Then Isaiah had taken one of the chairs, and Charles had decided to correct the arrangement personally. He lifted his champagne flute halfway to his mouth, let it remain there for a conspicuous moment, and looked at the stranger's face. The pause was designed to draw attention, and it worked; Philip stopped speaking, Eleanor glanced over, and Margaret put down her fork. Isaiah waited without attempting to fill the silence.
"Excuse me," Charles said at last, smiling the way a man smiles when he wants a reprimand to sound like a favor. "I believe you've made a mistake. This is table one, and the event staff have their own arrangements near the kitchen." He gestured toward the rear of the ballroom, where service doors opened and closed behind passing waiters. "If you're part of the audiovisual crew, someone at the entrance can point you in the right direction."
Isaiah rested a hand beside his place setting and looked up. "I'm not with the event staff," he answered. His voice was even, neither apologetic nor challenging, and he seemed more interested in the assumption than in the insult. "My seat is here."
Charles did not like the answer, partly because he had expected embarrassment and partly because he had not received a title. He was accustomed to people saying Mr. Kensington, sir, or some variation of Charles that asked permission in its tone. Isaiah had spoken as though they were two men meeting across a table and neither had been assigned the right to dismiss the other. That small refusal unsettled Charles more than an open argument would have done.
"We'll have the host confirm it," Charles said. "There are security protocols for this event, and I'm sure you understand why." Isaiah inclined his head, giving him no resistance to push against, and Charles raised two fingers toward Jean-Paul Laurent, the hotel's maître d'. The gesture was so imperious that Jean-Paul noticed it from the other side of the room. He approached with his seating tablet already open, his expression professionally neutral but his shoulders tense.
"Jean-Paul, this gentleman has found his way to my table," Charles explained. "Please make sure he gets wherever he's supposed to be." Jean-Paul looked at the place card, then at his tablet, then once more at Isaiah. His expression shifted so abruptly that Margaret noticed before Charles did.
"Mr. Kensington, there has been no mistake," Jean-Paul said. "This seat was reserved by the board's event office for a guest connected with the transaction. The placement was confirmed this afternoon." He paused, searching for a safe way to say what the record told him without revealing information he was not authorized to disclose. "The gentleman is exactly where he should be."
"Then I suppose he stays," Charles said, dismissing the matter with a cold laugh. He waved Jean-Paul away and turned back to Isaiah as if he had granted him a concession rather than been corrected by an employee doing his job. "You'll have to forgive the caution. In a transaction of this size, access matters."
"It does," Isaiah agreed. "More than most people realize."
Charles heard the words but not the warning in them. He glanced toward Philip, hoping for a shared smile, and received an uncertain movement of the lips instead. Margaret studied Isaiah as though she were trying to remember something she had read, while Eleanor regarded the exchange as an inconvenience that ought to have ended by now. Around them the gala continued, and at nearby tables several people who had heard the initial remark returned to conversations that suddenly sounded forced.