The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 690

The apartment had a rhythm now, and Feby was ashamed of how quickly she'd learned it by heart.

Alex left before she woke. He came home after dark. And every night he set two hundred dollars on the counter — sometimes three — peeled off whatever the day had paid him, without being asked, the way another man might take off his shoes at the door.

Like it was nothing. Like it didn't cost him twelve hours of his body to earn it.

She'd stopped arguing around the fourth night. There was a certain kind of stubbornness that wasn't worth fighting, and his was cut from the same stone as her father's had been.

Or so she imagined. She'd never known her father well enough to be sure, and that small hollow ache surfaced at the strangest times — like now, watching money she hadn't asked for sit quietly on a counter that wasn't really hers.

She was at the little table doing what she'd done every night for a week — filling out another application, this one for an assistant coordinator role two rungs below anything the Rydell document would accept — when the knock came.

Late. Three sharp raps, evenly spaced. Knuckles that had never once knocked and waited to be wanted.

She opened the door to her cousin's smile, which was somehow worse than her cousin's scowl.

"Wilhelmina." Feby said it flat. Not a greeting. A weather report.

"Feby." Wilhelmina swept past her without waiting to be asked, taking the apartment in one slow, unhurried circuit — the narrow kitchen, the single window, the mattress just visible through the half-open bedroom door — with the specific thoroughness of a woman pricing a property she had no intention of buying. "So this is it. I'd heard, but I didn't quite—"

She let the sentence die there, and the dying did more work than finishing it would have. Her face finished it anyway.

Every downward flick of her eyes said it plainly: you actually live in this cheap little place.

Behind her came a man Feby didn't recognize. Tall, dressed in a gray that never seemed to wrinkle, smiling before anyone had introduced him.

And behind him, Leon, hands in his pockets, already looking around the room like he was cataloguing it for later use.

"My fiancé," Wilhelmina said, without turning. "Julian Thorne. Julian — my cousin. The one I told you about."

"The one you told him about." Feby kept her voice level. It took effort. "Wonderful."

Julian took her hand before she'd offered it, held it one beat longer than any greeting required, and said, "Wilhelmina undersells you," in a tone that made the compliment feel like something she'd need to wash off.

Feby took her hand back.

Alex stood at the counter, sleeves still pushed up from the day, a line of dust along his forearm he hadn't gotten to yet. He said nothing.

He watched the three of them arrange themselves in the small room the way a man watches weather — not alarmed. Just noting which direction it was moving.

Leon noticed him last, which was its own kind of insult. "Alex." He said the name like he was trying it on for size. "Still jobless?"

"He has a job," Feby said, faster than she meant to.

"What job?" Leon's mouth curled. "Hauling freight at the port? That's not work, cousin. That's what you do with an animal."

"Every honest job is a good job." The words came out of her hot, and she heard it, and she didn't care.

But Leon had already turned back to his real entertainment. "Long day?" he asked Alex, pleasant as poison.

"Long enough," Alex said.

"You smell like it." Wilhelmina offered this brightly, the way she might mention rain coming, and didn't wait for a reaction. She turned back to Feby. "We were in the neighborhood. Julian wanted to see where you'd ended up."

"I didn't end up anywhere. This is where I live."

"Of course." Wilhelmina's eyes made one more slow lap of the apartment and landed, deliberately, on Alex. "It suits you both. Small. Like a cage for an animal."

Something in Feby's chest went very still and very hot at the same time. Not for herself — she'd been swallowing her cousin's contempt for years, it barely had a taste anymore.

For him. For the man who'd worked twelve hours and come home and put money on the counter and asked for nothing.

She opened her mouth. Then she caught the look on Alex's face — calm, almost bored — and closed it again.

He didn't need defending. She was starting to suspect he never had.

Leon cleared his throat, that old maneuver he'd always used to steer a room back where he wanted it. "Actually, cousin, we came with something useful. You remember Wendell Ashcombe."

"I remember the name."

"Good family. Old money — the real kind, the kind that doesn't have to explain itself." He said it easily, like the mention alone was a gift. "He's asked about you. More than once. I told him about your situation."

His eyes flicked to Alex, then away, as if the word situation covered him too. "A man like that could solve a great deal, Feby. Quietly. No thirty-day nonsense. No manager's chair you'll never actually land."

"I didn't ask for a man like that to solve anything."

"No," Leon agreed, pleasant as ever. "But you might want to start thinking like a rich man's wife. His door is always open for you."

Feby opened her mouth to answer and found Julian already at her elbow — somehow, without her having tracked the two steps it took him to cross the room.

He'd angled his back to Wilhelmina, who had drifted to the window and was loudly inspecting the kitchen shelf, announcing to no one in particular that she wouldn't survive a single night in a place like this.

"For what it's worth," Julian said, low, meant only for her, "Leon's overselling Ashcombe. And underselling the actual problem."

He smiled like this was a kindness. "Your inheritance isn't a thirty-day problem. It's a four-year problem, and you've been fighting it alone. I have connections your family doesn't. Real ones. I could help you win this properly — not some manager's chair you have to beg for. The whole estate. Cleanly. The way it should have gone to you in the first place."

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