# Chapter 21
The night of the gala arrived with a sky full of stars and a ballroom full of people who had no idea how carefully every one of them had been watched walking through the doors.
Elena wore blue, deliberately simple, at Reyes's insistence — nothing that would restrict movement if movement became necessary. Angelo wore a dress uniform borrowed, awkwardly, from the Valorian military attaché's office, feeling more exposed in it than he ever had in combat gear.
"You look uncomfortable," Elena murmured, taking his arm as they entered.
"I feel like a man wearing someone else's skin."
"You look like a man who belongs exactly where he's standing."
The King and Queen greeted guests near the entrance, composed and gracious, giving no sign of the fear Angelo knew lived just beneath the surface. Marcus stood beside them, paler than the room's warm light could disguise, but upright, smiling, playing his part.
Angelo stayed close to Elena, his eyes moving constantly across the crowd the way they had moved across that roadside in Sanjara months earlier — cataloguing faces, exits, anything that didn't fit.
Reyes was somewhere in the room, unseen, along with a dozen plainclothes officers positioned at every door.
For the first hour, nothing happened.
The orchestra played. Diplomats exchanged pleasantries. Elena danced once with her father, laughing at something only the two of them understood, and for a moment Angelo allowed himself to simply watch her, unguarded and radiant, before returning his attention to the room.
It was nearing midnight when he saw him.
A man near the eastern doors, unremarkable in every visible way, wearing a guest badge that, Angelo would later learn, had been forged with considerable skill. But the man's eyes weren't on the dance floor, or the King, or any of the evening's obvious focal points.
They were on Marcus.
Angelo moved before he had fully decided to.
He crossed the ballroom quickly, weaving between guests, never quite running, never quite calm. He reached Marcus's side just as the man near the doors began moving too — not toward the Prince directly, but toward a service corridor that ran behind the head table, close enough to strike without ever being seen approaching.
"Get him out," Angelo said quietly to the nearest security officer, nodding toward Marcus. "Now. Quietly."
The officer didn't question him. Months of increasingly serious briefings had prepared the entire detail to act on instinct rather than protocol.
Marcus was moving toward a side exit within seconds, flanked by two guards, Elena already at his side without needing to be told something was wrong.
Angelo turned back toward the service corridor.
The man was gone.
---
He found Reyes near the kitchens four minutes later, already receiving reports through a small earpiece, his expression grim.
"Two men," Reyes said. "Not one. The first was a decoy, meant to be noticed — meant to draw attention toward the Prince while the second moved elsewhere."
"Elsewhere where?"
Reyes's face answered before his words did.
"The King's private box," he said. "Overlooking the ballroom floor."
Angelo was already running.