The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 732

The front doors of House Draven stood nine feet tall, oak banded in iron, built for a siege that never came.

Nobody had shut them against an enemy in four generations.

Alex shut them now.

He dropped the iron bar across the frame one-handed — a beam three grown men were supposed to need — and set it in its cradle like he was latching a gate behind livestock.

No ceremony. No effort.

The sound rolled down every hallway in the house.

Somewhere in the east corridor, a voice called out, asking who'd closed the doors.

Nobody answered.

Alex rolled his shoulders once and started walking.

In the great hall, Lord Draven wasn't worried yet. “So, the man you called has come?”

Wren sat bound in a chair at the center of the floor, two guards behind her. Draven stood at the window, hands folded behind his back.

"You should understand what's about to happen," he said, "so you don't waste the next hour hoping."

Wren said nothing. Her wrists were raw from the rope. Her jaw stayed locked.

“Look around you. Three hundred men. Three hundred beasts. A hundred and forty of them guardian-tier—more than the Wardens field in this whole district. I spent twenty years building this. The city fears my name for a reason. And you actually believed one man could come here and save you?”

A horn sounded outside. Then another, farther off.

"There he is." Draven turned from the window, almost pleased. "Want to know how this ends? He gets forty feet past the wall. Something with four hundred pounds of jaw takes his legs out from under him. My men finish it. By tonight, it's a story about what happens to men who cripple my son."

A runner burst into the hall. "My lord. The outer line—"

"I know. Report when it's finished."

The runner didn't move. "My lord. It is finished."

"Good."

"No, my lord." His voice cracked. "Ours are finished."

“What? Impossible!”

For four minutes, reports kept coming. Then they stopped. That was worse.

Wren sat with her hands bound in her lap and listened to House Draven die, one wing at a time.

She'd expected it to sound like a battle — surges, lulls, back-and-forth. This had no rhythm at all. Just sound, moving through the building.

It would land somewhere, men would shout, something would scream in a register no beast should make — then silence. And the silence never left. The sound just moved on, closer.

Men ran toward it. Nothing ever ran back.

Draven stopped talking around the fourth minute.

He'd sent for his household guard — the expensive ones, the ones too valuable to ever waste on a normal post.

But they'd stopped reporting too.

Noise erupted right outside the hall. Loud. Close.

Then nothing.

"My lord." The last guard by the door had nothing left in his voice. "You should run.”

The doors didn't open. They came off their hinges — both leaves torn free at once, slamming flat across the marble. A body rode them in and skidded to a stop against a pillar. It didn't move again.

Alex walked in over the wreckage.

He looked no different from any passerby. His breathing remained unchanged. Five swords drifted around him in a loose circle, hanging in the air like they were already aimed, ready to cut down anyone who approached.

The two guards behind Wren's chair bolted for the servant's door. Alex didn't even look at them. Whatever waited in that corridor finished the job in about four seconds.

"You—" Draven's voice broke. He cleared his throat. It broke again. "How many."

"I didn't count."

"Three hundred men—"

"I know how many there were." Alex kept walking. "There aren't now."

Draven hadn't raised his voice at another person in thirty years. He'd silenced his own son's healers with a look. That same morning, he'd made a terrified retainer thank him for a death sentence. Now he took a step back — and couldn't stop himself.

He'd made a mistake. He understood that now, all the way down. The mistake had started around ten o'clock this morning, and there was no road back from it.

"Kaida!" he shouted.

The thing that came through the far archway had been his bond for forty-one years. It had to fold itself just to fit.

When it straightened, its head brushed a chandelier eight feet up, and the whole building seemed to settle under the weight of it.

Grey armored hide. A skull like a battering ram. This wasn't a beast bred for a garrison. This was a beast a house got built around.

No noble in the district had ever seen Lord Draven's own bond on a field.

There had never been a reason to.

"Kill him," Draven said.

It hit the hall like weather.

Alex’s five swords moved like lightning. They stabbed the beast before it could even register the attack. The creature never understood what had happened—five blades struck as one, and it was dead before it hit the ground.

The young man looked at Draven, kneeling in his own blood, arm hanging wrong. Something crossed his face, slow to arrive.

“I have to kill that man with my own hands. Please grant me this wish. I swore to my mother that I would be the one to put an end to this dog’s life.”

Alex studied him a beat. Then crossed the floor, picked up a fallen blade, and kicked it across the marble to the young man's feet.

"Kill him," Alex said, "and everything that was his belongs to you."

The hall went dead silent.

"Rowan." Draven's head snapped up. "Don't be a fool. Boy, look at me — you know what this house is. You know what I've given you—"

"You gave me a coat." Rowan's voice came out flat, like something that had been locked in his chest for years and just got let out. "This morning. A coat, a promotion, and orders to stand in front of the district magistrate and swear to a lie."

"That was—"

"I knew what it was." Rowan bent and picked up the blade. He didn't hold it right. Didn't matter.

"You're a servant—"

"I'm your son."

The words landed and the hall went still around them.

"My mother worked your kitchens," Rowan said, to no one, to everyone. "Seventeen years old. You rape her, paid her off and put her out. She died in a boarding house when I was twelve. You took me back in as staff so nobody would ask why a servant boy had your jaw. Twenty years, and you've never once said my name in front of company."

Draven's face had gone the color of ash.

"Edmund was three years younger than me," Rowan said. "I carried his bags to school. I carried him out of that banquet hall last night."

He glanced at Alex — not asking permission, just making sure he'd understood the offer right.

Alex said nothing.

Rowan turned back to his father.

"Wait—" Draven said. "Rowan, wait—"

He didn't wait.

It took longer than it should have. Rowan didn't know how to kill clean.

Alex let it take as long as it took.

When it was over, Rowan stood there breathing hard, blade still in his hand, staring down at the man who'd made him. He didn't look like he knew what he was supposed to feel.

"Sir." His voice shook. "I've killed the head of my own house. Now you can kill me."

He knelt and wait.