# Chapter 24
The weeks after the gala moved differently than any that had come before.
Aldana's network unraveled slowly, thread by careful thread, under Reyes's relentless attention — three more names implicated, two arrests made quietly outside the public eye, a scandal contained before it could fully bloom into the kind of crisis that might have genuinely destabilized the crown.
The public knew only a sanitized version: a security threat, discovered and neutralized before any harm was done. The King's popularity, if anything, increased, buoyed by quiet admiration for a monarchy that had faced danger without losing its composure.
Angelo's name appeared in the press again, this time with less surprise and more familiarity — the soldier who had, once more, stood between the royal family and disaster.
He hated it exactly as much as the first time.
"You could simply enjoy it," Elena said one morning, watching him scowl at a newspaper headline over breakfast.
"I could."
"But you won't."
"I didn't do it for headlines."
"I know." She smiled, taking the paper gently from his hands and setting it aside. "That's rather the point, isn't it? Why everyone seems to like you so much."
Angelo looked at her, and something in his chest, which had been tight with tension for weeks, finally began to loosen.
"What happens now?" he asked. "To us, I mean. Not the investigation. Not Aldana. Just — us."
Elena's expression grew thoughtful.
"I don't know," she admitted. "I've never had an 'us' before. Not one that mattered like this."
"Neither have I."
"Then perhaps we figure it out together," she said. "The way we've figured out everything else since that morning by the lake."
Angelo smiled, reaching for her hand across the table, no longer uncertain of the gesture, or of what it meant.
---
That afternoon, a message arrived from Sanjara — official, formal, unmistakably a summons rather than an invitation.
Angelo read it twice before speaking.
"My leave has ended," he said. "They want me back."
Elena went very still. "When?"
"Two weeks."
The words settled heavily over both of them, the first real reminder, in months, that Angelo's life existed somewhere beyond Valoria's walls, tied to obligations and a career he had never intended to abandon.
"You'll go," Elena said quietly. It wasn't a question.
"I have to."
"I know."
Neither of them said what both were thinking — that two weeks was very little time to decide what, exactly, they intended to do about a distance neither of them had planned for, and a life that had somehow, without either of them fully noticing, become impossible to imagine without the other in it.