The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 700

The Grand Aurelian had not seen an evening like it in thirty years, and the Grand Aurelian had seen everything.

Every chandelier lit. Every leaf of the gilt doors polished.

The full hall, none of the small rooms — four hundred guests under a ceiling of enchanted constellations that wheeled slowly overhead, and every one of those guests belonged to a House or a firm or a fortune that had spent the last decade declining Rydell invitations by return post.

Tonight they had all come. Tonight the Rydells had the only thing in the Arcanum State worth crossing town for: the promise of a face nobody had seen.

Feby stood near the foot of the hall in her pressed blouse and her mother's borrowed shawl, and watched her grandmother work the doors like a woman collecting on thirty years of debts.

Every arriving House got the same radiant sentence, pitched just loudly enough to travel.

"—yes, tonight, here — our Febyella, the head supervisor of the Reagent Group, arranged it personally. She holds his flagship campaign, you know. She gave us her word he would appear."

The first time Feby heard it, she thought she had misheard.

The second time, she started across the floor to correct it, and Adeline materialized at her elbow with a grip disguised as affection.

"Smile, sweetheart. Don't you dare make a face tonight of all nights."

"Mother, I never gave my word. I sent an invitation. Nobody ever answered it—"

"Don’t sweat over small things." Adeline's smile stayed fixed on the room. "Grandmother knows how to talk to these people. Let her talk."

Feby checked her tile for the fortieth time since noon.

To Miss Hargrove, office of the chief executive — sent, delivered, and sitting there unanswered, a little gravestone in glass.

She had messaged again at four. Again at six. The silence had a completeness to it that was beginning to feel less like an oversight and more like weather.

Across the hall, by a pillar he had chosen for its view of both the stage and the doors,

Alex stood in his one decent coat with a glass he wasn't drinking, being invisible the way only the worst-dressed man at a banquet can be.

A waiter had tried twice to direct him to the service corridor.

A woman in heirloom emeralds had handed him her empty glass without looking at him. He had accepted both experiences with the deep tranquility of a man who knows exactly how the evening ends.

Feby found her way to his pillar the way a swimmer finds a rock.

"He's not answering, Alex. She's telling everyone I promised. I never promised. If he doesn't come—"

"Then he doesn't come," Alex said. "And whatever happens after that happens to the people who built an evening on a stranger's calendar. Not to you."

"You don't understand. She put it on me. By name. Four hundred people—"

"I understand exactly," Alex said, and something in the way he said it made her look at him — but the lights were dimming, and the orchestra was resolving into a fanfare, and Marta Rydell was ascending the stage in black silk with the carriage of a woman collecting a crown.

"My friends." Her voice, tile-amplified, filled the hall to its painted stars. "On behalf of the Rydell house — welcome. Tonight we celebrate a partnership between this family and the Reagent Group: the flagship campaign of the greatest commercial expansion in the history of the union, resting in Rydell hands."

Applause, warm and hungry.

"And tonight, we are honored beyond measure to receive — for the first time before any gathering, anywhere — the chairman of the Reagent Group himself."

The hall made a sound like a tide going out. Four hundred heads turned as one. The spotlight swung from the stage to the great gilt doors and lit them up like scripture.

The doors stood there.

Being doors.

Ten seconds. The orchestra held its chord until the chord became a question.

Thirty seconds. Somewhere a glass was set down very carefully, and the click of it carried the length of the hall. The spotlight on the empty doors began to feel less like an announcement and more like an autopsy.

A minute.

"Perhaps he's sending an emissary," someone offered, in a whisper built to be heard.

Feby did not remember starting to move. She was simply outside, suddenly, in the cold marble quiet of the colonnade, with the banquet's warmth roaring behind the doors like something that had spat her out, and her breath coming in pieces, and her father's voice in her ears where it always lived — be good, take care of the family — and four years of trying folded up in her hands like a ticket to a show that had never existed.

They hadn't even needed her signature this time. They had simply announced her.

A coat settled over her shoulders. Street-rack wool, warm from him.

"Don't," she said. "Don't tell me it's a mediocre chairmanship and I can do better. Don't tell me anything kind. I'll come apart."

"All right," Alex said, and stood beside her, and told her nothing at all, which was somehow the one thing that held.

"They planned it." Her voice was flat now, which frightened her more than crying would have.

"The doors. The spotlight. The step-down speech — she had it memorized, Alex. You can't compose that on grief. They built the whole evening to fall on me, and I carried the invitations in myself. Gold ink. I proofread them."

"Yes," Alex said.

"He was never going to come. The chairman. Whoever he is." She laughed, one broken note. "The one man in the union I needed tonight, and he couldn't be bothered to send back a card."

Alex looked out at the lamplit square for a moment.

"Watch what happens next," he said quietly. "Just watch."

"Nothing happens next. Grandmother is inside crowning my uncle with my—"

The great gilt main doors suddenly swung open. Every head turned as a narrow man in drab gray stepped inside, document case in hand, escorted by two stern Reagent couriers.

He moved with the hurried precision of someone who bills by the minute.

He consulted a small card, then raised his gaze to the assembled guests and inclined his head politely.

"Everyone," he announced, "I am Harrow of Reagent Legal."

A short pause, and a dry glint appeared behind his spectacles. "Rydell Advertising House, or however you refer to it. I wish to make a formal report in the presence of all here."