The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 702

"Are you the chairman of the Reagent Group?"

The tram hummed. Amber rail light crossed his face — once, twice. Feby watched him the way she'd learned to watch her family: for the flicker. The skipped beat. The seam.

Alex laughed.

Not a performed laugh. A real one, low and easy, and it reached his eyes — and that was what cracked her certainty.

Five years cataloguing liars, and not one of them had ever laughed like that.

"Feby." He turned to face her. "Three weeks ago I didn't legally exist. You fixed that. You, personally."

He drew out his identity tile, the battered gray one, and laid it flat on his palm. Nothing up my sleeve. "Issued twenty-two days ago. Provisional class. Guaranteed by the signature of one Febyella Steinmeyer, because no bank in this city would touch a man with no past. I can't open an account without your name under mine. I couldn't rent our flat. The chairman of the Reagent Group is a sealed registry, a vault, a hundred lawyers deep."

He tipped the tile toward her. "How does a chairman have no identity tile? You'd be looking at the first pauper in history to buy the biggest company in the union on a document his fiancée had to vouch for."

Put that way, her suspicion collapsed into what it was. Built on coincidence. Founded on nothing.

"I'm not the chairman," Alex said, gently.

The words came out smooth and whole, because he'd built them the way he built everything — out of true bricks. Every fact real. Only the total a lie.

Feby exhaled a breath she'd been holding since the banquet. "I'm sorry." She pressed her hands over her face and laughed, wet and unsteady.

"You must think I've gone mad. Everything bends around me lately, and you were the only fixed point I could accuse. Forget I said it. Please."

"Already have."

She leaned back and let the tram rock her, wrung out past questioning. So she didn't see it — he angled his face away, one small degree — the thing that crossed him and was gone.

Not relief. Something that cost more than relief.

---

She went to Reagent Tower the next morning with an envelope in her inner pocket. Early. Before her nerve could reconsider.

Beatrix received her at once. =

"Miss Steinmeyer." Beatrix's eyes found the envelope before they found her face. Her eyes always found the business first. "You look like a woman about to do something accounting will talk about for years."

Feby slid the envelope across the desk.

"The development fund. One hundred million, drawn to my name. It's whole — I never deposited it."

When the Rydell Advertising House staff needed back wages, she paid them from her own savings. Reagent's money wasn't for Rydell debts.

Beatrix opened the envelope. Verified the check. Same with the one she gave her last time. “I accepted the money.”

She drew her pen and wrote. Unhurried strokes. The Reagent seal pressed into fresh wax. She turned the new check on the desk and slid it across with two fingers.

Fifty million dollars. Pay to Febyella Steinmeyer, her own name and person.

"The penalty, as read into the record last night. Return received in good faith; payment same day, as promised." A pause. "The chairman keeps his contracts to the letter, Miss Steinmeyer. It's his single most inconvenient quality."

Feby looked at the check. She didn't pick it up.

"I can't accept this."

"It isn't from me, so your objection is misaddressed. It's from the chairman. I'm merely the hand."

"Then tell the chairman—" She stopped. Gathered it. Laid it out flat, the voice of a woman getting through a confession before anyone could talk her out of it.

"Tell him the cancellation happened because of me. My family. My banquet. My name spent from a stage. I brought a circus into a two-hundred-million-dollar engagement and the engagement died of it. That's not his failure to compensate. That's mine to carry. The whole arrangement was unprofessional, and I let it be, because I wanted—"

Her jaw tightened. "Because I wanted things from those people that were never for sale. A professional would have kept her family a hundred miles from that contract. I didn't. So the penalty isn't owed to me. Not in any ledger that matters."

She pushed back the check. The way you return something borrowed.

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