The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 763

“Today. It ends today. All my misery!”

Her name was Clarissa Havenworth, and she stood in the rain on the gravel of a prince’s forecourt with a rolled paper in one hand and her father’s name in her mouth.

“I have said it for four years and nobody listens. I will not marry this idiot. I don’t care what was signed before either of us was born.”

She turned and called over her shoulder, and her voice went soft and sweet in a way it had not been a second earlier.

“Honey. Be a darling and get me his thumbprint.”

…

The man who came across the gravel took his time about it.

Good coat. Good boots. The kind of young man who has never once been told no by anybody whose opinion he valued, and he was already smiling before he got there.

He took a small knife out of his pocket and opened it with his thumbnail.

Then he looked past Alexander, at the young woman kneeling in the wet beside him with both arms around his shoulders.

“Get the nanny out of the way.”

…

Two of Clarissa’s people pulled Felicia off him.

She did not go quietly. She got one hand back on his sleeve and had it taken off again, and somebody put a palm over her mouth, and she watched the rest of it from four feet away with her heels dragging in the gravel.

Alexander sat in the puddle and shook.

He let himself shake. It was the first real choice he had made on Earth in fourteen years.

‘They think you are an idiot. Good. Stay one, until you know the shape of this place.’

So the body did what the body had done for fourteen years. It trembled. It made a small animal sound. It did not fight at all.

…

The man took Alexander’s wrist, turned the hand palm up, and drew the knife across the pad of his thumb.

It hurt more than it should have.

He pressed the thumb down onto the paper himself, rolled it, and held the sheet up to the rain to check the print had taken.

“There we are.”

…

Clarissa snatched it out of his hand and read it twice and laughed out loud, right there in the rain, with her head back.

“It’s over. Finally! It’s over.” She grabbed the man’s arm with both hands. “Louise — we can marry now. My father has no argument left. He has to accept it.”

“Of course he does, my dear.”

Louise folded the little knife and put it back in his pocket, and neither of them looked down again at the young man sitting in the puddle, holding his own hand, crying.

They were still laughing when they got into the car.

…

Felicia got to Alex the second they let her go.

“Come on. Come on, up. Let’s get you inside.” She had his hand in both of hers, pressing her sleeve against the thumb. “It’s all right. It’s not deep. I’ll clean it in our room.”

Alexander let her pull him up.

He looked at her properly for the first time.

She was young. Nineteen, maybe twenty — barely older than the body he was standing in. Round face, wet hair stuck to her forehead, mud all up one side of her skirt from being dragged.

Somewhere at the back of this skull, in the part that had been running the show for fourteen years, there was one soft word for this person.

Nanny.

But he knew her name. It came up like a stone out of water.

Felicia.

…

His own castle.

That was the thing he had to keep repeating to himself as she brought him in through a side door.

There was dust along the window ledges thick enough to write in. The runner in the corridor had a boot-shaped stain on it that had been there long enough to go brown at the edges.

Two lamps out of five were dead, and nobody had replaced them, and by the look of the sconces nobody had considered it.

A prince’s residence. The Tenth Prince’s residence.

Nobody had cleaned it in years, because nobody in it thought there was anyone here who would notice.

…

He smelled the dining room before he reached it.

Roast. Real roast, and bread, and something with wine in it, and under all of that the particular warm noise of people enjoying themselves.

Alexander came into the doorway and stopped.

The long table was laid the way it would be laid for a visiting duke. Twelve places. Silver out. A bird in the middle big enough for a holiday.

The people sitting at it were the head butler, two housekeepers, and six of the staff, and every one of them was laughing at something one of them had just said.

…

Alexander walked in.

He was out of Felicia’s reach before she understood he had moved — straight down the side of the table at an unhurried idiot’s shuffle, and he put his hand into the dish nearest to him and took a piece of meat out of it with his fingers.

The head butler came out of his chair and threw a bottle at his head.

It missed. It hit the table, went over, and rolled the length of it spilling wine onto the cloth, and the laughing stopped.

“Get this animal out of here.” The butler was breathing hard. “How dare he. How dare he put his hands on this table.”

…

“Sir.” Felicia was already there, already between them, already bowing. “Sir, I’m sorry. He’s only hungry. It’s past his lunch, that’s all.”

“It’s past his lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

The head butler sat back down and picked up his napkin.

“Take him to the kitchen and feed him whatever’s left,” he said. “Same as always.”

…

The kitchen was down three steps and colder.

There was a plate on the end of the block with what had come back off the table the night before — bones, a heel of bread, potato somebody had pushed to the side of their plate. It had been sitting out long enough to have gone grey at the edges.

Felicia looked at it, and her face did something she did not let him see.

Then she took her own bowl down off the shelf — her portion, her supper, the one meal a house servant gets to call hers — and she put it in front of him.

“You eat this, all right? That one’s yours.” She was already turning away, already busy. “I’ll cook something for me later. And if you’re still hungry after, I’ll cook for you too. Don’t worry about it.”

…

Alexander picked up the spoon in his fist, like a child.

He ate it exactly the way that body had eaten every meal for fourteen years — badly, too fast, with his face too close to the bowl.

He did not thank her. He did not change one single thing.

He needed to know the shape of this house first. Who ate at that table. Who threw the bottle. Whose orders they were all so comfortable under.

Everything else could wait a few days.

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