“So you think he’s after Gates,” she concluded, not in the mood to humor his ego. “Who’s still milling about with those majors near the bar, by the way. And I think he’s after you. We now have less than ten minutes to figure something out. How about we agree to disagree and work on the contingency that it could be either?”

“Fine,” Fiearius agreed, back to business at last. “You got an idea?”

Leta smirked. “I do. But you’re not gonna like it.”

—————–

Liam half-walked, half-ran down the hallway. Walked only because he knew it was in everyone’s best interest to stay quiet and undetected, but ran because he absolutely had to find Leta and Fiearius as soon as physically possible. He’d known something was fishy about the ordinary-looking man who’d been staring at them from across the room, but despite his suspicions, the worst he’d expected to uncover when he followed him upstairs to his guest quarters was a wealthy Carthian with a particularly nasty grudge against his cluster’s second admiral. The truth, he’d found in his years of reporting, was typically droll.

Not this time.

When he reached the stairs, he barrelled down them, no longer caring who heard. There wasn’t time. This go-around, one of the guards let out a semi-scolding, “Hey–” but Liam was already out of the stairwell and into the ballroom before he could manage much more.

For all he knew, this discovery was the exact thing Leta and Fiearius had been so worked up over when he’d found them earlier. But they had been in a different room. And if they knew what he knew, shouldn’t he have run into them during his investigation? If they knew, where were they now?

He stumbled to the edge of the dance floor, paying no heed to the group of women who glared at him for nearly bumping into them. Hurriedly, his eyes scanned the room. The two of them shouldn’t have been hard to spot. Both were tall, which helped and Liam had never met anyone else with hair as ridiculously iconic as Admiral Soliveré. If they were in the ballroom, he’d see them. And he didn’t see them.

Abandoning the dance floor, he started to race through the support hallway where he nearly ran into a parade of waiters carrying ornate dessert platters towards the main hall, but still no sign of either Leta or Soliveré.

Next he tried the foyer, the entrance hall, the vestibule. He even attempted to head back towards the stairs until the same guard that had called him out before pointed a finger his way and growled, “That’s the one! Been sneakin’ around–” Liam quickly hurried the opposite direction.

He was running out of places to look. Most of the ballroom was sitting down to eat their elaborate single-serve cakes, but the two people he needed, the two people he absolutely had to tell this news, were nowhere.

Where were they now?

He watched her retreating back as she followed after the tall redhead plowing through the crowd, but something else caught his eye. He wasn’t the only one watching them. A perfectly average-looking middle-aged man stood near the edge of the dance floor, seemingly engaged in a conversation with a group of socialites. But whatever the topic of conversation, it clearly didn’t interest him for his eyes were fixed on Fiearius and Leta as they moved across the room.

Liam might not have thought anything of it, had he not just been abandoned by two people who clearly thought something was amiss. But as it so happened, there was something about the man’s stare that bothered him. Something far too intense, far too meaningful, for simple curiosity.

Well, he hadn’t become an investigative journalist for nothing. He straightened his jacket and slipped into the crowd.

————-

Leta followed on Fiearius’ heels, weaving herself through the throng of guests. She felt a stab of guilt at leaving Liam behind again, but she had something far bigger to worry about: finding the assassin that had infiltrated the party.

Fortunately, Fiearius seemed to know what he was doing. Or at least he was walking as though he did, stalking with the utmost importance through any clusters of people standing in his way. No one was foolish enough to try and stop him.

“What’s the plan here?” she asked, ignoring the strange looks she was receiving from the gowned women and suited men they passed.

“Well. The message said the deed had to be done before dessert’s served, right?”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“No idea,” Fiearius admitted, finally leading them off of the ballroom floor and into one of the support hallways that looped around it. “But it’s a starting point.”

“And a time limit,” Leta added.

“Right.”

Without hesitation Fiearius pushed open a set of double metal doors that led to the kitchen. Inside, wait staff flooded by with trays of drinks, entrees and horderves. Fiearius didn’t wait for one of them to notice him before he demanded, “When’s dessert?”

The sudden barking question startled a few of them. Confused a few more. Finally, a woman answered, “Fifteen minutes, sir. We’ll be happy to bring it to your table if you–”

But Fiearius had already stopped listening. Leta rushed after him as he abandoned the kitchen and started down the hallway again. “Then our assassin’s running out of time. We need to find him.”

Leta nodded, but of course, that was the best solution. Track him down before he’s able to act and put a stop to it. But as they passed by an archway that looked out onto the ballroom, she found herself slowing to a stop and staring.

“There were pictures in the file, I think I’d recognize his face,” Fiearius was saying, his voice ever growing quieter as he continued to walk away from her. “Maybe we can get some guards in on this. No, I don’t want to cause any panic. We need to be subtle, remove the threat, don’t let anyone notice. You and me can split up though, cover more ground, are you good at face descriptions? Am I?” Finally, he seemed to notice he was alone. “Leta?”

It was true, what he’d said. The assassin was running out of time, but so were they. And as Leta watched the masses of people flit and mingle and dance across the ballroom, it became abundantly clear that they didn’t have enough.

“Fiear, there’s no way we can find him in time,” she pressed quietly as she felt him rejoin her in the archway. “He’s only got fifteen minutes, he’s probably not going to wait til the last second and he’s likely not even on the floor anymore. We need a better plan.”

Fiearius faltered. “We could look for the weak points. Where he could make his strike. We could–”

“Fiear,” she cut him off, “There’s no time. This mansion is huge.”

Furrowing his brow, he moved his gaze to the dance floor. “We’re not too late, are we?” he breathed, sounding more fearful than Leta had ever heard him.

For her part, she didn’t understand. She’d never known Fiearius to be worried about potential assassins. Usually, he’d scoff at such a threat and dare them to try, but perhaps there was something she didn’t know here. Perhaps in their years apart, he’d experienced something that shook him. Perhaps he had reason to not be as confident as he used to be. Regardless, she didn’t like the look on him. “If we were too late, you wouldn’t still be standing here,” she pointed out gently, laying her hand on his arm, hoping he’d find it comforting, but suddenly he regarded her with a sharp, confused stare.

“What? What does that have to do with anything?”

Now she was certain she didn’t understand. “If it was too late, you’d be dead,” she elaborated more clearly, feeling a little less sorry for him now.

“Why would I–,” he began and then promptly shook his head. “You think he’s after me?”

“Of course. The note said something about a five-star funeral, it’s obviously referring to an admiral.”

“There’s more than one admiral here,” Fiearius said. “Why would you assume he’s after me?”

She crossed her arms over her chest and regarded him impatiently. “Who doesn’t want you dead?”

 “But who’s stupid enough to try and off me?” he barked, apparently amused by the notion. There it was. The Fiearius she recognized. All shreds of sympathy left her.