Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 146

CHAPTER 125 PART 1

The word left Benjamin Abbott’s mouth and Dominic Allen was already moving.

He crossed the corridor in four strides toward Ives, reaching to pull her clear before whatever was about to happen happened around her. It was the trained instinct of a man who had spent fifteen years managing violence professionally-extract the principal, then engage the problem.

He didn’t look at Cosmo.

That was his first mistake.

The kick came from his left with no warning and no sound except the displacement of air a compressed, whipping force that passed close enough to his ear that he felt it before he heard it. Dominic’s head snapped sideways on pure reflex and he dropped into a defensive crouch, one arm raising, the other planting – and the follow-through of Cosmo’s heel grazed his forearm with enough transferred force to push him back three full steps across the marble floor.

He caught himself against the boutique display case.

The store behind him rattled.

Dominic Allen stood very still for exactly two seconds. Then he straightened, adjusted his footing, and looked at Cosmo with an expression that had never once appeared on his face during the previous twenty minutes.

Actual attention.

Behind him, his Red Star fighters had started forward. He raised one fist without turning around. They stopped. “Hold,” he said quietly.

Benjamin Abbott’s brow drew together. “Dominic-”

“Hold.” He said it again, the same flat register, his eyes still on Cosmo. The calculation behind them was visible to anyone who knew what to look for – the rapid reassessment of a fighter who had just felt the weight class shift beneath him. “She’s not regular.”

Cosmo tilted her head. She looked genuinely entertained.

“Took you that long to figure that out?” She rolled her wrist loosely, watching him. “I barely touched you. If I’d wanted to take your ear off, you’d be bleeding right now.”

A ripple of tension moved through the Red Star men. They understood their enforcer’s reputation. They had watched Dominic work. The woman standing across from him weighed a hundred and twenty pounds and had

barely moved, and Dominic Allen – who had not publicly acknowledged a threat in three years was currently standing with his weight shifted to his back foot.

That meant something.

Benjamin understood it too. He had recruited Dominic from a world that most people in Grayson City didn’t know existed – the shadow networks, the bounty circuits, the underground fighting hierarchies that decided quietly which men in any given city were actually dangerous. Dominic’s file, if such a thing existed in any official capacity, would have listed accomplishments that polite society didn’t discuss. When someone like that treated a woman in a shopping mall with genuine caution, it was not a performance.

“Who trained you?” Dominic asked.

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Cosmo smiled and said nothing.

The silence was its own answer, and whatever conclusion Dominic drew from it landed on his face as something close to recognition.

“Shadow Warrior?” he said.

“Former,” she said pleasantly. “I have a better employer now.’

Benjarnin’s patience expired, “Dominic. There are twelve of us and two of them. Stop analyzing and—”

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