2024-09-29 00:02:23Outside the Lancaster mansion, a modest car stood waiting, with the driver by its side.
Alfred had chosen this low-profile setup, understanding it would help Alex stay unnoticed.
As soon as the driver saw Alex approach, he quickly moved toward him.
"Sir Alex, I’m Morris, the driver sent by Mr. Alfred," he said politely, bowing as he opened the car door for Alex to enter.
Inside the car, Morris handed Ale
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Chapter 774
He sat with that newspaper for most of the night, and the money was the smallest part of it.A billion dollars was a number. He could make a billion dollars.What he could not make was a witness.Alexander still did not know which of them had killed his mother.He knew it was one of two women.The Second Queen had borne the First Prince — the crown prince, the eldest, the one the court had been arranging itself around for thirty years.And the First Queen had come late to it. She had been barren for nine years and then, past forty, she had borne the Second Prince, and from the day that boy could walk she had been pushing him at the throne with both hands.Two women. Two sons. One line of succession, and eight queens' worth of children standing in the way of it.One of those two women had signed that....The summons arrived four days later, on paper, with a seal.His Imperial Majesty required the attendance of Prince Alexander of Leonhart at the Hall of Council in the capital, to answ
Chapter 773
The first real money arrived on a Tuesday, and Richie brought the printout up the stairs himself because he did not trust himself to say the number out loud.One million subscribers.Twenty dollars a month, every one of them, on a service that had existed for eleven weeks."Twenty million dollars," Richie said. "A month. Recurring."Behind him, Felicia had stopped in the doorway with a tray in her hands and forgotten she was holding it...."And the corporate side?" Alexander asked."That's the other page." Richie turned it over for him, and his hand was not quite steady."Separate tier. Direct connection, machine to machine — the firms don't want a person typing, they want their own systems talking to ours. We've signed nine hundred and forty accounts, most of them on the mainland, four in the capital.""How much?""Another twenty million a month. Give or take."Forty million dollars a month, out of a two-storey building opposite a fish market....Felicia put the tray down very care
Chapter 772
The crowd went home talking, and Alexander went upstairs to the governor's office and sat down with the truth.A tax haven is not a law. A tax haven is a reputation.You can write anonymity into your statute in an afternoon. Getting a man in another country to move nine million dollars to an island he has never heard of, through a bank with four staff and a door for a vault, on the word of a twenty-year-old prince the whole Empire calls an idiot — that takes something else entirely.He had no name. Harland had no name.And the island had nothing to sell. No ore under the chalk, no port, no factory, a fishing fleet older than its crews and a tourist season dying a little every year.To attract outside money, Harland had to create something people actually wanted to buy.It was the only way to launder the proceeds into clean, legal cash.He wrote to the head steward that night."If I want to borrow for Harland, how much can I have? I need it to start a business."The answer came back in
Chapter 771
The letter came up the hill in an official car eleven days later.The Emperor's head steward wrote it himself, in his small neat hand, and it said what the council had decided.His Imperial Majesty, on the advice of the council, was pleased to grant the governorship of the island of Harland to Prince Alexander of the House of Leonhart.The prince would take up his post at his earliest convenience.And the court wished to see results in five years.Felicia read it over his shoulder twice and did not understand why he had gone so quiet."Is it good?" she said. "It sounds good. It sounds like they're giving you something."“Well,” Alexander thought, “first they hand over a castle, and now they’re throwing in the entire island with it.”...In the capital, the Second Queen laughed until she had to sit down."Harland." She said the word to the ceiling. "Harland. Out of the entire Empire, they gave him Harland."Her head maid poured the tea and permitted herself a smile."It is the poorest
Chapter 770
Previously, Alex had spent those three days in the hospital watching the world.Felicia had thought he was resting. He was lying propped on two pillows with the television on the wall running the news, and a borrowed phone in his hand under the sheet, and he was reading everything this planet had to say about itself.It took him about a day and a half to understand the size of it.And the size of it was small.Earth was behind.Not a little. Not in one place. Behind in everything, the way a village is behind a capital.Their aircraft still burned fuel. Their computers answered questions the way a clever dog fetches sticks — eagerly, and wrong about a third of the time.Their medicine cut people open to find out what was inside them. There was not one machine on this whole planet that Prussia would have let into a museum.He scrolled for an hour through what this world called its best technology and put the phone face-down on his chest."Is something wrong?" Felicia asked from the chai
Chapter 769
Alexander stepped back behind Felicia.He did it the way the old Alexander would have done it — shoulders up, chin down, one hand bunched in the back of her coat like a child in a crowd.She felt the tug and spread her arms without thinking, a nineteen-year-old woman in a travelling coat trying to hide a grown man from twenty rifles.The Second Queen watched them and almost laughed.Behind Felicia's shoulder, Alexander's lips barely moved....The voice did not come from him.It came from everywhere at once, and from an inch inside every ear in the front of that hall — the Queen's, and each of the twenty men in armour — low and dry and very old."I warned this house not to let anyone enter."Twenty visors turned at the same moment."And since you have come anyway," the voice said, "you can die here."...The line of knights broke step.Not much. Half a pace. But these were palace men, picked and drilled, and half a pace from palace men is the same as a scream from anybody else."What
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