The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 734

Vesper came out of the pen.

He shouldn't have been able to. Poisoned twice in a week. Four days flat on his side under Alex's needles. But a bonded guardian doesn't get a vote when his house is dying.

For half a minute, House Calder had a chance.

He flipped a vehicle onto its side. Threw two men through a wall. Thirty Line troops gave ground, and up on the landing, something wild and stupid rose in Wren's chest. Hope.

"Cable teams," a voice said below. Calm. Bored. Like a man calling a card game.

They stopped fighting him. They started processing him.

Three teams, three sides. Stakes hammered into Calder stone. Steel line thrown over him like a net over a bird, men leaning back on the ropes in ranks while others put round after round into his legs.

Never the skull. Nothing about it was angry. They'd done this before.

His forelegs buckled. Then his hindquarters. Then all of him.

They left him alive. Pinned under eleven cables, two men standing on his neck.

Lord Calder came down his own front steps in a dressing gown.

"I am the head of this house." His voice carried further than it had any right to. "You have killed my men. You have put a guardian beast down on my own ground. Give me the name and authority of the officer commanding. Now."

The soldiers came, knocked Lord Calder unconscious, and went inside to get Wern.

They didn't hurt her.

That was the part she couldn't get her mind around. Two soldiers dragged her toward the doors, one on each arm.

She got a hand free and raked her nails across a man's face. He didn't flinch — just put her back in line, the way you'd correct a horse. Nobody hit her. Nobody spoke to her.

She was being handled. Freight marked fragile.

They took her to an empty factory.

Dead for years — a concrete floor the size of a parade ground, roof forty feet up, every window long gone. Gantry rails still bolted to the ceiling from whatever it used to build.

"Will this do, Commander?" the adjutant asked.

Varan Draven walked the length of it once, looking up. "How many can I put on this floor?"

"All three hundred, sir. With the beasts."

"Neighbors?"

"Nothing within four miles. Nearest road's a track."

"Entrances?"

"Loading doors at the north end. Everything else is welded shut or fallen in." The adjutant paused. "Sir — a man would have to come in through the front. There's no other way into this building."

"Good." Varan stopped in the middle of the floor and turned a slow circle. He wasn't inspecting a prison.

He was measuring a stage.

"Bring her in."

They gave Wren a chair, a blanket, water.

Then Varan sat across from her and set a phone on the crate between them.

"I'll be straight with you," he said. "I don't have the temperament for anything else, and I think you'll respect it more."

Wren said nothing.

"Call the man who kill my brother. Tell him where you are. Tell him I'm the one asking." He nudged the phone an inch closer.

"He comes here tonight, your grandfather and your steward walk out before midnight. Unharmed. Uncharged. You have my word — ask anyone who's dealt with me what that's worth."

"And me?"

"You stay until he arrives. After that, it stops being about you."

Wren looked at the phone.

"No," she said.

Varan nodded slowly, like he'd expected to work for it. "I don't think you understand what happens instead."

"Then say it."

"All right." He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, calm as still water. "I hold a lawful charge, brought under my own hand, that no court in this Dominion can review. Nobody is coming. No magistrate. No Warden. No house. Nothing to appeal to, nothing to buy, no one to shame into helping you." A beat. "Hear that before you answer again. It isn't a threat. It's the situation."

"I heard you."

"Then call him."

"No."

Varan sat back.

"Wren." Lord Calder's voice came from across the floor, cracked in a way she'd never heard. "Make the call."

She closed her eyes. "Grandfather—"

"Look at me." He was on his feet, two soldiers letting him, because there was nowhere for him to go. "Make the call. That's not a request from your grandfather. It's an order from the head of your house."

The whole factory went quiet.

"No," Wren said.

"Wren—"

"No." She opened her eyes. Wet, and steady. "He helped us. We owe him." Her jaw set. "I will not call and ask him to come die."

Varan looked at her a long moment. Then he stood, laid his coat over the chair.

"Get her up."

They put her on a gantry bar. Arms out, wrists lashed to the steel, feet six inches off the concrete, under the work lights in the middle of that empty floor.

A soldier set up a camera on a tripod.

Varan stepped into frame. He didn't give a speech — he read a statement into a log.

"My twin brother was murdered in his own house days ago. The man who did it has no name I can serve, no house I can charge, no door I can knock on." His voice never rose. "So I'll be here. This woman will be here with me. When he comes, this stops."

He stepped out of frame.

"Begin."

"Open it — open the door—"

Alex opened it.

David fell into the room, bruising still dark along his jaw from the last time they'd stood face to face. His hands shook so hard he needed both to hold up the phone. "You have to go. Right now. Look at it—"

Alex looked.

He didn't take the phone. He stood in the doorway, hands at his sides, and watched the feed for eleven seconds — a figure on gantry bars, a factory floor, a counter reading four hundred thousand and climbing.

"This is all your fault!" David babbled, voice cracking with panic. "It's Draven's brother—he came for you. If you don't go out there right now, Wern is going to die because of you!"

"Where."

"The old works, western track. Past the quarry road." David swallowed.

Alex looked at him. Not at the phone. At him.

“Take me there!” He took his coat off the hook.

"You — you what?"

"Move."

David moved.

The old works sat at the end of four miles of bad track. Alex walked all of it.

He came through the loading doors.

Three hundred Line soldiers stood on that floor in formation. Not house guards. Not banquet muscle.

Grey field armor, border dust still on it, ranks silent, beasts beside them — scarred, border-bonded, bred on things that came out of the dark, as still as their handlers.

Three hundred men. Three hundred beasts. One door.

Above them, in the work lights: two crossbeams.

Wren's head came up. She'd been in and out for an hour, and it took her a moment to understand what she was looking at.

When she did, she said his name. It didn't come out as anything at all.

The camera swung on its tripod. Somewhere out there, four hundred thousand people watched a man in plain clothes walk into a building alone.

Varan came down off the platform and crossed the floor, unhurried, hands empty. He stopped ten feet away.

"You're smaller than the report made you sound."

"Take her down."

"That isn't how this goes."

"It's the only offer you're getting." Alex's voice never changed. "Take her down. Put your men on their transports. Drive east. Everyone in this building goes home."

Varan gave a grim smile. "Son, there are three hundred of us."

"I know," Alex said coldly. "And there will be three hundred corpses if you don't let her go."