2024-09-14 00:02:54Sophia scoffed.
"Do you really think bargaining will make you worth millions?"
“That price doesn’t even scratch the surface of my value,” Alex replied with a wink.
“But seeing how eager you are, I decide not to make it too difficult for you. I’ll offer a 99.99999999999999999% discount, so it will be just one hundred thousand. How about it?”
Alex chuckled inwardly.
&nb
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Chapter 777
There is a story they tell in the villages of the south, about the most romantic couple anybody ever knew.They had been married fifty-five years.Everybody in the district knew them. They walked to anywhere arm in arm, they sat on the same bench outside the bakery every morning, and when the regional paper wanted a feature on lasting love, it was always their door the reporter knocked on.And every time, the wife said the same thing."We're a happy couple. My husband is so kind to me. Fifty-five years, and he has never once raised his voice. He helps me with everything. Always romantic." She would put her hand over his on the table."And if there's an afterlife, I'll marry him again. I want to be his wife there too."The husband never said anything.He only sat beside her, and smiled, and nodded.The reporter came back the next day, and the wife had gone into town for the market, and the old man was sitting on the bench by himself.The reporter sat down next to him with his notebook.
Chapter 776
The Hall of Council went so silent you could hear the rain on the gallery windows three storeys up.The Minister of the Interior was still on one knee in front of the throne.He stayed there for a moment longer than he meant to, and in that moment every man in the room watched him understand it.He had stood up and asked for Harland. Then he had chased a prince down the middle of the floor.Then he had asked the Emperor to put that prince on a scaffold.And now there was a ghost in the room that wanted his head, and the only thing standing between the Second Queen and her grave was whether the Emperor was willing to hand it over.He had dug the hole himself, one shovel at a time, in front of witnesses.There was no way out of it.They had wanted to take everything from him, and he had turned around and hit them exactl
Chapter 775
"Your Majesty."The voice came from the left side of the floor, and every head in the Hall of Council turned toward it, because everybody knew which side of the floor that was.There were three factions in that room, and there had been for twenty years.The First Queen's people sat on the right, under the green standards.The Second Queen's sat on the left, under the gold. And in the middle, in the plain seats nearest the throne, sat the ones who belonged to nobody — the career men, the old families, the ministers who served the Emperor and whoever came after him and had very carefully never been seen to prefer a prince.It was the left side that stood up first.The Minister of the Interior came down onto the black stone with his hands folded in front of him."Your Majesty, the Second Queen's household is prepared to be generous." He turned his palms up."We will agree to restore the Tenth Prince to the line of succession. Whatever this council struck from the record, let it be writte
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
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It is an interesting nov l.