The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 736

New Avalon hadn't changed.

Same glass towers. Same clean streets. Same money smell in the air.

Alex walked into the Regent Group lobby at nine in the morning and nobody stopped him.

That was the first wrong thing.

The second wrong thing was the front desk. Empty. No guard. No clerk.

The third wrong thing was the elevator. It was already coming down.

A young woman stepped out of it. Regent Group badge. Grey suit. Her hands were shaking so hard she had to hold one with the other.

"Are you Mr. Alexander?" she said.

Alex stopped walking.

"Where is Beatrix?"

"They took her at seven." The woman's voice cracked.

"Who took her?"

"Her uncle."

"Cornelius."

"Yes." She pulled a folded paper from her jacket and held it out. Her whole arm trembled. "He left this. He said to give it only to you. He said you'd know what it meant."

Alex unfolded it.

An address. Nothing else.

"It's the storage works. West of the city." She was crying now and trying not to. "We hold new product there. It's ours. It's Regent property."

"Arrange a driver for me," Alex instructed.

"Understood, sir. A company chauffeur will take you to your destination immediately."

...

The storage works sat forty minutes west, past the last of the good roads.

It was a big ugly building. Regent Group's own name was still bolted across the front in letters ten feet high.

He went in through the front.

Inside it was cold and enormous. Crates stacked forty feet up in rows. A wide clear floor in the middle, lit by work lamps somebody had dragged in and pointed at the center like a stage.

Beatrix Hargrove sat in a chair in the middle of all that light.

Her wrists were tied. Her hair had come loose on one side. There was a red mark high on her cheekbone where somebody had held her too hard.

She saw him and her face did something complicated.

"You shouldn't have come," she said.

"Probably not."

"I'm serious. Turn around."

"Beatrix," said a voice from the shadows, "let the man work."

And Cornelius Hargrove stepped into the light.

...

He was sixty. Silver hair, good coat, soft hands. A gold pin in his tie.

He looked like a man who had never once been hit in his life, and he moved like it.

"So," Cornelius said. "A boy in a cheap coat, who bought forty-one percent of my family's company with gold while the price went up ten times."

"Nine times."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It went up nine times," Alex said. "You're rounding up to make yourself feel worse."

Somebody in the dark laughed and stopped fast.

Cornelius's smile stayed. His eyes didn't.

"You think you're funny."

"I think you're boring. That's different."

"Mm." Cornelius stopped circling. "Let me be plain, then. I don't enjoy this. I'm not a violent man. I've never struck anyone in my life."

"You're doing fine so far. You paid other people to do it."

"Yes." Cornelius didn't even flinch. "That's what money is for."

He nodded at his niece in the chair.

"The shares. All forty-one percent. Signed back to me, to the Hargrove family this morning, in this building, in front of my lawyer, who is standing over there and is very well paid to be discreet." He tipped his head. "Or Beatrix doesn't leave this building either."

Alex looked at him.

Then he laughed.

It wasn't polite. It came up out of him loud and real and bounced off forty feet of crates and came back.

Cornelius's face changed for the first time.

"Something amuses you."

"Yeah." Alex wiped his eye. "You do."

"I have your—"

"You have Beatrix." Alex pointed at her, still grinning. "Do you know how many times I've spoken to that woman? I don't know her birthday. I don't know if she takes sugar. I've never had a meal with her in my life."

"She is the chairwoman of—"

"She's an employee." Alex shrugged. "A good one. But I've got a fortune in one hand and a woman I've met twice in the other, and you're standing there like that's a hard sum."

The room went quiet.

Beatrix was staring at him. Something in her face had gone very still.

"So no," Alex said. "Kill her, don't kill her. It's a terrible trade and you knew it was a terrible trade before you woke up this morning."

He turned to go.

"Wait," said Cornelius. He raised one soft hand. "Bring the other one."

...

A door opened somewhere in the dark at the back.

Two men walked a woman out into the light.

She was small. Dark hair pinned up the way she always pinned it for work. A grey Regent coat over a dress she'd clearly put on for an ordinary Tuesday.

