The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 695

Morning came gray and clean, the lanterns still fading along the avenue when they reached the base of Regent Tower.

Feby stopped on the plaza and looked up, and looking up was a mistake. The tower rose until the eye gave up counting floors, glass and pale stone and the faint hum of the tile grid under all of it, and her heart performed the same maneuver it had at the Rydell gate — the hollow drop of a person about to ask a bank vault for charity.

She was here for an assistant coordinator interview. Two rungs below anything the document would accept. A match-seller petitioning a treasury.

But she had signed her name to thirty days in front of her whole family, so she was going through the door.

"You're breathing like you're about to be sentenced," Alex said beside her.

"I might be."

He looked at her for a moment. Then, with the tenderness he spent so rarely it always caught her off guard, he set his hand briefly on her hair. "Go in. You'll do better than you think. Trust me."

"You say that like you've read the ending."

"I read a lot," Alex said. "I'll see you tonight."

She watched him walk off with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, as though the city belonged to him and he was merely letting it operate.

Then she took one breath that used her whole body, and went in.

The queue for interview registration was forty people long. She had been standing in it for less than a minute when a graceful assistant in Regent gray appeared at her elbow.

"Miss Steinmeyer? Miss Hargrove is expecting you. This way, please."

"I — there must be a mistake. I'm here for the coordinator—"

"No mistake, miss. The top floor, if you'd follow me."

Feby moved forward, her legs acting before her mind caught up. The people in line were startled to see her pass, escorted by the CEO's personal directive—she must be someone important.

The lift rose through thirty floors of the most powerful company in the state while she rearranged every assumption she owned.

Miss Hargrove. The chairwoman. Girls in the coordinator queue would have traded years of their lives for the ride she was currently too terrified to enjoy.

Beatrix Hargrove stood when Feby entered, which was its own small earthquake, and gestured her to a chair.

"Miss Steinmeyer. Thank you for coming."

"Miss Hargrove. Thank you for — I'm sorry, I think there's been some confusion. I applied for the assistant coordinator post."

"You did. Your application was incomplete." Beatrix sat, and slid a slim folder across the desk. "It was also the most honest document to cross my desk this quarter. No invented references. No borrowed accomplishments. I read four hundred of these a month, Miss Steinmeyer; do you know how rare that is?"

Feby opened the folder because her hands needed employment. Then she read the first line, and her hands stopped needing anything at all.

APPOINTMENT: HEAD SUPERVISOR — NEW PRODUCT DIVISION.

"That post doesn't exist," she heard herself say. "I studied your structure. There's no—"

"It exists as of this week. Regent is preparing a new line — you'll learn its nature after you sign, and not a breath of it before. The Head Supervisor holds oversight of that line on behalf of this office." Beatrix folded her hands. "To be plain about the grade: the division's general manager reports to you on every matter touching the line. You answer to me and to no one else in this building."

The room tilted gently. "Miss Hargrove. There are ten thousand people in this city more qualified than I am. Certified magicians. House heirs. I serve coffee." She said it before pride could stop her, because it was true and because someone in this conversation ought to say true things. "Why me?"

Beatrix regarded her for a moment with something that might, in a warmer woman, have been approval.

"The decision was made above me," she said.

"Above you? You're the chairwoman."

"The Regent Group has a new chairman. You'll see it announced within days; his name is withheld at his own request, and it will stay withheld." Beatrix's voice gave away exactly nothing. "He reviewed the file. He made his wishes known. I have learned very recently that when this particular man makes his wishes known, the intelligent response is to say yes quickly."

"I don't know any chairman," Feby said faintly. "I don't know anyone at all."

"Then he knows you," Beatrix said, "Maybe you serve him a coffee and he likes your service. Whatever made him move. Salary and terms are on the second page. Sign wherever you find yourself agreeing."

Feby turned to the second page. The salary made her ears ring. She read every clause twice — she had learned that lesson in a sitting room with her own family, and it had cost her a signature to learn it — and found nothing with teeth in it anywhere.

She signed.

Beatrix pressed the Regent seal to the appointment writ herself, the wax flaring briefly with the company's sigil. Then, as Feby gathered the folder with hands she was very proud were not shaking:

"The money is gone."

The words crossed the table and arrived somewhere behind Feby's ribs. She heard herself say, from a small distance, "Gone."

"Invested." Rael's hands moved, smoothing air. "The trust bore costs, you understand — the house, administration, four years of fees — and two years ago the principal was placed into a venture. A sound one. Advertising. The Rydell Advertising House — offices on Corvane Street, eleven staff, a licensed trade seat. Every firm in New Avalon buys notices, broadsheets, lantern-boards; the projections were —" he stopped smoothing the air. "The projections were good."

"You ran it," Alex said. It wasn't a question.

"I directed it. Leon managed the accounts and the clients."

"And?"

Leon's jaw worked. "The clients left."

"The clients were poached," Rael corrected sharply, an old argument surfacing through the confession, "by firms with House backing, which we'd have matched if the market hadn't—"

Feby sat very still. Four years. Four years of when you're ready, of certification levels invented across a tea table, of her mother's soft voice explaining complexities — and behind every locked door they defended, there had been less. They hadn't been guarding her inheritance from her. They had been guarding her from the discovery that they'd already spent it.

"You put me through all of it," she said. Her voice stayed level, which surprised everyone, including her. "The levels. The conditions. The thirty days. And there was nothing behind the door."

"There is the company," Marta said.

The room turned.

"The Rydell Advertising House holds the lease, the license, the trade seat, and the staff." Marta's spine had recovered; the matriarch was reassembling herself around the only offer left in her hand. "The family will transfer it to you. The whole of it. Every share, signed today, in full and final settlement of your father's estate." Her chin lifted. "You wished to prove you could manage something, Febyella. Very well. Manage that."

Leon laughed. He tried to fold it into a cough and failed, and Alex marked it, filed it, and let it go — for now.

"It's three months behind on its lease," Leon said, recovering, generous with detail all of a sudden. "The staff haven't been paid since spring. The debts come with the shares, cousin. Congratulations."

Feby looked at the writ on the table — the seal, the rank, the first thing she had ever won in that house — and then at the faces arranged along the settee, smug in defeat, handing her a corpse and calling it a settlement, and she felt the refusal rising in her throat.

But it was all hers to claim now. And tears meant nothing—they were already throwing it in her face. Her money was gone.

Only the dying businesses remained, burdened with debt. And they still called themselves family.