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Chapter 693
Alex bought his clothes off a street rack because they let him move, and he had never once cared what this city's money thought of that. He cared even less this morning, walking toward the Regent building with his hands in his pockets.He didn't make it past the parking lot."Well. Look who's slumming it at a real company." Leon Rydell pitched it to carry, and it did — across the lot, off the glass, into every ear within fifty feet. He stood by the entrance with Julian Thorne on one side and Wilhelmina on the other, three people dressed like they'd rehearsed belonging somewhere they didn't."Leon." Alex kept walking. One word was already more than the man had earned."Careful." Julian's smile never touched anything below his mouth. "Last time we saw this one, he had opinions about who gets to speak in rooms he wasn't invited to." He tipped his head toward Wilhelmina. "This is the fiancé. The unemployed one.""I remember," Wilhelmina said, the way you'd recall a stain on a carpet.Heat
Chapter 692
The ink on the tile contract wasn't dry when the door didn't knock. It slammed."Beatrix." Cornelius Hargrove filled the doorway the way he filled every room he'd ever walked into — loud first, right second, if at all. "Twenty minutes. I sat in that boardroom for twenty minutes."Beatrix didn't stand. "Uncle—""Don't." He threw a folder onto her desk hard enough that it slid into the tile Alex had set down an hour ago. His eyes found Alex, flicked once, and dismissed him completely. "And you're in here with — whoever this is."Nobody had ever looked at Alex like he was furniture. It was almost restful."Two years." Cornelius's voice cracked down the middle of the word, somewhere between fury and something rawer underneath it."Two years watching Ferrowgate eat us alive, quarter by quarter, and every time I ask what the plan is, I get told to trust you. I don't trust you. I trust numbers. And the numbers say this company's a corpse that hasn't stopped twitching yet.""We have something
Chapter 691
The knight behind the desk wasn't Walsh. She didn't offer a first name, and she carried the particular briskness of someone who had decided how this conversation would end before Feby and Alex ever sat down."Inspector Thackeray," she said, by way of introduction. For half a second her eyes caught on Feby's face and something flickered there — recognition, maybe, or the memory of it — before she smoothed it back into procedure.If Feby noticed, she didn't have room for it. She was watching the thin folder the inspector had slid halfway across the counter — and then, after a moment's reconsideration, slid back."We appreciate you both coming in," Thackeray said. "The inquiry's closed."Feby's hand stopped in the air, halfway to the folder. "Closed.""Reviewed and closed. No suspects worth holding." The inspector didn't quite meet her eyes when she said it."The men involved weren't organized. Weren't working for anyone we could substantiate. It happens more than you'd think, Miss Stein
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 be
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 Reagent 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
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