Her hands were tied in front of her.

Alex stopped breathing.

"Feby," he said.

Febyella Steinmeyer heard her name and flinched like someone had swung at her.

And then she wouldn't look at him.

That was the part. Not the ropes. Not the men holding her arms. She turned her face down and to the side and looked at the concrete, and she would not look at him.

"Oh," said Cornelius softly. "Oh. There it is."

Alex didn't answer.

"You see, I couldn't understand it either." Cornelius walked toward Febyella, and Alex's eyes tracked him the whole way. "Head Supervisor. New product division. Twenty-three years old, no name behind her, no money behind her — and somehow she is the one who signed the paperwork on the product that broke Ferrowgate's share price."

He stopped beside her.

"So I asked myself. Who put her there?"

"Don't touch her."

"I haven't." Cornelius held both hands up, palms out, delighted. "Look. I haven't."

"Cornelius." Beatrix's voice came out of the chair like a whip. "Stop it. Stop it right now."

"Quiet, dear."

"She has nothing to do with this. She's a girl, she works in—"

"She has everything to do with this." Cornelius never raised his voice. He never had to.

Febyella's shoulders were shaking.

"Alex," she said, still looking at the floor. "Don't."

"Feby."

"Don't give him anything." Her voice broke in the middle. "Don't you dare give him anything. Not for me."

Alex looked at her for a long moment.

"Feby."

"Don't be kind to me. Please. Not now."

"I'm not being kind." His voice had gone very quiet. "I'm telling you to close your eyes."

And the blade opened his forearm from wrist to elbow.

Not a scratch. Not a graze.

It went through his coat, through his skin, and through the thing underneath his skin — the thing that had made a King Lion roll over — and it took all three away in the same stroke, like a knife under fish scales.

Alex staggered.

Blood came out of him fast and red and ordinary.

"Alex!" Febyella's eyes were open now, wide, one hand over her mouth.

"There!" Cornelius was screaming from behind the line, all his composure gone. "THERE! He bleeds! HE BLEEDS!"

The blade-mage came again.

And Alex smiled.

...

It was not a nice smile.

"Do you know," he said, "how long it's been?"

He caught the second swing on the flat of his palm and it cut him and he let it.

"Since somebody made me bleed?"

He closed his hand around the blade.

The blade-mage tried to pull it back. It didn't move an inch.

"Thank you."

And then Alex broke his arm at the elbow, took the sword out of his hand, and put it through him.

The body dropped.

And the whole floor felt it go.

...

That was the anchor. That was the piece the formation was built around — the one man who could hold Alex in place long enough for the other twenty-nine to keep hitting him.

Without him, the lanes collapsed.

Alex went through the rest of them in under four minutes, and there is no clean way to describe it.

He didn't cross the floor. The floor got smaller.

Men on the racking learned that height wasn't distance. Men at the doors learned that doors weren't exits. Two of them dropped their focus and ran, and made it about eleven steps.

Bolts kept coming until there was nobody left to throw them.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the lawyer in the good suit stopped filming with his tile, put it in his pocket, sat down against a crate, and stayed there with his hands over his head until it was over.

The last one went down against the north wall.

Then it was quiet.

Thirty of the finest contracted magicians in New Avalon, and the loudest sound in that building was Beatrix Hargrove trying to breathe.

...

Alex walked out of it dripping.

His left sleeve was gone from the elbow down. Blood ran off his fingers and left a trail behind him, one drop every second step, all the way across the concrete.

He walked past Febyella and didn't stop.

He walked to the chair.

"You," he said. "You—"

Alex reached over his own niece's shoulder and took him by the collar.

He lifted him off the ground with one arm — the cut one, still open, blood running down into the man's expensive coat — and held him there.

"I'm going to ask you a question," Alex said.

Cornelius's shoes kicked at nothing.

"You paid thirty men to kill me. And you brought that woman here—" He pulled him closer.

"So."

"Please—"

"What will you give me," Alex said, "so I don't kill you?"