The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 698

"Show them the letter, miss," Prue said from behind the counter. She hadn't been paid in two months. A woman with nothing left to lose has the steadiest voice in the room.

Feby laid the award letter on the counter, seal up.

Leon snatched it first. He read it indulgently. Then quickly. Then twice — and the color climbed his neck line by line, like water filling a glass.

"It's fake," he said. "The Reagent Group does not hand a two-hundred-million expansion to—"

He stopped. His eyes had finally caught up with his mouth.

The address line.

Rael took the letter from him. He read the line once. Then again, the way a man rereads a telegram hoping the words have been persuaded to rearrange themselves.

The letter was not addressed to the Rydell Advertising House. It was not addressed to any house at all.

Awarded to Febyella Steinmeyer. In her own name and person. Sole awardee. Non-transferable.

"That's a mistake," Rael said. "Contracts of this class go to licensed firms. Trade seats. Not to — not to a girl."

"Read the rider," Feby said.

He read the rider. It explained, in the Reagent Group's serenely bureaucratic hand, that the awardee could execute the campaign through any licensed firm of her choosing. That her designation of the Corvane Street firm was a courtesy. Revocable at her sole discretion. The award followed the person, not the paper.

Alex leaned against the back shelving, unacknowledged, and said nothing. He had known clause lawyers who wept over less elegant drafting. He should know. He'd dictated every word himself — three drafts, past midnight, building a door only she could walk through.

She didn't know that. She would never hear it from him.

"The Rydell name," Rael said, his voice gone strange, "appears nowhere on this."

"No," Feby said. "It doesn't."

And there it was. The house on Corvane Street was worthless collateral. The firm was a glove — and the hand could leave it whenever it liked. They could call the police, the papers, the Governor of the Arcanum State himself, and all anyone would find was a private citizen holding a private award. And a family of strangers shouting in her lobby.

They had come to take a company from her.

There was no company to take. There was only her.

Wilhelmina understood it last and said it first, which was very like her. "Then if she walks out of this building — the contract just goes with her?"

"Anywhere I like," Feby said. "It's mine the way my hands are mine. Grandmother could own this street down to the cobbles and it wouldn't move the decimal point."

The silence that followed had a new texture. This family's silences had always been instruments — punishments, verdicts, doors closing. This one was just the sound of five people discovering which side of a locked door they stood on.

Rael sat down. There was no chair behind him. A staff member slid one under him at the last second, out of pure reflex, and was not thanked.

"Febyella." Marta's voice came out softer than Feby had heard it in her entire life. "We are family. We raised you."

"No. My father raised me. You spent his money."

"Your father was completely useless," Adeline snapped. "All he left you was forty million. That measly sum ran out in just four years. It’s not nearly enough."

Feby's nails bit into her palms. "Forty million is a family's lifetime, Mother. You burned through it, and now you stand here blaming the dead man who earned it. Get out."

Marta smiled — actually smiled — and stepped closer. "Yes, yes, your father was a great man. Died so young. So unfortunate. And perhaps we misspent. But money doesn't vanish that fast on its own. Perhaps your great man stole it in the first place. Perhaps that's why it wouldn't stay."

The words landed like a slap. Feby's breath stopped somewhere behind her ribs.

Marta didn't wait for the wound to close. "Listen to me, Febyella. Two hundred million in advertising — done well, that's fifty percent profit. Thirty at minimum."

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