The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 704

They came for Alex at dawn. Six knights of the City Watch, a warrant tile glowing official blue, and a broad-shouldered sergeant who read the charge loud enough for every neighbor on the stairwell to hear it.

"Alexander Leonhart. Provisional registrant. You are detained on suspicion of the abduction of Febyella Steinmeyer."

Alex knew those shoulders. One week ago they had marched Feby out of a Knight Station lobby, her heels scraping tile, while an inspector buried the alley case behind them. Now the same man stood on his doorstep, performing justice for an audience.

Near the back stood Dax — the young knight who had biometricked Alex into existence on his first night in this world. Dax stared at the floor. He couldn't look at the man he'd given a name to. He knew what this was.

For one second, something moved behind Alex's eyes. The sergeant's hand drifted toward his baton. Then it was gone — filed, shelved — and what remained was a man in yesterday's coat studying six armed knights with the mild attention of an auditor.

Of course, Alex thought. Of course.

These men weren't an obstacle. They were a lead.

"May I put on my boots?"

The sergeant blinked, thrown by the tone. Nodded. Alex crouched by the door, laced one boot slow, and with his body shielding his hands, pressed four words into his tile. Sent them a half-second before a corporal snatched it away.

Knight Office. Framed. Come.

Somewhere in this city, Feby was locked in the dark, waiting for him — and he was letting six men put him in irons. His jaw ached from holding still. He held still anyway.

He stood. Offered his wrists. Let them take him — quiet, cooperative, memorizing each face on the way down the stairs the way other men memorize a debt.

The last time knights marched him into a station, he'd been nameless. No tile. No coin. Not one soul on the continent to answer for him.

That was weeks ago.

He was almost looking forward to the difference.

---

The interrogation room at the central Knight Office was a grander cousin of the one on Third Street. Same scarred table. Same lantern angled into the prisoner's eyes. Same smell of old fear soaked into stone.

But they didn't give him to duty-knights this time. They gave him to Inspector Thackeray.

She came in with a folder she never intended to open and sat down with the briskness of a woman who'd decided how this ended before the door closed. And Alex, watching her square her papers, felt the last piece of the week click into place.

The alley case. Reviewed and closed in a day. It's a Tuesday, Miss Steinmeyer. He'd stood on that pavement wondering who inside the Knights wanted it buried.

He'd stopped wondering.

"Let me save us a long day," Thackeray said, folding her hands. "A woman is missing. You're a ghost with a provisional tile who crawled out of an alley and attached himself to her rooms, her signature, her rising fortune. This morning she came into fifty million in front of the whole city. Tonight she vanished. Every court in the Arcanum State could draw this picture blind."

She leaned in, warm as a salesman. "So here's the only kindness you get today. Sign a confession — abduction, motive of gain — and I speak to the magistrate myself. Cooperation. Provisional status. Twenty years. You'd walk out younger than I am now."

"And if I don't sign?"

"Abduction with harm is a hanging offense." She said it comfortably, laying her best card face-up. "And it will be with harm by the time it reaches a courtroom. Evidence ripens in our cellars, Leonhart. You'll hang before winter."

"I didn't take her." His voice stayed level. "I've never harmed her. I was home from morning on."

"Stop lying." The sergeant, behind his shoulder.

"You know I didn't take her." He read her face the way he'd once read Rydell contract clauses — line by line, striking the false ones. "Because you know who did. Five men in an alley. A paymaster's name in a folder. You slid that folder back across the counter and called it a Tuesday."

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