I find that either brave or unwise." A pause. "Sometimes those are the same thing."
Damian didn't answer.
He made it to the next table, offered the drinks, and kept his hands completely steady.
But his pulse was doing something it shouldn't.
Because Victor Hale had looked at him the same way a man looked at a lock he hadn't opened yet.
Not because he couldn't.
Because he hadn't decided whether it was worth his time.
And across the ballroom, Damian felt it before he saw it — the particular weight of two gazes finding each other over the crowd.
He glanced up without meaning to.
Kendrick, near the balcony doors.
Victor, turning away from where Damian had been standing.
Their eyes met across the room. Something passed between them — wordless, unreadable from a distance.
Victor raised his glass slightly.
Kendrick didn't move.
But his jaw tightened. Just once. Just barely.
Victor smiled and turned away.
Damian looked back down at his tray.
His reflection looked back at him from the surface of a champagne glass — small, distorted, surrounded by a room full of people with far too much power.
One more hour, he told himself.
But the feeling crawling up the back of his neck had stopped feeling like nerves.
It felt like a countdown.