The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 814

The bread rolls sat on the side table, neat and untouched.

Now the men had Serena by both arms, and the great doors were getting closer.

Then somebody stepped into their path, holding a silver tray with nothing on it.

"Excuse me," Alex said. "That's my wife."

The men stopped, mostly from surprise. Connor turned round with the loan folders under his arm.

"What is this?" he said. "Another hero?"

"No. A husband."

Connor laughed. His men laughed with him, and then five hundred guests laughed from their chairs, because laughing was safer.

Connor walked up close and blew cigar smoke into the idiot's face.

"You've got some nerve, talking to me like that. Do you know who I am? My father is Victor Russell."

Alex blinked through the smoke. "My father is the Emperor."

He said it the way he said everything, mildly, like a man telling you the time.

The laughing stopped.

For a moment the whole ballroom remembered at once what nobody ever said aloud. The idiot by the kennels was the Tenth Prince. His father really was the Emperor.

Then Connor smiled.

"Your father," he said, loud enough for every table, "threw you out. He married you off to a perfume house and forgot your name. As for me, I'm my father's sole heir. Do you understand the difference, idiot?"

"I think so." Alex nodded. "You should let her go. Before it gets out of hand."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you'll be sorry." Alex thought about it. "I don't know you, really. I don't care very much, either. Three seconds, please. Or two."

Heads turned from the idiot standing in the middle of the floor to Preston, the cousin who had folded, still on the floor by the podium.

"You stupid idiot," Preston hissed. "You're going to get us all killed!"

"Are you insane?" Connor looked Alex up and down. "You want to play the hero? Fine. Let's see what you've got."

He snapped his fingers. Two men stepped out of the ring, the biggest in the room, one of them smiling with a gold tooth.

Alex looked once at the long table, at Natasha and the phone in her hand. Nobody else saw it.

A minute earlier, at the back wall, Alex had taken out his cheap phone and typed eight words to Natasha Vale. When I look at you, cut the lights.

Natasha touched her screen.

Every light in the Grand went out.

A woman screamed. A chair went over.

"What the hell?" Connor shouted.

A grunt. A thud. The gold-tooth man made one sound and stopped. Then a second thud.

"What did he just do?" Connor's voice cracked. "Bruno? Carl!"

Nobody answered him.

"Last chance," said a quiet voice in the dark. "Let her go."

"In your dreams! All of you, get him!"

Thud. Thud. Thud. Like rain starting on a roof.

The hands on Serena's arms were gone. Something moved past her in the black.

It smelled of cedar. And the sea.

Then the thuds stopped. Only Connor was left, breathing.

"Who are you?" His voice had gone thin. "Who the hell are you?"

The voice was very close. Nobody in that hall had ever heard it.

"Your reckoning."

The lights came on.

Every man of the ring lay on the floor in the spilled soup. Only the two men on the doors still stood, white as tablecloths. They had never come in.

"What happened?" Patricia was on her feet in the front row. "Who did that? Who was that?"

"Something did it in the dark," Preston whispered.

"There's nobody there! Preston, there's nobody there!"

Serena stood alone, rubbing her wrists. By the doors her father stared at her as if she might disappear.

Then she saw her husband.

He was under the nearest table, on his knees, holding the silver tray over his head like an umbrella.

He peeked out from under it at the bodies on the floor.

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