The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 703

Across the city, Alex sat at the small table in his flat. His tea had gone cold. A magic book lay open in front of him.

All morning, he had been thinking about his decision. And every way he looked at it, the answer seemed right: he should leave her.

The engagement was only on paper. It was never real love.

And every day he stayed, he hurt her more. Or hurt himself for lying to her.

He had secretly paid 50 million dollars and arranged everything so she would be accepted and protected.

She didn't know. Last night on the tram, she almost guessed it. He lied to her face, with a smile — and she believed him.

That scared him. He was becoming a good liar. He didn't want to become that kind of person.

So he made his list of reasons: She was safe now. She was rich. The contracts he wrote protected her. She didn't need him anymore. They were just strangers — a kind woman helped a stranger once, the stranger paid her back, and now everything was even.

He repeated this to himself, again and again, alone in the flat — while her spare hairpin still sat on the windowsill, and the smell of her terrible cooking still hung in the walls.

By noon, he had almost stopped noticing how many times he needed to repeat it.

Tonight, he decided. He would cook dinner for her, for once. Then he would tell her he was leaving. Or maybe he wouldn't tell her at all — maybe he would just disappear after this last night together.

Everything was paid. Everything was done. It was time to go. After that, he would learn magic. It seemed interesting.

***

The tram was half-empty when Febyella boarded it, which she would remember later as the first wrong thing.

The 11:40 to the east district was never half-empty. It was always shoulders and someone's shopping bag against her knee.

Now there was room to sit, and she sat, and she was tired enough to be grateful instead of suspicious.

The second wrong thing was the smell. Sweet, faintly, like a florist's shop. She thought: someone's perfume.

She thought: I'll be home in twenty minutes.

She thought nothing after that, because the sleeping magic took her between one lamppost and the next, gentle as a hand closing a book.

She woke to rope.

That was the whole of it at first — rope at her wrists, rope at her ankles, the particular ache of arms drawn back too long.

Then the room assembled itself around the rope: bare boards, one lantern on a crate, shutters nailed over the windows. And the people.

She counted them the way you count stairs in the dark, needing the number to be smaller than it was. Ten. Standing in a loose ring, unhurried, the way people stand when they have done a thing many times before.

"Simple day for everyone," said the one by the lantern. Flat voice. Gloved hands. "Fifty million dollars. An account, a box number, a name at a bank. You say it, we check it, you go home to your supper."

"I returned it." Her voice came out smaller than she ordered it to. "This morning. To the Reagent Group. Ask anyone in that tower — the clerks saw me—"

The slap came without anger, which made it worse. A workman's stroke. Her head snapped sideways and copper arrived in her mouth like a bill.

"Wrong answer," the flat voice said, patiently. "The man paying for this room says you have it. Men paying for rooms are rarely wrong. So we'll go again. We've got all day and night, and this house has no neighbors, miss. Fifty million. Where."

Feby breathed against the cord.

"I don't have it," she said again, and set her jaw.

---

Alex had cooked.

Badly — the flat smelled of ambition and scorched onions — but the table was set for two, and folded under his own cup, where he could reach it when the moment came, was everything he'd rehearsed since Beatrix's call that morning, down to the first sentence.

Feby. Sit down. Beatrix tells me fifty million dollars walked back into the tower today, and it had your handwriting on it. Tell me why.

He had told Beatrix to hold the money. I'll speak with her first, he'd said, as if it were a small thing, as if his hands hadn't been cold on the tile.

The man Beatrix sent did ask questions for a living, and he was very good, and that was the mistake.

His name went unrecorded in most cities. He wore a grey coat that made witnesses forget his height, and he carried a leather folder that opened to whatever credentials a doorman needed to see.

By three o'clock he was sitting in the uncle's receiving room — a room with too much gilt and too few books — asking mild, patient questions about a niece's whereabouts.

And Rael, watching from behind the long window of the study, understood exactly what he was looking at.

Not a constable. Constables came in pairs and wiped their boots.

This was private money, moving fast, less than a day after the girl vanished — which meant someone with reach already knew, and there was only one man in the city with that kind of reach and that particular reason to care.

Rael did not panic.

Men who paid for kidnappings in advance rarely did.

He gave the grey coat tea, gave him nothing else, showed him out with apologies — and then stood at the window for a long moment, turning the situation over the way a jeweler turns a stone, looking for the angle that caught light.

Rael made a call to the chief he knew.

The fiancé. The crate-boy nobody. The stranger who'd appeared out of the fog and attached himself to fifty million dollars' worth of heiress. Who lived alone with her in an unwatched flat.

He was dictating the report to the Knight's Bench before the grey coat had reached the end of the street.

The knights came at dusk.

Alex heard them before the knock — four sets of boots don't try to be quiet on old stairs — and when he opened the door the corridor was full of white tabards and lamplight on steel.

"Alex, no family name registered." The sergeant read from a writ without looking up. "You are detained on information laid this afternoon, concerning the abduction of the lady Febyella—"

"Abduction — I reported her missing—" But no. He hadn't. He'd called Beatrix, not the Bench. He'd sent private men through private channels, quiet money moving in the dark, and from the outside — the realization arrived like ice water down the spine — from the outside that looked exactly like a man cleaning up after himself.

"—and you will come with us now."