The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 768

Alex kept moving.

"It was always a choice," he said. "Be killed by him, or be killed by me. You chose him. You chose to hit me. So this is your payment."

"Please. Please don't. I'm sorry—"

The man turned to run. Alex took both his arms before he made the second step.

And Alex kept moving.

Every one of them had been part of it. The side that killed his mother. The people who had treated him like nothing for fourteen years. This was the bill for all of it.

"Think of it as karma," Alex said, and moved on.

...

That night is the one nobody in that province will ever write down.

Thirteen people in that castle lost both arms at the shoulder inside twenty minutes. Every one of them was alive when it happened. Every one stayed conscious for a few minutes after, screaming, shouting, trying to survive. But a human being with both arms gone does not last long. The veins pump the blood straight out.

They shouted until they stopped shouting.

By half past two, nothing was moving on the west side of the house.

Five were left.

Two had gone to bed with earphones in and slept through the whole thing, which is an absurd way to survive a massacre. The other three were behind locked doors with the lights off and their hands pressed over their mouths.

Alexander went to each of those five doors and stood outside it.

...

He did not knock.

He put his mouth close to the wood and sent the voice through it, one ear at a time, in a register that did not belong to any living throat.

"Get out of this place. None of you can stay here. Nobody can."

Behind the third door, somebody started to cry.

"How dare you put your hands on my grandson. How dare any of you. I have taken thirteen tonight and I am not finished. Every living soul still under this roof at dawn will die. Only my grandson and his loyal, sweet maid Felicia may stay."

He let it sit.

"Get out of my house."

Then he hit the door, once, hard. The frame shook.

Behind almost every door, somebody sobbed. They were sure the wood would give. They were sure they were next.

...

He went back down to the great hall.

He wiped the sabre with a wet tissue. The grip, the guard, the blade, then the grip again. He laid it on the long table in the middle of the room, in plain sight, where anybody walking in would see it in two seconds.

Let them find it. Let them find it clean.

Out through the boot-room door. Over the wall at the ivy. Down the switchback in the dark. Up the drainpipe, and through the hospital window again.

The clock on the wall said five past three.

Felicia had not moved in her chair. Her hand was still resting on the edge of the mattress.

Alexander lay down, pulled the sheet up over the tape on his ribs, and went to sleep.

...

In the morning she was crying again. The good kind, this time, because he had opened his eyes.

She fed him. She washed his face. She held a cup with a straw to his mouth and scolded him for trying to sit up, and she did all of it on about five hours of sleep across three nights.

They kept him in that hospital for three days.

In those three days, Alexander did not hear one word about the castle. Not from a nurse. Not from the news playing in the corridor. Not from the two policemen who came on the second afternoon, stood at the foot of the bed for four minutes, wrote down that the patient had never left the room, and walked out.

That told him everything.

They had cleaned it up. Royal ground, thirteen bodies, a sabre with no prints, and the only witnesses gone over the wall in the night. Somebody very senior had decided this had not happened, and had paid whatever it cost to make that true.

Good, Alexander thought. Let it not have happened.

...

On the third afternoon, Felicia stopped tucking in the sheet and looked at him.

"Why are you so quiet?"

He had been quiet for three days. He had let her do everything, the way he always had, and he had said almost nothing.

"I feel like I just woke up from a very long dream," Alex said.

"Really," Felicia said.

She said it the way you answer a child, already half turned away, already reaching for the water jug.

Then she froze.

The jug didn't go down. It didn't come up. It hung in her hand, halfway.

"What did you say?"

...

Alexander looked her in the eyes.

He had never done that before. Not once in fourteen years. That body had looked at chins, at hands, at things over people's shoulders. At nothing.

"I feel like I woke up from a long dream," he said. "Felicia."

...

The jug hit the tray badly. Water ran across the top of it.

Her eyes went wide and stayed wide. Her mouth opened, and for four seconds nothing came out at all. Then everything did, in one shapeless sound, her whole face coming apart.

"You—"

She pressed a hand over her mouth.

"You're awake. You're finally awake."

"Yes," Alexander said. "I'm awake."

Felicia came across the bed, threw both arms around his neck, and pressed her forehead hard into his bandaged shoulder. She cried into his hospital gown for a long time. It was a cry with fourteen years in it. Every meal, every wash, every cold night in a room with no window, every time someone in that house had laughed at the two of them in a corridor.

Alexander held her with the arm that still had the drip in the back of his hand.

He said nothing. There was nothing to say that was both true and safe.

...

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