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Chapter 705
The knock came at nine, and it wasn't a knock. It was the front doors of Rydell House hitting the wall hard enough to crack a hinge.Rael was in the study with the ledgers. He heard boots on the entry marble — eight men, maybe ten, moving in the drilled rhythm that meant warrant. Four seconds to decide who he was going to be.He chose grief.By the time the first knight reached the study door, he was on his feet, dressing gown half-tied, face already arranged. "What in the name of the Nine—" He let his voice crack. "Is it Febyella? Have you found her? Tell me you've found her.""Rael Rydell." The Commander himself, gauntlets on, holding a folded warrant like something he didn't want to touch. "You're under arrest.""Arrest." He said the word like it was foreign to him. Behind the knights, his mother appeared in her nightclothes, one hand pressed to the wall beneath the portraits — four generations of Rydells in oil and gilt, all of them watching. "My niece is missing, Commander. I rep
Chapter 704
They came for Alex at dawn. Six knights of the City Watch, a warrant tile glowing official blue, and a broad-shouldered sergeant who read the charge loud enough for every neighbor on the stairwell to hear it."Alexander Leonhart. Provisional registrant. You are detained on suspicion of the abduction of Febyella Steinmeyer."Alex knew those shoulders. One week ago they had marched Feby out of a Knight Station lobby, her heels scraping tile, while an inspector buried the alley case behind them. Now the same man stood on his doorstep, performing justice for an audience.Near the back stood Dax — the young knight who had biometricked Alex into existence on his first night in this world. Dax stared at the floor. He couldn't look at the man he'd given a name to. He knew what this was.For one second, something moved behind Alex's eyes. The sergeant's hand drifted toward his baton. Then it was gone — filed, shelved — and what remained was a man in yesterday's coat studying six armed knights
Chapter 703
Across the city, Alex sat at the small table in his flat. His tea had gone cold. A magic book lay open in front of him.All morning, he had been thinking about his decision. And every way he looked at it, the answer seemed right: he should leave her.The engagement was only on paper. It was never real love.And every day he stayed, he hurt her more. Or hurt himself for lying to her.He had secretly paid 50 million dollars and arranged everything so she would be accepted and protected.She didn't know. Last night on the tram, she almost guessed it. He lied to her face, with a smile — and she believed him.That scared him. He was becoming a good liar. He didn't want to become that kind of person.So he made his list of reasons: She was safe now. She was rich. The contracts he wrote protected her. She didn't need him anymore. They were just strangers — a kind woman helped a stranger once, the stranger paid her back, and now everything was even.He repeated this to himself, again and agai
Chapter 702
"Are you the chairman of the Reagent Group?"The tram hummed. Amber rail light crossed his face — once, twice. Feby watched him the way she'd learned to watch her family: for the flicker. The skipped beat. The seam.Alex laughed.Not a performed laugh. A real one, low and easy, and it reached his eyes — and that was what cracked her certainty.Five years cataloguing liars, and not one of them had ever laughed like that."Feby." He turned to face her. "Three weeks ago I didn't legally exist. You fixed that. You, personally."He drew out his identity tile, the battered gray one, and laid it flat on his palm. Nothing up my sleeve. "Issued twenty-two days ago. Provisional class. Guaranteed by the signature of one Febyella Steinmeyer, because no bank in this city would touch a man with no past. I can't open an account without your name under mine. I couldn't rent our flat. The chairman of the Reagent Group is a sealed registry, a vault, a hundred lawyers deep."He tipped the tile toward he
Chapter 701
Rael was mid-toast when the Reagent seal came through the doors.The hall saw the gray livery before it saw the man. Four hundred people rose by inches — him, it's him, the chairman — and the orchestra scrambled for its fanfare.Then the room registered, in one long deflating rustle, that what had entered was a lawyer.Mr. Harrow walked to the foot of the stage without being invited. He opened his case on a table a waiter surrendered to him and spoke at the volume of a man who had learned that quiet reading forces a room to do its own listening."By instruction of the chairman of the Reagent Group, received this evening. Notice of termination." He lifted a single page. "The engagement for the launch campaign of the Reagent Group's forthcoming product line is hereby cancelled. Whole and entire. Effective upon this reading."The silence was total. Even the enchanted constellations seemed to slow.Marta reached the stage's edge in four steps. "Cancelled? On what grounds? We are partners.
Chapter 700
The Grand Aurelian had not seen an evening like it in thirty years, and the Grand Aurelian had seen everything.Every chandelier lit. Every leaf of the gilt doors polished.The full hall, none of the small rooms — four hundred guests under a ceiling of enchanted constellations that wheeled slowly overhead, and every one of those guests belonged to a House or a firm or a fortune that had spent the last decade declining Rydell invitations by return post.Tonight they had all come. Tonight the Rydells had the only thing in the Arcanum State worth crossing town for: the promise of a face nobody had seen.Feby stood near the foot of the hall in her pressed blouse and her mother's borrowed shawl, and watched her grandmother work the doors like a woman collecting on thirty years of debts.Every arriving House got the same radiant sentence, pitched just loudly enough to travel."—yes, tonight, here — our Febyella, the head supervisor of the Reagent Group, arranged it personally. She holds his
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very very interesting .