The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 704

They came for Alex at dawn. Six knights of the City Watch, a warrant tile glowing official blue, and a broad-shouldered sergeant who read the charge loud enough for every neighbor on the stairwell to hear it.

"Alexander Leonhart. Provisional registrant. You are detained on suspicion of the abduction of Febyella Steinmeyer."

Alex knew those shoulders. One week ago they had marched Feby out of a Knight Station lobby, her heels scraping tile, while an inspector buried the alley case behind them. Now the same man stood on his doorstep, performing justice for an audience.

Near the back stood Dax — the young knight who had biometricked Alex into existence on his first night in this world. Dax stared at the floor. He couldn't look at the man he'd given a name to. He knew what this was.

For one second, something moved behind Alex's eyes. The sergeant's hand drifted toward his baton. Then it was gone — filed, shelved — and what remained was a man in yesterday's coat studying six armed knights with the mild attention of an auditor.

Of course, Alex thought. Of course.

These men weren't an obstacle. They were a lead.

"May I put on my boots?"

The sergeant blinked, thrown by the tone. Nodded. Alex crouched by the door, laced one boot slow, and with his body shielding his hands, pressed four words into his tile. Sent them a half-second before a corporal snatched it away.

Knight Office. Framed. Come.

Somewhere in this city, Feby was locked in the dark, waiting for him — and he was letting six men put him in irons. His jaw ached from holding still. He held still anyway.

He stood. Offered his wrists. Let them take him — quiet, cooperative, memorizing each face on the way down the stairs the way other men memorize a debt.

The last time knights marched him into a station, he'd been nameless. No tile. No coin. Not one soul on the continent to answer for him.

That was weeks ago.

He was almost looking forward to the difference.

---

The interrogation room at the central Knight Office was a grander cousin of the one on Third Street. Same scarred table. Same lantern angled into the prisoner's eyes. Same smell of old fear soaked into stone.

But they didn't give him to duty-knights this time. They gave him to Inspector Thackeray.

She came in with a folder she never intended to open and sat down with the briskness of a woman who'd decided how this ended before the door closed. And Alex, watching her square her papers, felt the last piece of the week click into place.

The alley case. Reviewed and closed in a day. It's a Tuesday, Miss Steinmeyer. He'd stood on that pavement wondering who inside the Knights wanted it buried.

He'd stopped wondering.

"Let me save us a long day," Thackeray said, folding her hands. "A woman is missing. You're a ghost with a provisional tile who crawled out of an alley and attached himself to her rooms, her signature, her rising fortune. This morning she came into fifty million in front of the whole city. Tonight she vanished. Every court in the Arcanum State could draw this picture blind."

She leaned in, warm as a salesman. "So here's the only kindness you get today. Sign a confession — abduction, motive of gain — and I speak to the magistrate myself. Cooperation. Provisional status. Twenty years. You'd walk out younger than I am now."

"And if I don't sign?"

"Abduction with harm is a hanging offense." She said it comfortably, laying her best card face-up. "And it will be with harm by the time it reaches a courtroom. Evidence ripens in our cellars, Leonhart. You'll hang before winter."

"I didn't take her." His voice stayed level. "I've never harmed her. I was home from morning on."

"Stop lying." The sergeant, behind his shoulder.

"You know I didn't take her." He read her face the way he'd once read Rydell contract clauses — line by line, striking the false ones. "Because you know who did. Five men in an alley. A paymaster's name in a folder. You slid that folder back across the counter and called it a Tuesday."

She set a single tile on the scarred table. It lit with the Reagent seal.

"The chairman has taken personal interest. He is watching how this is handled — minute by minute. And I'm instructed to remind you, in whatever spirit you find most motivating, that half the grid your watch-lanterns run on is Reagent tile. Under contracts. Which come up for renewal."

The Commander went the gray of his own coat. "Madam Hargrove, I assure you, the moment the report—"

"The records, Commander. Three sets. Lost in one day, from one afternoon." Her voice never rose. It narrowed, like water finding a crack. "Records don't lose themselves in triplicate. Someone signed them out. Find the seal, and you find the person your office should have arrested tonight."

The Commander turned — and the requisition ledger was already coming through the door.

It was carried by a rumpled desk sergeant from Third Street named Walsh, who'd been summoned at dawn to certify the losses, had spent two hours refusing to certify anything, and now held the open ledger out to his Commander with the weary satisfaction of a man whose stubbornness had finally found employment. A Reagent lawyer's finger came down under the line.

The seal on all three withdrawals was Inspector Thackeray's.

What followed had a terrible municipal efficiency. Thackeray went from inspector to suspect in the time it took the Commander to cross the room.

And the broad-shouldered sergeant broke before the cell door even closed — he'd always been the boots, never the spine.

"Rael Rydell," the sergeant said. "He's had us since — the inspector runs it, she handles the paper, I just — he pays quarterly, has for years. Little things. Licenses. A complaint gone missing. The alley thing, she closed that one herself." His voice cracked toward a whine. "We didn't know he'd actually take the girl. We thought it was family business. He said it was family business."

Beatrix stood listening with her arms folded, and the temperature around her dropped a degree per sentence.

"Commander." The recording clicked off. "Two things happen in the next hour, and the Reagent Group's entire attention rests on both. First — Rael Rydell, in custody, now. Second—" her gaze went through the cell bars at Thackeray, and there was nothing corporate left in it "—every knight on that man's payroll faces the tribunal. The inspector first. Publicly. If even one of them is quietly retired to the countryside, the chairman will want to know why. And Commander — you do not want the chairman asking you why."

"Before midnight," the Commander said.

And meant it with his whole career.