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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
Chapter 768
Alex kept moving."It was always a choice," he said. "Be killed by him, or be killed by me. You chose him. You chose to hit me. So this is your payment.""Please. Please don't. I'm sorry—"The man turned to run. Alex took both his arms before he made the second step.And Alex kept moving.Every one of them had been part of it. The side that killed his mother. The people who had treated him like nothing for fourteen years. This was the bill for all of it."Think of it as karma," Alex said, and moved on....That night is the one nobody in that province will ever write down.Thirteen people in that castle lost both arms at the shoulder inside twenty minutes. Every one of them was alive when it happened. Every one stayed conscious for a few minutes after, screaming, shouting, trying to survive. But a human being with both arms gone does not last long. The veins pump the blood straight out.They shouted until they stopped shouting.By half past two, nothing was moving on the west side of
Chapter 767
"Please stop!"Felicia got her body across him on the floor and took the next boot on her hip and did not move off."If he dies, every single one of you in this room dies with him! Do you understand what he is? Do you understand whose son that is?"That was what stopped it.Not her crying. Not the blood. The word son.Because a prince is still a prince even when he cannot hold a spoon, and there is a difference between kicking one and having killed one, and five men found that difference somewhere around the fourth second of standing there breathing....One of them spat on the floor beside Alexander's head."For a loser like him," he said, "dead's better than alive. Everyone knows it. His own family knows it."Then Vincent came through the middle of them.He had his napkin still hanging off two fingers, and he put his boot into the side of Alexander's head one more time, unhurried, the way a man kicks a door that has been sticking."You have to learn to fear me," Vincent said. "Do yo
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