The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 767

"Please stop!"

Felicia got her body across him on the floor and took the next boot on her hip and did not move off.

"If he dies, every single one of you in this room dies with him! Do you understand what he is? Do you understand whose son that is?"

That was what stopped it.

Not her crying. Not the blood. The word son.

Because a prince is still a prince even when he cannot hold a spoon, and there is a difference between kicking one and having killed one, and five men found that difference somewhere around the fourth second of standing there breathing.

...

One of them spat on the floor beside Alexander's head.

"For a loser like him," he said, "dead's better than alive. Everyone knows it. His own family knows it."

Then Vincent came through the middle of them.

He had his napkin still hanging off two fingers, and he put his boot into the side of Alexander's head one more time, unhurried, the way a man kicks a door that has been sticking.

"You have to learn to fear me," Vincent said. "Do you understand that? Me. Not a voice. Not a ghost. Me."

...

Alexander did not answer him, because Alexander was lying on his face on the dining hall floor with blood coming out of his hair.

He was not moving at all.

Felicia was up and running, screaming down the corridor for the phone, for the gate, for anybody, and her hands were shaking so badly she dropped the handset twice before she got the emergency line to pick up.

...

Vincent stood over the blood and looked around the table.

Nine people. Twelve places laid. A bird in the middle going cold.

"Listen to me," he said. "All of you. When the doctors get here, he fell. Down the west stairs, on his own, because he is what he is and he has fallen before."

Nobody said anything.

"That is the only sentence any of you knows. He fell down the stairs." Vincent's voice did not go up. It went flat, which was worse.

"If one of you says anything else — to a doctor, to a policeman, to your own mother — you will die. Not be dismissed. Die. We have all had a week of learning how easily that happens in this house."

They went quiet in a particular way that Alexander would have recognised if he had been conscious.

Because it was not fear of a ghost any more.

It was fear of a man with a job.

Vincent was the head butler now, and that was his first order, and every person in the room took it.

...

Alexander opened his eyes in a hospital room.

White ceiling. A drip stand. The smell of the stuff they wipe bed rails with, and under it the faint sourness of his own sweat in a gown that was not his.

Felicia was asleep in a chair on the other side of the bed with her coat over her like a blanket and her hand still resting on the edge of the mattress, three inches from his, as though she had fallen asleep mid-sentence.

It was the county hospital in the village below the castle. Three floors, one ambulance, a car park with four cars in it.

The clock on the wall said five past one in the morning.

...

He took stock of himself the way a man checks a coat for rain.

Bandage around the head. Bandage on the left forearm. Tape across two ribs and a line in the back of his hand.

None of it hurt.

Two months of drawing heaven and earth down into the dantian does make a body armoured.

He had walked into that dining hall knowing exactly what Vincent would do.

He had let a boot go into his skull twenty-six times, in front of nine witnesses, with his nanny screaming on the floor beside him.

Because a man who has been an idiot for fourteen years does not simply stop being one.

People need a reason. Doctors need a reason. A palace needs a reason it can write down.

He had gone in there to buy himself a head injury. To graduate from being idiot.

...

Alexander slid out from under the sheet without letting the frame creak.

He stood a moment over the chair. Felicia's face had the particular slackness of someone who had not slept in two days and had cried for most of them, and there was a bruise coming up along her jaw where somebody's elbow had found her.

He put her coat straight over her shoulder.

Then he crossed to the window and looked down three floors at a gravel car park and a single yellow lamp.

The window opened eight inches before the catch stopped it.

He went out and jumped down the building and landed on gravel without making enough noise to interest anybody.

The night guard was in the booth at the front with a screen on and his back to the glass.

Alexander went past him along the hedge line, out through the service gap where the bins go, and onto the road.

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