The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 696

Alex leaned close. His voice was for her alone.

"Take it."

"It's a shell, Alex. They're laughing at me." She could hear it — the little coughs behind hands, the smirk Rael wasn't bothering to hide.

"Let them. A licensed trade seat is a door. Doors matter more than what's behind them." A pause. "Take it in writing. Every share. And this time, I read the pages first."

He looked at her, quiet and level. "Do you have any other choice?"

She didn't. The money was already gone — swallowed by his mother's family, then chased with a lawsuit for good measure. You can't pay back people who took everything and then billed you for the privilege.

Alex started reading the pages. Aloud, where it suited him. He struck one clause that would have quietly kept the trade seat with the family.

Then a second — one that would have draped Rael's personal guarantees over Feby's shoulders like a hand pressing down on her head. He didn't announce what he'd found. He just drew two lines and watched Rael's face confirm the purpose of both.

Feby only saw the pen move. She would never know exactly what he'd just carried off her back.

He laid the deed in front of her. Beside it, a one-page release ending the Rydell co-administration of the Steinmeyer estate. Forever.

"Read it carefully before you sign," he said — clearly, for the whole room, in exactly the voice he'd used the last time. "They are not honest people."

Nobody denied it. Not this time either.

Feby signed. Marta signed. Rael signed with the pen at arm's length, as though the paper might correct him.

On the tram home, Feby watched the amber pulse of the rail run ahead through the dark.

"I own a failing advertising company," she said. "Four years of fighting, and that's my prize."

"You own an advertising company. Failing is a condition. Not a trait."

"Eleven employees who haven't been paid since spring."

"Then pay them Monday. Head Supervisors earn well, I hear." He turned to the window. She waited for more. For once she thought he might actually say it — whatever it was he never said. His jaw shifted. The moment passed. "And keep the name off your face when the announcements come."

Her chest went tight. "What announcements?"

"Regent's," Alex said. "I'm told there'll be two."

There were two.

They landed on the city two mornings later like a change in the weather everyone felt through the walls.

The first: the Regent Group had changed hands. New chairman, name withheld by request. Beatrix Hargrove, the woman who built the company, would stay on as vice chairman and chief executive.

By noon, every tea house, trade floor, and House parlor in New Avalon was chewing on the same bone. Who buys the Regent Group? Who has that kind of gold?

Three Houses publicly denied being the buyer, in tones that begged to be disbelieved.

Behind her, eleven unpaid employees read the paragraph over her shoulder and made sounds that were not professional.

Across the city, in a sitting room with one chair too few, Rael Rydell heard the news from a neighbor before the evening broadsheets could bring it — and had to sit down.

In the chair his family had once refused to offer anyone.

They'd held the company through two years of famine. They'd handed it to Feby, signed and sealed and laughing, exactly two days before the Regent Group turned it into a gold mine.

"We gave it away," Leon said. To no one. Several times.

And in the flat above the lantern-lit street, Feby sat at the little table that evening with the award letter in front of her. Her tea went cold. She didn't notice.

The interview she shouldn't have gotten. The post that hadn't existed a week ago.

A chairman with no name who somehow knew hers. And now this — landing on a company she'd owned for two days. A company no one outside her family even knew had changed hands.

She looked across the room at Alex — reading, one finger marking his page — and she remembered him at the base of the tower. Go in. You'll do better than you think. Trust me. He'd said it the way other people reported the time.

He had never once been surprised. Not at the gate. Not at the signing. Not tonight.

The question climbed all the way to her teeth, the way it did most nights now. She looked at him — calm, ordinary, impossible — and swallowed it back down. Filed it where she filed everything about him.

Who are you, really?