Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 153

CHAPTER 128 PART 1

The notification arrived four minutes and fifty-three seconds after Miguel Abbott had said done.

Quinn Hartford felt her phone vibrate against her palm. She looked down at the screen with the composed attention she brought to most things – methodical, unhurried — and then she stopped moving entirely.

The number on the screen was not the number she had been anticipating. The number on the screen was not any number she had been prepared for. She read it twice, then a third time, her Saintess aura flickering at the edges like a candle in a sudden draft.

“Quinn?” Anna leaned over her shoulder. A pause. Then: “Quinn.”

Lance pushed in from the other side. She looked at the screen. She looked at Quinn. She looked at Marcus Steel, who was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets watching Benjamin Abbott’s men assist their employer into a standing position with the detached patience of a man waiting for a crosswalk signal.

“That’s nine billion,” Lance said.

“Four,” Quinn said quietly. “The ransom was three and a half.”

“That screen says nine.”

Quinn looked at it again. The Saintess composure held, but only just, a faint warmth moving through her expression like sunlight through cloud cover. “He transferred more than agreed.”

Marcus glanced over at that. He said nothing, but something in his expression registered the number — and registered Miguel Abbott with it. The extra five billion was not carelessness. A man who moved that kind of money in under five minutes didn’t make arithmetic errors. It was a message written in the only language that crossed every cultural and territorial boundary without losing meaning.

I understand who I offended. I will not make this mistake again.

Marcus looked at Benjamin Abbott, being steadied by two of his men, face still carrying the dragon-print of the last hour. Benjamin met his eyes once and immediately looked away. Beside him, Ives was being guided toward the service corridor by a third man, her designer shoes somehow still intact through everything else that hadn’t survived the afternoon.

“Release them,” Marcus said simply.

Cosmo stepped back. The gesture was so casual it almost constituted an insult on its own- the complete absence of ceremony, the implication that holding them or releasing them were equally unremarkable outcomes.

Benjamin moved without speaking. He didn’t look back. The Red Star Group filtered out of the corridor in the controlled retreat of men who had decided that their most important professional skill at this moment was the ability to become invisible quickly.

Dominic Allen passed last. He paused at the corridor’s edge, his broken wrist immobilized against his chest, and turned back once. He looked at Cosmo for a moment with the specific expression of a man filing something away rather than resolving it.

Then he left.

The fifth floor of Crystal Plaza exhaled.

Lance turned back to the bank notification with the expression of someone who had decided that the most reasonable response to the afternoon was to locate a number she could understand and hold onto it.

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“Nine billion dollars,” she said again. “In Quinn’s account.” She looked at Marcus. “Can I be your mistress?”

“No,” Quinn said, without looking up from her phone.

“I haven’t even finished the sentence-”

“No.”

Lance pressed her lips together. “I was going to offer very competitive terms.”

“Lance.”

“Fine.” Lance sighed dramatically and looked at Anna. “We’re just going to be normal poor people forever.”

Anna was still staring at the notification. “I sold a necklace to this man for sixty thousand dollars,” she said quietly. “Sixty thousand. I thought I’d done well.”

Quinn finally put her phone away. The composure was fully restored, the brief warmth tucked back behind its usual distance. She looked at Marcus with the particular quality of attention she reserved for things she had questions about but had chosen not to ask immediately.

Marcus read it anyway.

“The extra money isn’t aggression,” he said. “It’s the opposite.” He turned slightly toward the window at the corridor’s far end, the afternoon light falling across Crystal Plaza’s atrium below. “Miguel Abbott is a businessman before he’s anything else. He ran the numbers. What I’ve done in Grayson City in the last few months – the Brand Family, the Potter situation, what happened to the Ridge Family.” He paused. “He doesn’t want to be next on the list. The five billion is an opening handshake.”

Quinn was quiet for a moment. “And if it isn’t? If his family decides that what happened today requires a different kind of response once you’re not standing in front of them?”,

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