The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 765

"Not now."

Alexander muttered the restraint to himself, hovering just two feet behind the man's chair. A single strike would have settled it. Simple.

Yet killing one solved nothing—he wanted them all. Precision required patience; he had to separate the sheep from the wolves before the slaughter. No emotional slips. No gray areas. He would strike only when the targets were indisputably marked.

He lowered his arm, letting it rest against his thigh

...

He crossed the rug without a sound and sat where he had been sitting two hours earlier, cross-legged, primer in one hand, smooth grey stone in the other.

And he began knocking the stone against the cover again. Slow. Even. Exactly the rhythm a broken seven-year-old had kept for fourteen years.

Behind him, Jericho went on talking.

He talked the way a man empties a bucket he has been carrying too long — about the coal accounts, about a horse he had sold and written off as dead, about a girl in the village and what it had cost him to make that go away.

He wasn’t confessing anymore; he was just spilling his guts with smug indifference. Why wouldn't he?

He had someone powerful in his back.

Then, mid-sentence—right as he was rambling about the wine cellar—the tap abruptly shut off.

He realized he’d said enough.

"That's it," he announced to the room. "That's everything. Every bit of it."

He put his hands on the arms of the chair.

He had talked, confess , but his eyes still gave him nothing at all, so he came up out of that chair like a man standing in a lake at midnight.

"Maid!" Jericho roared. "Get in here and take me down! Now!"

He had ordered her to keep clear of the room so no one would overhear them, but the silence was deafening. Cursing under his breath, he lurched toward the door himself.

Before his hand could touch wood, the door flew inward.

The girl had moved with frightening speed—sprinting from the far end of the hallway the moment his shout echoed out. She wrenched the brass handle, swinging the solid edge straight into Jericho's face, splitting the skin over his nose and left brow.

He went down on one knee with both hands over his face, and the sound he made was not a word in any language.

"Sir—"

"All of you," Jericho said through his fingers. "All of you damn bastards."

Alexander sat on the rug and hit a book with a stone.

...

That night he came up the back stairs at two in the morning.

Jericho was on his back this time, mouth open, with a wet cloth folded across the bridge of a swelling nose, and a bottle on the floor by the bed that had done more for the pain than the cloth had.

The first needle went into the base of the skull. The second went in below the left shoulder blade.

Alexander counted three breaths, drew them both out, and wiped them on the sheet.

Then he stood over the bed for a moment longer than he needed to, looking down at the man who had burned fourteen years of his letters.

"Enjoy your eyes," he said.

...

Jericho woke at dawn with the grey of a window in front of him, and it took him whole seconds to understand what he was looking at.

Light. A window. His own hand, when he lifted it, which it did, on the first try.

He got out of bed and stood in the middle of his stolen room with his arms going up and down like a man testing a coat.

He laughed. He actually laughed, out loud, alone, at six in the morning.

And then the laughing stopped, because his stomach caught up with the rest of him.

...

He had told it.

Not some of it. All of it. The four hundred a month from the second prince. The ninety thousand. The gold under these boards, under his own feet, this minute. The invitations. The cook, the groom's hand, the whippings.

He had said every one of those things out loud, in a small room, with the door shut.

To the idiot.

Jericho sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed both palms flat against his knees and told himself the obvious thing, which was that it did not matter, because the boy could not read, could not count, could not follow a sentence with two ideas in it, and had never in fourteen years repeated anything anybody said to him.

Then he went downstairs to make sure.

...

He watched him for an entire day.

He watched him eat, which was a performance with a spoon held in a fist and a face too close to the bowl.

He watched him get walked up and down the west corridor by his nanny like a dog. He watched him sit on the study floor for an hour and a half hitting a book with a rock.

Twice he sent people over to talk to him.

The first was a footman who asked him three simple questions and got a grin and a comment about a bird.

The second was one of the housekeepers, who put her face right down in front of his and said, slowly, "Do you remember anything from yesterday?"

Alexander told her the bird had come back.

Talking to him was like talking to a wall, except a wall does not look pleased with itself for having heard you.

...

It still was not enough.

Jericho found him in the afternoon in the side hall, sitting on the flagstones with Felicia crouched beside him, buttoning his coat against the draught.

He did not announce himself. He walked up, and without one word of warning he swung his boot into the young man's ribs.

Alexander went over onto his side.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify