# Chapter 20
Eleven days became seven, then three, and the palace began to feel less like a home and more like a fortress preparing for siege.
Reyes had insisted on total secrecy. No public announcement of increased security. No cancellation of the gala, which would only tell Aldana his plan had been discovered and send him further underground.
"We let him come to us," Reyes said, spreading a floor plan of the grand ballroom across the King's desk. "Every entrance covered. Every guest vetted twice. And Lieutenant Sanchez close to the family at all times."
"You want me visible," Angelo said.
"I want you exactly where you already stand," Reyes said. "No one will question the soldier who saved the King standing near him at a public event. It is, in fact, the least suspicious thing in this entire plan."
Elena sat beside her father, quiet, listening. She had insisted on being included in every briefing since the shooting, and after some resistance, the King had stopped arguing.
"And if he doesn't come through the doors at all?" she asked. "If he sends someone else? Or nothing at all — no gunman, just poison in a glass, or something none of us can see coming?"
"Then we watch everything," Reyes said. "And we hope that is enough."
It wasn't the reassurance anyone wanted, but it was the only honest answer available.
---
That evening, Angelo found Marcus in the garden, sitting slower than he used to, but still stubbornly outside instead of resting in his rooms as the doctors preferred.
"You should be inside," Angelo said, sitting beside him.
"I've spent months inside. I intend to see this gala from somewhere other than a hospital bed."
"Elena would have my head if something happened to you at an event I'm supposed to be securing."
"Then don't let anything happen." Marcus smiled faintly. "You seem reasonably good at that."
They sat in silence for a while, the kind Angelo had come to associate with this family — comfortable, unhurried, full of things that didn't need saying.
"I meant what I said," Marcus said eventually. "About my sister."
"I remember."
"I won't be here to see how it turns out. Not all of it, anyway." His voice was steady, matter-of-fact in a way that had taken Angelo weeks to understand wasn't resignation, but a kind of hard-won peace. "So I'd like to see as much of it as I can, while I'm still around to watch."
Angelo looked at him. "You make it sound like a foregone conclusion."
"Isn't it?"
Angelo didn't answer, because he wasn't entirely sure it wasn't.
---
Two nights before the gala, Angelo found Elena on the terrace, wrapped in a shawl against the evening cold, looking out at gardens now patrolled by twice their usual number of guards.
"You should be asleep," he said, echoing her own words to him weeks earlier.
"So should you."
He sat beside her.
"I keep thinking about the alley," she admitted. "The sound of it. I didn't even understand what was happening until you had already pulled me down."
"You don't have to think about it."
"I can't stop." She looked at him. "But I noticed something else, in that moment. Underneath the fear."
"What?"
"That I trusted you completely. Without thinking. My body simply decided you would keep me safe, before my mind had caught up to what was happening at all." She held his gaze. "I don't know when that happened. But I know I don't want it to stop."
Angelo reached over and took her hand, the gesture no longer new, but no less significant for its familiarity.
"It won't," he said. "Not from my side."
"Even after all this is over? Even after Aldana, and the gala, and whatever comes next?"
"Especially then."
Elena leaned into him, resting her head against his shoulder, and for a while neither of them spoke of danger, or conspiracies, or the uncertain future pressing in from every direction. There was only the garden, the cold air, and the quiet, unshakable fact that whatever came next, they intended to face it together.