Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 145

CHAPTER 124 PART 2

Beside him, Ives Abbott sat with her back against the boutique window, arms wrapped around her knees. Her face had not fared well. The left side was swollen and discolored, a thin line of blood tracing from the corner of her mouth. Her hair — formerly the kind of glossy that required professional maintenance – had not survived Cosmo’s handling intact. She stared straight ahead with the particular expression of someone assembling their fury into a shape they could use later.

“You’re finished,” she said, very quietly. “All of you. When my uncle gets here—”

Cosmo crouched in front of her.

Ives flinched before the hand even moved.

“Keep going,” Cosmo said pleasantly. “Tell me more about your uncle,”

Ives pressed her lips together.

“That’s what I thought.”

Wesley had been scanning the far end of the corridor every thirty seconds with the desperate frequency of a man expecting rescue. His hands were still shaking when he leaned toward Ives. “I sent the video,” he whispered. ” Benjamin will come. He always comes.”

“He’d better come fast,” Ives murmured back. Her voice was steady again, whatever internal resource she ran on restoring itself through sheer spite. “Because when he does, every single person in this corridor is going to wish they’d never learned my name.”

The sound reached them before the people did.

It was organized — not the shuffle of a crowd but the rhythm of men moving in formation, the kind of footstep pattern that announced itself on purpose. Heads turned toward the mall’s south entrance corridor. Nicholas Lancaster’s remaining men straightened without being told.

Then Benjamin Abbott walked into the light.

He was in his mid-fifties, built like someone who had once been physically imposing and had simply never stopped being so. Gray at the temples, tailored charcoal suit, the kind of face that had long ago settled into permanent dissatisfaction. He moved through the corridor with ten men flanking him and Dominic Allen two steps behind, and the space rearranged itself around his arrival the way spaces did around men who had never once been refused anything on their home territory.

“Uncle Benjamin-”

Ives’s voice broke on the second word.

He was across the corridor in six strides, hands on her face, eyes moving over the damage with an expression that went very, very quiet. The quiet was worse than noise. Benjamin Abbott enraged was a liability. Benjamin Abbott quiet was something that ended careers and occasionally people.

He straightened slowly.

–

His gaze moved across the corridor across Wesley’s ruined face, across Cosmo standing with relaxed hands, across Nicholas Lancaster near the column- and landed nowhere in particular, which was more threatening than if it had landed somewhere specific.

Dominic Allen stepped past him and stopped.

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“Lancaster.” He said it like a fact. “What are you doing here?”

Nicholas went very still.

Benjamin turned. He studied Nicholas with the particular attention of a man recalculating a familiar equation and arriving at an unexpected result. The Lancaster name still meant something in Grayson City, even diminished. Its presence here raised questions Benjamin hadn’t anticipated.

“Nicholas Lancaster,” Benjamin said, slowly. “Someone want to explain to me why you’re standing twenty feet from my niece’s blood?”

“He was with them,” Ives said from the floor, her voice sharpening back into its natural register now that her uncle was present. “He brought men. He ordered his people to hold us here.”

Nicholas opened his mouth.

“That’s not-” he started.

“He’s lying,” Wesley added helpfully, from his position still kneeling on the floor. A trickle of blood ran past his jaw. “Lancaster set the whole thing up. His men held us. His people blocked the exits.”

Nicholas turned toward Wesley with an expression of genuine disbelief.

Benjamin didn’t wait for the rebuttal. He nodded once at Dominic, and the Red Star Group men moved. Six of them fanned out in a perimeter around Nicholas’s position. Nicholas’s own guards tensed, hands moving toward jacket interiors, and for three seconds the corridor held the specific charge of a situation that could go irreversibly wrong.

Nicholas raised one hand.

His men went still.

“This has nothing to do with me,” Nicholas said, carefully and clearly. “I was here accompanying someone else. Whatever happened to your niece was not my call and not my doing.”

Then whose call was it?” Benjamin’s voice was very flat. “Because somebody in this corridor decided to put their hands on an Abbott. And somebody is going to account for that. So I’ll ask one more time, Lancaster – who gave the order?”

The silence lasted two seconds.

“I did.”

Marcus Steel stepped forward.

He came from the right side of the corridor where he had been standing with the unremarkable patience of someone watching a mildly interesting situation resolve itself. He moved without urgency, stopped at a distance that was neither confrontational nor retreating, and looked at Benjamin Abbott with the same expression he’d worn throughout – calm, present, entirely undisturbed.

“I gave the order,” Marcus repeated. “Leave Nicholas out of it.”

Benjamin Abbott looked at him.

He took his time about it – the full assessment of a powerful man encountering something he hadn’t expected and trying to categorize it. Mid-thirties. No visible security. No uniform markers of institutional money. Standing beside Quinn Hartford, who Benjamin vaguely recognized from regional business coverage, which meant—

“You’re one of Lancaster’s people?” Benjamin said.

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Nicholas made a sound that he converted at the last second into a cough.

“No,” Marcus said.

“Then who are you?”

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