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Chapter 696
Alex leaned close. His voice was for her alone."Take it.""It's a shell, Alex. They're laughing at me." She could hear it — the little coughs behind hands, the smirk Rael wasn't bothering to hide."Let them. A licensed trade seat is a door. Doors matter more than what's behind them." A pause. "Take it in writing. Every share. And this time, I read the pages first."He looked at her, quiet and level. "Do you have any other choice?"She didn't. The money was already gone — swallowed by his mother's family, then chased with a lawsuit for good measure. You can't pay back people who took everything and then billed you for the privilege.Alex started reading the pages. Aloud, where it suited him. He struck one clause that would have quietly kept the trade seat with the family.Then a second — one that would have draped Rael's personal guarantees over Feby's shoulders like a hand pressing down on her head. He didn't announce what he'd found. He just drew two lines and watched Rael's face co
Chapter 695
Morning came gray and clean, the lanterns still fading along the avenue when they reached the base of Regent Tower.Feby stopped on the plaza and looked up, and looking up was a mistake. The tower rose until the eye gave up counting floors, glass and pale stone and the faint hum of the tile grid under all of it, and her heart performed the same maneuver it had at the Rydell gate — the hollow drop of a person about to ask a bank vault for charity.She was here for an assistant coordinator interview. Two rungs below anything the document would accept. A match-seller petitioning a treasury.But she had signed her name to thirty days in front of her whole family, so she was going through the door."You're breathing like you're about to be sentenced," Alex said beside her."I might be."He looked at her for a moment. Then, with the tenderness he spent so rarely it always caught her off guard, he set his hand briefly on her hair. "Go in. You'll do better than you think. Trust me.""You say
Chapter 694
The knock came at the hour when decent visits have already ended.Feby was at the little table with her one good blouse laid out over the chair back, pressed twice and inspected three times, and a borrowed almanac of New Avalon's great firms open to the chapter on the Regent Group.She had read the same page four times without retaining a word of it. Tomorrow sat in her chest like a swallowed coal — bright, secret, hers.She had told Alex nothing. He had asked nothing, which was its own kind of noticing.Three knocks. Softer than Wilhelmina's, more certain than a stranger's. Feby knew the hand before she reached the door."Mother."Adeline Rydell-Steinmeyer entered the way she entered everywhere — perfume first, apology never.Her eyes made the same slow circuit of the flat that Wilhelmina's had, arriving at the same verdict by a politer road. Then she stepped aside, and the doorway filled with a man.Tall. A charcoal traveling coat with silver thread worked through the collar, cut by
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
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