The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 778

They kept him in the palace for three days.

Nobody called it that. He had a suite in the east wing with a sitting room and a view of the gardens, and a man outside the door in a grey uniform who was extremely polite about the fact that the door was not going to open.

Alexander spent the three days at the window, watching the Empire being taken apart and put back together.

It was the largest purge in a century, and on the outside it barely made a sound.

The state broadcaster ran it as a reshuffle. Forty-one ministers had been found wanting in their duties.

They had been thanked for their service and replaced.

There were photographs of the new men being sworn in, with good suits and grave faces, and a short statement from the palace about renewal and efficiency.

That was all the public got.

Inside the palace, nobody was pretending.

He heard it in the corridors. Two queens' households, thirty-five years of patronage, every office and seat and regiment their families had ever put a friend into — all of it being pulled out by the roots and replaced with men whose only loyalty had ever been to the Emperor.

Not the next Emperor. Not a faction. Him.

On the second evening a footman brought dinner and said, under his breath, that all the princes and princesses had been summoned. Every one of them. An extraordinary meeting, the first in the Emperor's reign.

On the third evening, the door opened.

The meeting hall was smaller than the Hall of Council.

And there was a gallery at the back, behind a rail, where perhaps a dozen of the new ministers stood in their new suits and watched.

His brothers and sisters were already there.

Fifteen of them, in a loose ragged crowd at the front of the room, and almost none of them had he ever seen before in his life.

There was a woman in her late twenties in a military dress uniform.

There were two boys who could not have been more than sixteen, standing together and trying not to look nervous.

There was a man with a banker's haircut, and another in a white suit who was holding a drink he had not been offered.

Half-brothers and half-sisters, from eight different queens, who had grown up in eight different households.

The only thing any of them had in common was the way they looked at him when he walked in.

"So that's him."

"The idiot."

"That's not what I heard. I heard he's not an idiot at all. I heard he was pretending."

"For fourteen years? Nobody pretends for fourteen years."

They looked at him the way people look at a crack in a wall they have lived beside for years — as though it had always been there, and never mattered, and had now suddenly and unreasonably brought the whole house down.

One of them came out of the crowd toward him.

He was about thirty, tall, with the Leonhart jaw and his mother's colouring, in a dark suit that had cost as much as a house in Harland. He walked up until he was close enough that Alexander could smell the coffee on his breath.

"You were supposed to just die," he said quietly.

It was not a threat. He said it like a man remarking on a clerical error.

"Fourteen years, in a house at the end of nowhere. You were supposed to do everybody the courtesy of dying in it."

"Bad luck for you, then," Alexander said.

He said it pleasantly.

"I'm still alive." He tilted his head slightly. "And honestly, I think your mother is going to die first."

He did not know most of the faces in this room.

But he knew two of them. He had made sure to know two of them. The sons of the First Queen and the Second Queen — the two men every courtier in the capital had spent thirty years choosing between — and the man in front of him now, with the Leonhart jaw and his mother's colouring, was the elder.

The crown prince. The Second Queen's son.

Whose mother had left the capital four days ago on a stretcher, in the sun, looking up at the sky.

"What did you say?"

The crown prince's hand went inside his jacket and came out with a pistol, and he had it up and level at Alexander's face before anybody in the room had understood that he was carrying one.

Somebody at the back gasped.

Alexander had already moved.

He took the wrist first — a turn, a press, the thumb against the nerve at the base of the palm — and the gun came out of the prince's fingers as though it had been oiled. It was in Alexander's hand before the crown prince had finished closing his.

And while the man was still standing there, staring at his own empty hand, Alexander slapped him across the face.

The sound went up into the dark of the ceiling and came back down.

Nobody in that room moved.

The Tenth Prince — the idiot, the boy in the servants' wing, the thing nobody had bothered to count — had just disarmed the crown prince of the Leonhart Empire in about half a second and then slapped him like a servant, in front of fifteen royal siblings, a dozen ministers, and six cameras set into the walls of the palace.

And their father had not even arrived yet.

Alexander ejected the magazine, dropped it on the floor, cleared the chamber, and set the empty pistol down on the long table.

The crown prince put his hand up to his face.

When he took it away, his cheek had a clear white print on it that was already going red, and his eyes had gone flat and very strange.

"You're dead," he said. "You're dead. Do you understand me? You're—"

He came forward.

"His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor!"

The announcement came from the double doors at the side of the room, and every person in it straightened as though a string had been pulled.

The crown prince stopped mid-step.

Fifteen princes and princesses went silent and stood where they were, in their loose ragged line, and the Emperor came in.

He looked older than he had four days ago.

Greyer in the face.

He walked slowly, and there was a man a half-step behind him ready to take his arm, and he coughed twice into a folded handkerchief before he reached the chair at the head of the room and sat down in it.

He looked out over his children.

"Well," he said. "Do any of you know why I've called you here?"

The crown prince stepped forward before anybody else could.

He had a hand-shaped mark still glowing on his cheek and he did not touch it.

"Father. It must be because of him." He did not look at Alexander. "This idiot has been talking nonsense. Ghosts. Curses. Voices in his head. He's caused chaos in the council and chaos in the capital, and my mother—"

His voice caught very slightly.

"Yes, Father." That was the woman in the military uniform. "The Tenth Prince has disgraced the house."

"He should be punished," said the man with the banker's haircut.

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