The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 806

"Who on earth has been sticking pins in him?"

Rebecca heard the voice before she saw the man. The whole house heard it.

Dr. Henry Foster came through the sickroom door like a parade coming into town. Bald and pink. Gold spectacles. A white coat with the crest of the Imperial College. Six young doctors hurried in behind him and lined up along the wall like ducks.

He smelled of cologne. Sweet and expensive. Like a cake shop.

For thirty years Henry Foster had been the most famous doctor in the Empire. He had built the Imperial College's new wing in the capital with his own name over the door. Princes had always waited a month to see him. Whenever he walked into a room, other doctors had always stood up.

Natasha had gone down to her car to telephone. The masked man was on the back step. Rebecca was alone in a hot room that smelled of camphor.

"Dr. Foster." She kept her hands on the bed rail so he wouldn't see them. "Thank you for coming tonight. My father has a healer. He'll be back in ten minutes. He said nobody must touch the needles for two hours."

"A healer." Foster said it the way other men say rat. He bent over the bed with his hands behind his back, as if the patient might be catching. "Sixteen pins. In the chest of a count."

"Village pins, Professor," said the tallest duck. The others smirked into their collars.

Foster straightened. "Miss Morgan, if needles could cure the sick, there'd be no need for doctors."

"Dr. Foster is right, Rebecca," Aunt Ruby said. "He's Dr. Foster. He's in the newspapers."

"Thank you, madam," Foster said warmly.

"Pull them, Doctor," Oliver said from his chair. "The man ran off. Real doctors don't run off."

"The man in the mask said Father's heart would stop," Rebecca said. "If anyone took them out early."

"Did he." Foster polished his spectacles. "And did the man in the mask say where he studied? Which hospital? Which great house he's served?"

Rebecca said nothing.

"No. They never do." He put the spectacles back on, kind and slow, like a man talking to a child. "A stranger in a mask has frightened you, my dear. Frightened people believe all sorts of things. Your father needs my care, and quiet. Not village pins. If anything goes wrong, it's on my head. Not yours."

"Ten minutes," Rebecca said. "Please. Wait ten minutes."

She heard herself say please. Again. She had said it more tonight than in three years.

"I've been a doctor since before you were born," Foster said. "I don't wait for quacks."

He bent over the bed and began pulling out the needles. One by one. Like a man picking fluff off his coat.

"One," he said cheerfully. "Two. You see? Nothing. Three. Four."

"Stop," Rebecca said. "Please stop."

"Hearts don't stop because a pin comes out. Twelve. Thirteen." Tink. Tink. Tink, into a dish. "Sixteen. There. Now we can all breathe."

The last needle hit the dish.

One long second. Nothing.

Then her father's back arched off the bed. His hands clawed at the blankets. His face went from grey to a terrible dark red, and blood ran from his nose into his white beard. The machine by the bed began to scream. One high, flat note after another.

"Thomas!" Aunt Ruby shrieked. "Tommy!"

"Hold his arms!" Foster shouted. "Somebody hold his arms!"

Rebecca couldn't move. Her father had held her hand at the gate the day her mother's coffin came home. He had never once let go. Now he was drowning in his own bed, and the most famous doctor in the Empire was shouting at ducks.

Foster fought frantically for the patient, cycling through every intervention in his arsenal—compressions, desperate maneuvers, emergency injections. He watched and waited, but the monitors never changed. Finally, stepping back from the table, Foster gave up. “It is his fate to die.”

Then the door banged open, and the white mask came in at a run.

---

The room smelled of hot metal and blood.

Alex had heard the machine scream from the back step. Through a shut window. Over the rain.

He had given them ten minutes. Foster had needed three.

One look told him everything. Sixteen needles in a dish. A heart running out of road.

"Who took them out?" he said.

Foster spun round and saw the white mask. All his fear went into his face at once, and turned into anger, because anger was easier.

"You!" He grabbed the front of Alex's coat in both pink fists. They were hot and damp. "You did this! You and your pins! You poisoned him with your filthy country tricks, and now you come back to watch!"

"I asked who took them out."

"I did, and I'd do it again!"

"Then you're the one who stopped his heart," Alex said calmly. "How did a man so careless ever get to be a doctor?"

Foster went purple. "Do you know who I am?"

"Yes. You're the man who pulled the needles. Let go of my coat."

"Get away from him," Rebecca said.

She walked up to the most famous doctor in the Empire, took his white coat in one thin hand, and pulled him off the mask as if he weighed nothing.

"I begged you to wait," she said. "I don't beg. You said it would be on your head."

"Miss Morgan, this man is a fraud—"

Rebecca slapped him.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify