The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 801

The doorman stopped him on the top step with one gloved hand and pointed at a small brass sign by the glass doors.

No dogs.

Alex read it carefully. Then he read the back of it.

"It doesn't say anything about idiots," he told the doorman, encouraged.

The doorman, against every year of his training, leaned over and checked the back of the sign too.

Friday had come in cold and bright, gulls screaming over the fish market. He had been up since four. The old man who ran this tower owed the harbour boss a fortune, and the boss had kept him on a leash with that debt for years. At four that morning Alex had sent Natasha one line: Buy that debt. Quietly. By breakfast, the leash would belong to Halcyon.

Serena stood beside him with her mother's case. He could hear her counting.

"If I lose," she said, very low, "we're out of the gate tonight. In the rain."

"Then I'll carry the case," Alex said. "It's lighter going downhill."

Something like a laugh moved in her face. "Patricia has my mother's notebooks. I know she has."

"Then she'll have to read fast."

"And if she reads fast enough?"

"Then you'll smell faster." He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, the way he did on the cold stairs at home. "Go and make them close their eyes."

She went in through the glass.

A tall woman in a long grey coat came up the steps reading a file.

"Like a stranger, Natasha," Alex said quietly, without looking up. "If she loses, she loses."

"Like a stranger," she said, without breaking step. "Done. I paid a third more than it was worth." Her mouth tightened as if it hurt. "I hate that."

---

The lobby smelled of floor polish and cold marble. Then the noise came in with Patricia, Megan behind her with three cases, the house's two perfumers behind Megan.

"Serena!" Patricia cried, for the whole lobby. "You found it! Did you count the steps on the way up? It's like watching a child learn the stairs."

"I got here first," Serena said.

"Where's your husband? Outside with the umbrellas?"

"He likes it outside."

By the lift, the woman in the grey coat stood reading. Megan shoved past her elbow with a case. The paper cup jumped, and coffee ran down the grey wool sleeve, dark and hot and bitter.

"Oh dear," Patricia said sweetly, glancing at the plain coat and the bare hands. "This tower lets anyone stand around in its lobby now. Send me the cleaning bill."

The woman lifted her eyes. "I will."

Serena held out a handkerchief, one of her mother's, with an R stitched in the corner. The woman took it without a word.

The case by Megan's feet had come open in the shove. Under a silk scarf lay the edge of three blue notebooks, and the smell of her mother's cheap blue ink.

"You brought them," she said.

Patricia closed the lid with one finger. "My notes, cousin. For luck. Like your little empty book." She smiled. "Tonight Grandmother signs the director's chair over to me. At nine o'clock Preston holds the gate open for you. He's been practising his bow."

"An hour is all anybody gets in there."

"An hour," Patricia said, "is a very long time to shake."

At the desk a receptionist held out a card: Ms. Vale asked who had offered to pay for her coat. Patricia laughed and wrote on it. "Patricia Tiffany. Two Ts, darling."

---

Outside, Marco came up with the Grand's lunch trolley. On its bottom shelf lay a white jacket, a paper cap, and a cloth mask.

"Lab rules," he muttered, one eye on the doorman. "Nobody breathes on the samples. Not even the soup." Then he saw Alex's face. "Mister Alex. No. If they catch you, I've never seen you in my life. I was born this morning."

"Then don't look," Alex said, and took the cap. He was already doing up the buttons. In two hundred years the great houses of Westmere had never once looked twice at a waiter.

---

The laboratory smelled of alcohol and clean glass. A red second hand went round on the far wall. At the end stood one bare bench with a card on it: Serena Tiffany.

A masked waiter laid out cups by the windows, slowly.

"She can't even hold a glass dropper," Patricia told her perfumers, loud enough to travel. "Two years in the dark." Without looking round, she snapped her fingers. "Waiter. Water. Room temperature. And don't breathe on my bench."

The waiter brought it. She took the glass from his gloved hand without once looking at his face. Under her perfume, on the inside of her right cuff, he smelled something he had last met on the rim of a wedding glass.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify