The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 691

The knight behind the desk wasn't Walsh. She didn't offer a first name, and she carried the particular briskness of someone who had decided how this conversation would end before Feby and Alex ever sat down.

"Inspector Thackeray," she said, by way of introduction. For half a second her eyes caught on Feby's face and something flickered there — recognition, maybe, or the memory of it — before she smoothed it back into procedure.

If Feby noticed, she didn't have room for it. She was watching the thin folder the inspector had slid halfway across the counter — and then, after a moment's reconsideration, slid back.

"We appreciate you both coming in," Thackeray said. "The inquiry's closed."

Feby's hand stopped in the air, halfway to the folder. "Closed."

"Reviewed and closed. No suspects worth holding." The inspector didn't quite meet her eyes when she said it.

"The men involved weren't organized. Weren't working for anyone we could substantiate. It happens more than you'd think, Miss Steinmeyer. A woman alone, that hour, that part of the city — men like that don't need much of a reason. It isn't information. It's a Tuesday."

A Tuesday. As if what happened to her had been weather.

"The message said you had a name," Feby said. "The one who paid them."

"The message was premature. All you need to know is that this case is closed."

"No." The word came out low, cracking like ice under weight. Then everything underneath it gave way. "You can't just close it. There's a name — they told us there was a name. You're protecting someone. Tell me who paid them."

Alex reached for her arm. "Feby—"

She was already on her feet. "Inspector Thackeray, look me in the eye and say that again. You think I'm just going to walk away? After what they did — after what they tried to do to me? Open the damn folder!"

Heads turned across the lobby. A uniformed sergeant at the front desk straightened.

"Miss, you need to calm down—"

"I will not calm down!" Her voice sharpened into a yell that rang off the tile walls. "This wasn't some random Tuesday mugging. Someone sent those animals after me, and you're burying it. Who's paying you to bury it?"

The sergeant moved fast. Two more officers came out of the side hallway, and the broad-shouldered one stepped directly into Feby's space.

"Ma'am, you're done here. Time to leave."

"Don't touch me!" she snapped. "I have rights—"

The second officer took her upper arm, firm and professional. "Out. Now."

Something in her tore loose. "Get your hands off me! This is corruption — you're all covering for—"

Alex was already moving. He wrapped one arm around her waist from behind and pinned her flailing arm against her side, as gently as decisive would allow.

"Feby. Stop."

She fought him anyway, thrashing hard enough that her elbow found his ribs. "Let go, Alex! They can't do this! I won't let them bury it like it was nothing!"

He took the elbow without a sound and kept walking. Half-dragged, half-carried her toward the exit, her heels scraping across the floor, her voice still going over his shoulder.

"You hear me? This isn't over! I'll find out who it was myself, and when I do—"

The heavy doors shut behind them with a final thud.

She was still straining against his arms, breathing hard, her whole body shaking with a fury that had nowhere left to go.

He didn't loosen his hold until they were half a block down, until the fight in her burned down to a furious, trembling silence.

She couldn't accept it. He could feel that in her shoulders — the refusal still running under her skin like current.

"They're not going to look," she said finally.

"No."

He glanced back once at the station's windows — ordinary, sun-bright, giving nothing away. He didn't say the rest of it out loud. A case didn't close that fast, that clean, unless someone with real reach inside the Knights had wanted it closed.

She'd had enough taken from her today. She didn't need his suspicions stacked on top of it.

"I have somewhere to be," he said.

"Where."

"Work." Which was not, strictly, a lie. It only undersold the truth by several orders of magnitude.

The receptionist at the Reagent Group's ground-floor desk had watched every kind of man try to talk his way past her, and for the first four seconds Alex registered as one more of them.

"Ms. Hargrove doesn't take unscheduled—"

He set the box on the counter.

She picked it up. The moment her fingers touched the surface, she felt the difference — a warm, living hum, refined power sitting quiet in her palm like a held breath.

He met her eyes.

"I'm offering Reagent Group the prototype and full production rights. Stamp your logo on it. Sell it as your own breakthrough. Fifty percent of all profits come to me — structured however your lawyers prefer."

Beatrix studied him in silence.

"One more condition," he said, without pause. "One person supervises the project from my side. Her name is Febyella Steinmeyer. She becomes head supervisor — real authority, not a courtesy title. She'll only watch and learn. But she holds the real chair."

Beatrix's gaze sharpened. "You're negotiating a partnership and attaching a hiring condition in the same breath."

"She's my fiancée," Alex said evenly. "Working with the Reagent is her dream. That's why I'm here instead of Ferrowgate. Don't you think it's convenient for a man to secure his woman's dream?"

His voice stayed level. "But she must never know I had anything to do with it."

Beatrix studied him for a long moment. "A romantic man, huh?"

Plain clothes. No House signet. A calm that hadn't wavered since he stepped through the door. She glanced back down at the glowing tile in her palm and ran the numbers—the same cold arithmetic that had built her empire.

She set the tile down and met his eyes directly.

"Why don't we start signing now?" She was not going to miss the chance to knock Ferrowgate's product out of the market. She reached for the intercom without hesitation.

"Send legal up. Immediately."

The woman looked at Alex for a long moment. “I’ll keep the gift. A woman like me would normally say no to something this beautiful.”

Alex’s voice stayed even. “That’s the intent. A beautiful gift for a beautiful woman.”

Across the city, in an apartment with a view of a street she'd stopped hoping would ever look different, Feby filled in the last box of an assistant coordinator application — a job two rungs below anything the Rydell name would have tolerated her taking.

She licked the envelope anyway.

She'd stopped waiting to find out whether something would work before doing the next thing in front of her.