2025-01-23 18:53:47
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 689
Alex's hand crossed the counter.The slap wasn't hard. That was the frightening part — the economy of it, one crisp crack of palm against cheek and then Alex's hand was simply back at his side, relaxed, as if it had never moved.The loupe clattered to the floor. Somewhere in the back room, something stopped rustling and listened.The broker touched his own face like he was checking it was still attached. Then his shock caught fire."You dare — you dare hit me?" He shot up from his chair, knocking it over, and his voice cracked into a roar. "Guards! Guards, throw this man out!"The back room emptied.Five of them came through the curtain — big men, the kind bought by the pound, shoulders filling the doorway one after another. Iron bars in their fists. Faces arranged to make ordinary people apologize for existing. They spread across the shop floor with the lazy confidence of men who had done this before and never once lost.Alex exhaled through his nose. Almost a sigh.Then he moved.If
Chapter 688
Feby leaned in until her shoulder nearly touched his. Her voice came out thinner than she wanted it to."Do I sign this?"Alex didn't look at the paper. He looked at her, and something in the steadiness of it made her breath catch — like he'd already read the whole document and half her life besides."Which one gets you there faster?" he asked quietly. "Reaching magician level three, or landing a manager's position at the Regent Group?"She almost laughed. Level three. As if the words alone didn't sting.She'd spent years pressing her palm to testing stones that stayed dark, years watching other students light them up like sunrise while hers gave back nothing but her own reflection.Talent wasn't something you could bribe, borrow, or earn. You either had it or you spent your whole life pretending the ache of not having it didn't exist."The manager position," she said. "Of course."Alex tilted his head closer, and his whisper dropped so low it was almost just breath. "Then here's a th
Chapter 687
Alex looked at Grandmother Marta."You're right," he said. "I'm not going to tell you who I am. That's not relevant to this meeting." He leaned forward slightly."What's relevant is that the trust instrument says Feby gets her money. You've been withholding it for fourteen months past the legal trigger date. In that time, the estate has continued to generate returns which have been administered by the co-administrator structure — which means by your family. Every month of delay is a month of returns that should have been accessible to Feby and weren't." He paused."I'm not a lawyer. But I've read the documents, and from where I'm sitting, this looks less like prudent management and more like four years of spending someone else's money and finding reasons not to give it back."The silence was absolute.Leon broke it first, and the friendliness in his voice had thinned considerably. "That's an extraordinary accusation.""It's not an accusation," Alex said. "It's a description of what th
Chapter 686
The Rydell family home was the kind of place that had been designed to make visitors feel small.Three stories of pale stone, iron-latticed windows, a gate that required a mana-key to open — the kind of gate that announced, before anyone inside had spoken a word, that the people within considered themselves a different category of person than whoever was standing outside it.Alex stood outside it with Feby and noted all of this without comment.She had told him on the tram ride over. Her father — Edmund Steinmeyer, dead four years now — had left behind a fortune so substantial that the precise number had never been discussed in polite company.What had been discussed, extensively and behind closed doors, was the question of what happened to it.Edmund had died without a will that satisfied everyone.His money had passed into a family trust administered jointly — which in practice meant administered by the Rydell side, her mother's family, who had been living off the interest since the
Chapter 685
She had a bruise on her jaw and she was pointing at him like she owned him."That one," she said again, apparently for the benefit of the knight who had stepped sideways to block her, because she was already moving around him.Alex watched her cross the room. She moved the way people moved when they were frightened and had decided to be angry about it instead — purposeful, slightly too fast, her eyes fixed on him with the concentrated intensity of someone who had made a decision on the walk over and was not going to reconsider it now.She stopped in front of his chair.He looked up at her.She looked down at him.Neither of them said anything for a moment."You're the one from the alley," she said. It wasn't a question."I didn't see your face," Alex said."I saw yours and your naked body." She pulled the chair beside him out and sat, uninvited, angling her body so that her back was to the knight named Dax. A small tactical choice. Alex noted it. "You're in trouble.""Moderate trouble
Chapter 684
The wormhole tasted like lightning and old copper.Alex felt it before he understood it — that electric wrongness on his tongue, the metallic pull at the back of his throat, as the old man carried him through the tear in space.Ragnar was there too, limp and silent, the old man bearing both of them through the fold in reality as though he'd done it a thousand times.Alex had no idea where they were taking him. He knew only one thing with terrible certainty: he would not survive the journey's end.Whatever mercy had kept him breathing until now would end the moment they stepped through the other side.Move.His nascent soul power surged from that buried place, and Alex threw every fragment of it against his own chains.His muscles screamed.His vision strobed white.And then — the
You may also like
The Gilded Man With A Thousand Lives
Kaiser Ken98.5K viewsThe Midnight Heir
South Ashan100.6K viewsSecretly Rich Son in Law
Banin SN198.7K viewsTHEY HUNTED THE WRONG MAN
Eun119 viewsTHE UNSTOPPABLE JASON SALFORD
POPSICLE26 viewsThe Medical Doctor's mother died in his arms
Allahamdullilah books100 viewsMr Nobody's Empire
Tigress 188 views
Reader Comments
I am done with Sophia playing dumb