Calloway returned to the main floor first, leaving Julius standing there a moment longer than he should have. Helen's hand found his arm again, gentler this time, like she was trying to coax him back into the night rather than question him further.
"Come on," she said. "They're about to do the toast."
Julius let her lead him back into the crowd, though his attention kept drifting upward, toward the curtained gallery where he'd seen the shadow shift. It was empty now. Or it looked empty, which wasn't the same thing.
The toast passed in a blur of polished words from Calloway about partnership and legacy, words Julius barely registered anymore now that he understood what they actually meant. He smiled where he was supposed to smile. He raised his glass when the room raised theirs.
Helen watched him do it, and for the first time all night, he saw something close to suspicion settle behind her eyes rather than concern.
"You used to be better at this," she said quietly, once the applause died down.
"At what?"
"Pretending." She said it without malice, almost gently, which somehow made it worse. "I used to believe you when you said you were fine."
Julius didn't have an answer for that. He was saved from needing one when his phone buzzed sharply against his hip, and he excused himself before she could ask who it was.
The message was from Marcus. Calloway's lawyers requested an accelerated contract timeline this afternoon. Pushing the wedding date up. Don't know why yet.
Julius read it twice, his stomach tightening. An accelerated timeline meant urgency, and urgency from a man like Calloway meant something had changed, or something was at risk of being discovered before it was secured. He thought of Harrison's message from the day before — I looked into her family before I ever looked at you — and wondered, with a creeping unease, whether the two things were connected.
He typed back: Find out why. Tonight if you can.
He pocketed the phone and turned to find Helen watching him from across the room, her expression unreadable, before her mother pulled her into a conversation with one of the other guests. Julius used the gap to step away again, unable to stomach another hour of performing a marriage that increasingly felt like a transaction he hadn't been told the full terms of.
He moved past the edge of the dance floor, nodding at guests he didn't have the patience to speak to, his mind cycling through everything he now knew. The shipping contracts. The arms trafficking investigation that vanished twice. The word arrangement instead of marriage. The accelerated timeline. Harrison, somewhere above the room, watching all of it unfold like a man reading a book he'd already finished.
By the time Julius reached the edge of the ballroom, his chest had gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with Harrison's pheromones and everything to do with the slow, sick realization that he might be the last person at this engagement to understand what it actually was.
Helen's voice reached him before he'd fully decided where he was going. "You're not listening," she said, catching up to him.
"I am," Julius replied. It wasn't true, and they both knew it.
"You've been distracted all night," she pressed. "If something's bothering you, you can tell me."
He met her eyes and, for a moment, considered it — considered telling her everything, the report, the holding companies, the word arrangement that her own father used like a verdict. But he didn't trust yet what it would do, not until he knew how much of it she already understood.
"I said I'm fine," he said instead, too sharp, and saw her flinch slightly at the edge in it.
"Excuse me," he added, already stepping back. "I need to leave."
"Leave? Now?"
"I have something to handle," Julius said, and didn't wait for her answer before moving through the crowd, his pace controlled but urgent, like something behind him was gaining ground with every second he stayed in that room.