The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 702

"Are you the chairman of the Reagent Group?"

The tram hummed. Amber rail light crossed his face — once, twice. Feby watched him the way she'd learned to watch her family: for the flicker. The skipped beat. The seam.

Alex laughed.

Not a performed laugh. A real one, low and easy, and it reached his eyes — and that was what cracked her certainty.

Five years cataloguing liars, and not one of them had ever laughed like that.

"Feby." He turned to face her. "Three weeks ago I didn't legally exist. You fixed that. You, personally."

He drew out his identity tile, the battered gray one, and laid it flat on his palm. Nothing up my sleeve. "Issued twenty-two days ago. Provisional class. Guaranteed by the signature of one Febyella Steinmeyer, because no bank in this city would touch a man with no past. I can't open an account without your name under mine. I couldn't rent our flat. The chairman of the Reagent Group is a sealed registry, a vault, a hundred lawyers deep."

He tipped the tile toward her. "How does a chairman have no identity tile? You'd be looking at the first pauper in history to buy the biggest company in the union on a document his fiancée had to vouch for."

Put that way, her suspicion collapsed into what it was. Built on coincidence. Founded on nothing.

"I'm not the chairman," Alex said, gently.

The words came out smooth and whole, because he'd built them the way he built everything — out of true bricks. Every fact real. Only the total a lie.

Feby exhaled a breath she'd been holding since the banquet. "I'm sorry." She pressed her hands over her face and laughed, wet and unsteady.

"You must think I've gone mad. Everything bends around me lately, and you were the only fixed point I could accuse. Forget I said it. Please."

"Already have."

She leaned back and let the tram rock her, wrung out past questioning. So she didn't see it — he angled his face away, one small degree — the thing that crossed him and was gone.

Not relief. Something that cost more than relief.

---

She went to Reagent Tower the next morning with an envelope in her inner pocket. Early. Before her nerve could reconsider.

Beatrix received her at once. =

"Miss Steinmeyer." Beatrix's eyes found the envelope before they found her face. Her eyes always found the business first. "You look like a woman about to do something accounting will talk about for years."

Feby slid the envelope across the desk.

"The development fund. One hundred million, drawn to my name. It's whole — I never deposited it."

When the Rydell Advertising House staff needed back wages, she paid them from her own savings. Reagent's money wasn't for Rydell debts.

Beatrix opened the envelope. Verified the check. Same with the one she gave her last time. “I accepted the money.”

She drew her pen and wrote. Unhurried strokes. The Reagent seal pressed into fresh wax. She turned the new check on the desk and slid it across with two fingers.

Fifty million dollars. Pay to Febyella Steinmeyer, her own name and person.

"The penalty, as read into the record last night. Return received in good faith; payment same day, as promised." A pause. "The chairman keeps his contracts to the letter, Miss Steinmeyer. It's his single most inconvenient quality."

Feby looked at the check. She didn't pick it up.

"I can't accept this."

"It isn't from me, so your objection is misaddressed. It's from the chairman. I'm merely the hand."

"Then tell the chairman—" She stopped. Gathered it. Laid it out flat, the voice of a woman getting through a confession before anyone could talk her out of it.

"Tell him the cancellation happened because of me. My family. My banquet. My name spent from a stage. I brought a circus into a two-hundred-million-dollar engagement and the engagement died of it. That's not his failure to compensate. That's mine to carry. The whole arrangement was unprofessional, and I let it be, because I wanted—"

Her jaw tightened. "Because I wanted things from those people that were never for sale. A professional would have kept her family a hundred miles from that contract. I didn't. So the penalty isn't owed to me. Not in any ledger that matters."

She pushed back the check. The way you return something borrowed.

Then Leon laughed — an ugly, disbelieving bark. "Returned it. Fifty million dollars. She returned it." He stepped closer, and in his eyes was something worse than contempt. Need.

"You think we're children? The whole city heard the lawyer. Same-day payment, to your name, the chairman keeps his contracts. There is no version of anyone on this earth handing back fifty million—"

"I did."

"You're lying." Rael's voice had gone quiet, which was new, and worse. "You've hidden it. Some account, some arrangement — that lawyer of yours, that chairman of yours. You've been lying since the day you walked into our sitting room with that man, and now you'll tell me fifty million evaporated because of your conscience?"

He smiled with nothing in it. "Nobody is that clean, Febyella. Nobody."

"I am exactly that clean. It's the family disease. I got the recessive strain."

She walked past them. Leon's hand twitched toward her sleeve and stopped — there, on the plaza's edge, in view of the tower — and she felt both their stares on her back the whole length of the street. Like weather about to change.

"You'll hand it over," Rael called after her, past caring who heard. "One way or the other, girl. Family collects."

---

Rael Rydell stood in the noon light a long moment after she'd gone, finishing his arithmetic.

Then he walked to a public tile-booth — not his own tile; he'd learned that much from a lifetime of contracts — and keyed a code he'd sworn, last time, never to use again.

The voice that answered didn't use names. It never had. Not the first time either — a quiet arrangement, an alley, a lesson for a niece who needed one, back when the problem was small and the solution was four men and had gone wrong in ways nobody ever adequately explained to him.

"It's me," Rael said. "The same commission as before. No — listen. Not like before. Nothing polite this time. Double it. Ten men." He lowered his voice into the booth's warded hush.

"The girl has fifty million hidden somewhere and she's going to tell you where. I don't care what condition her manners are in when she does. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere empty. Today."

A pause on the other end. A price, doubled to match the men.

"On delivery," Rael said. "Believe me. After today, the money's there."

He hung the receiver back on its hook with a steady hand, and went to lunch.