The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 766

Jericho and the others stayed frightened for nine days.

Then nothing happened.

Then more nothing happened.

And nobody can stay frightened forever of a boy hitting a book with a rock.

By the end of the first month Jericho was back at the head of the long table with the silver out.

The house adjusted, the way houses do.

The curse became one of the facts of working there, like the draught in the east wing.

You went blind. You went down to the study. You got it off your chest.

You came back up able to see, and by supper you were laughing about it.

Some of them found it almost convenient.

And when somebody had a bad week of it — three days blind, four trips down to that rug before it took — they did what people do.

They stood in the kitchen with a cup in their hands and cursed the ancestors of the idiot prince, down every generation they could name, for having the nerve to lay a curse on honest working people.

...

"Not yet," Alexander said.

He said it most nights. Cold stone under him in the servants' room, back straight in the dark, hands turned palm up on his knees, a young woman asleep eight feet away.

The first form of the Xia method draws heaven and earth energy in through the skin and sends it down to settle in the dantian, three fingers below the navel.

He had done it every night since the study. Every night he grew harder to kill.

This wasn't revenge. Revenge was cheap — an indulgence for careless men, costing nothing to want.

The slaughter was simply inevitable.

One day he would wipe out every capable asset under this roof, and the moment he did, the high seats in the capital would turn all their fury on his head.

He had to be strong enough to survive the answer before he drew the first drop of blood.

There was a list in his head, and it was getting longer.

...

Two months slipped away.

Nothing changed, as far as anybody in that castle could see.

The idiot was still an idiot.

The maids still moved him out of doorways with the flat of a hand and laughed about it. One of them had taken to flicking his ear every time she passed, a small private joke that never stopped being funny to her.

He let his head rock with it and shuffled on.

And Jericho lived like a prince in a prince's room, and ate like a prince at a prince's table, and had begun, in the evenings, to call the house his.

Then something changed.

The cook was crossing the lower yard at dusk when a voice spoke into his ear.

Not beside him. Into it, from an inch away, low and perfectly clear.

"Go to the servants' room. Number fifteen. Now."

He stopped dead with a pan in his hand. Nobody within thirty feet of him. A wall on one side, open yard on the other, the light going orange over the stable roof, and not one living soul close enough to whisper.

"And bring the knife," the voice said. "Your wife is in there with the driver."

"What?"

He turned all the way round once. Nothing.

Then the cook took the boning knife off the block and crossed the house at a run.

Number fifteen was on the north side. The door wasn't locked, because they had never needed to lock it before, and it came off the latch on the first shove and banged against the inside wall.

His wife was on the bed, naked, with the driver. Neither of them had time to get to their feet.

...

"How dare you," the cook said.

Everybody in that castle knew about him. Good cook. Decent man. And a temper that arrived all at once, like a dropped plate — it had cost him two jobs before this one.

"How dare you cheat on me—"

The driver got one arm up.

The knife came down anyway. Once. Twice. Three times, into his chest. The wife screamed.

Then the knife found her too.

The sound that came out of him afterwards wasn't words. It was a man tearing in half.

...

At the far end of the corridor, Alexander stood and listened to it the way he listens to rain.

Long-range sound transmission is hardly an advanced art. Any cultivator who has crossed the first threshold can cast a phrase across an open courtyard, tucking it straight into a chosen ear without the surrounding world catching a single syllable.

...

After that, the house began to find things out about itself.

A maid was on her knees with a scrubbing brush when the voice came.

"Your husband took your savings. All of it. He gave it to a woman he met on an app, and he takes her to a motel when you're on shift. They're in the back yard now. In the corner, behind the wall."

She stood up slowly. The brush stayed where it fell.

"There's a gun in the third drawer of the head butler's room," the voice said. "Take it. They'll kill you if you come empty-handed."

She went up to Jericho's room and found it exactly where the voice said. Third drawer, under the folded shirts. Heavier than she expected. Colder.

Then she walked out to the corner of the yard, and her husband was there with his mouth on the woman from the app.

"You stole the money for our child."

He didn't even have the decency to look sorry. "I've told you. I don't believe it's mine."

"I only ever slept with you."

"Really. I think you've slept with half this house." He shrugged. "Doesn't matter now. I choose her. We're done."

She started laughing, and it was a terrible sound to hear in a yard at that hour. "You take my money. You get me pregnant. And then you leave me. Fine."

She raised the gun. "Die."

"Wait—"

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify