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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 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
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