Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 148

CHAPTER 125 PART 3

He had not been there a moment ago. Benjamin hadn’t seen him move. No one in the corridor had seen him move – not the Red Star fighters raising their arms, not Nicholas Lancaster against the column, not the mall employee still frozen at the corridor’s end. One moment Marcus had been eight feet away. Now he was close enough that Benjamin could see the exact shade of his eyes, and the quality of the stillness in them was not the stillness of someone calm.

It was the stillness of something very old deciding not to hurry.

Benjamin’s command died in his throat.

Marcus’s hand closed around Benjamin Abbott’s collar – one hand, unhurried, fingers not even fully clenched- and lifted.

Benjamin Abbott’s feet left the marble floor.

He weighed two hundred and ten pounds. He had not been physically lifted by another human being since he was four years old. The shock of it – the sheer mechanical impossibility of the casual ease with which it was happening – overrode every other response his nervous system was attempting to generate. His hands went to Marcus’s wrist by reflex and found nothing to work with. The grip was not tight. It didn’t need to be.

Something moved behind Marcus. Dominic Allen, operating on the last reserves of professional obligation, had pushed himself upright and was moving forward with his good arm raised, angling for Marcus’s blind side.

Marcus’s free hand came back without him turning his head.

The back of his fist connected with Dominic’s temple with a force so precisely calibrated that it neither shattered anything nor left him conscious. Dominic Allen folded sideways and stayed folded. His men stared at the space where their enforcer had been standing.

Marcus hadn’t looked.

He turned his attention back to Benjamin Abbott, still suspended, feet still off the floor, face cycling through colors.

“Your family is strong,” Marcus said conversationally. “Five-River Province. Real estate. Hospitality. I’ve heard the name.” He tilted his head slightly. “Outside Grayson City, you’re formidable. Inside it-“He let the sentence end there. “You have one call. Think carefully before you make it.”

He set Benjamin down.

Benjamin Abbott’s legs held him, barely. He straightened his collar with hands that were not entirely steady, and the breath he drew was longer and slower than he would have preferred. Around him, twelve fighters stood in arrangements of varying paralysis. Ives was silent on the floor. Wesley hadn’t moved.

Benjamin’s mind worked through its inventory.

The Grayson City contacts – most of them were commercial relationships, not enforcement relationships. The Red Star Group’s real muscle was in Five-River Province, two hours away. He had twelve men here and two of them were unconscious and one was trying to quietly hold her face together.

One name surfaced.

Aaron Jackson. Undisputed authority over Grayson City’s underworld infrastructure. The man who had, by most reliable accounts, arranged every major territorial decision in Grayson City for the last six years. If anyone could apply immediate force in this mall on thirty minutes’ notice, it was Aaron Jackson.

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Benjamin pulled out his phone with a steadiness he did not entirely feel and dialed.

It rang twice.

“Jackson.” The voice on the other end was casual, unhurried – a man answering a call he hadn’t particularly anticipated but wasn’t surprised by.

“Jackson.” Benjamin turned slightly away from Marcus, his voice dropping into the register of a man issuing a consequence rather than requesting a favor. “I’m at Crystal Plaza. I have a situation. There’s a man here who needs to understand what it costs to put hands on Abbott family. I need you to—”

A hand reached past his shoulder.

Fingers closed gently around the phone.

Marcus Steel took it from him with the same ease he might take a pen from a desk and raised it to his own ear. His dragon eyes held a quality Benjamin Abbott had not seen in them before – something that was not aggression and not amusement but lived in the narrow space between them, ancient and entirely comfortable.

“Aaron,” Marcus said.

A pause on the line.

Then Aaron Jackson’s voice came back, all of its casualness stripped away in a single syllable.

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