Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 150

CHAPTER 126 PART 2

He moved toward the seating area near the boutique entrance, and Nicholas Lancaster – without being asked, without any visible instruction – had already positioned a chair. The timing was so precise it could only have been deliberate. Marcus sat. Nicholas stepped back to a respectful distance.

The gesture was small. Its meaning was not.

Several of the Red Star fighters exchanged glances. The math of the corridor had been continuously revised over the last fifteen minutes, and the current calculation was not landing in their employer’s favor.

Benjamin Abbott’s composure broke along one edge.

“You think this is settled?” His voice came out louder than he intended, filling the hall with the compressed pressure of a man who had too much pride and not enough options. “Red Star Group has three hundred men in Grayson City alone. The entire fifth floor of this building is mine – every exit, every stairwell, every service corridor. You’re sitting in my building, at my table-”

“You don’t have a table,” Marcus said. “You’re standing.”

The observation landed with the quiet devastation of something true.

“Three hundred men,” Marcus continued, tilting his head as though doing arithmetic. “That’s a large number. Very impressive.” He looked at Cosmo. She was examining her nails. He looked back at Benjamin. “They’re not immortal, though. Are they.”

Benjamin opened his mouth.

“Benjamin.”

The voice came from the floor.

Dominic Allen had pushed himself into a sitting position against the boutique window, his broken wrist cradled against his chest, blood drying on his lip, one eye swollen enough to affect his peripheral vision. He looked, by any reasonable measure, like a man who had recently been through something serious. But his remaining eye was clear, and the expression in it was the specific expression of someone who had received a lesson at considerable personal cost and was attempting to transfer it at no charge.

“Stop,” Dominic said. Quietly, but with weight. “Benjamin. Stop.”

Benjamin looked at him. Something shifted in the older man’s face not softness exactly, but the particular attention paid to the words of someone who has earned the right to speak by bleeding.

“I’ve worked for you six years,” Dominic said. “In that time, I’ve told you twice that something was beyond our reach. Twice.” He paused to breathe. “I’m telling you a third time.”

The silence that followed had a different quality than the previous ones. Benjamin Abbott, for the first time since entering the corridor, was not performing.

He was listening.

Ives Abbott was not,

“Don’t you dare-” She pushed herself upright, hair destroyed, face a catalog of the last forty minutes, voice cracking with the specific frequency of someone who had confused their family’s name with personal invincibility for so long that its failure felt like a physical injury. “He’s one man. Uncle Benjamin, Riggs and Jett are down but there are still enough of us to-”

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Cosmo’s palm connected with her cheek.

The sound rang off the marble. Ives went sideways, caught herself, and sat back down with the stunned expression of someone who keeps expecting the universe to intervene and keeps being disappointed.

Cosmo lowered her hand without hurrying. She glanced at Benjamin.

Benjamin Abbott watched his niece sprawled on the Crystal Plaza floor and said nothing. His hands were at his sides. The fury in his chest was enormous and entirely without a functional outlet.

He looked at Marcus Steel.

Marcus was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, entirely relaxed, watching Benjamin with the attentive calm of someone who had already read this particular chapter and knew how it ended.

“What do you want?” Benjamin said. The words came out flat. It was not quite surrender, but it had surrender’s handwriting.

Marcus uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes level and unimpressed.

“Your niece came up to my wife,” he said, “and decided she needed to be put in her place. Then she tried to put her hands on her and got blocked. Then she cried about it.” He gestured mildly at Wesley, still kneeling and bleeding nearby. “Then this one held up a phone like a weapon because his own fists weren’t working. Then you arrived with a small army and your best fighter-” A brief look toward Dominic, “—who is currently sitting against that wall trying not to move his wrist.” He paused. “And now you want to negotiate.”

Benjamin said nothing.

“Here’s my issue,” Marcus said. “You didn’t come here to talk. You came here to bury someone. You just couldn’t decide the body count.” He sat back. “People who negotiate only after they’ve lost don’t actually want to negotiate. They want a pause.”

The Red Star Group fighters were very still.

Benjamin Abbott stood in the center of the corridor with twelve men who could no longer help him, an enforcer who had told him to stop, a niece bleeding on the floor, and a man sitting in a chair who was less concerned about the outcome of this conversation than he was about the quality of the chair.

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