Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 158

CHAPTER 130 PART 2

Elize picked up the menu. Simeon picked up the menu. The table settled into the particular quiet of three people who had arrived at the same location by different routes and were still working out what to do about it. The food, when Elize glanced at what Marcus was eating, looked considerably better than anything she’d had all day.

“It’s good,” Marcus said, without looking up. “The bass.”

Elize opened her mouth. Closed it. Ordered the bass.

The man arrived twenty minutes later.

He came from the bar area, which was visible from table fourteen through a half-partition of frosted glass, and he brought with him three companions whose primary quality was that they occupied space aggressively — wide stances, leather jackets in a room full of tailoring, the practiced physicality of people whose job description involved being noticed as a warning.

He was mid-forties, dressed expensively in the way of someone who had learned what expensive looked like from a catalog rather than from experience, and he moved through the restaurant with the easy confidence of a man who ate here regularly and had never once been asked to leave.

He sat down next to Elize without being invited.

Not across from her. Next to her. Close enough that she had to shift her chair sideways.

“You looked lonely over here,” he said, with the particular smile of someone who had used that line before and found it effective.

“We’re not lonely,” Elize said flatly. “We’re dining. Leave.”

“I can get you a better table. Private room, harbor view, better menu.” He didn’t look at Marcus. “Your friend too, obviously.”

“We have a table,” Simeon said, with the tight precision of someone making a final statement. “We don’t want a better one. We want you to go.”

He laughed. Not a response to anything funny – the laugh of someone performing comfort with a situation that wasn’t comfortable for anyone else at the table. He reached forward and lifted the wine bottle that a waiter had delivered moments earlier, pouring two glasses without asking.

“Relax,” he said. “Drink something. The night’s better when you stop being difficult.”

“I’m not drinking that,” Simeon said.

“Why not? It’s good wine.”

“Because a stranger poured it without asking and I don’t drink things poured by strangers who sat down without being invited.” Simeon pushed the glass back across the table with two fingers, the motion of someone removing something that had no business being where it was. “I’m very clear on this.”

He looked at Elize. “Your friend’s tense.” He smiled again. “Come on. One drink.”

Elize looked at the glass. Then at his companions, still flanking the table in their wide-stance configuration. Then at the exit, which was not close.

She reached for the glass.

“It’s drugged.”

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Marcus said it without raising his voice, without looking up from his plate, without any particular emphasis. A statement of fact delivered with the same register as a weather observation.

The table went completely still.

The man’s smile didn’t disappear – it changed. Curdled, rearranging itself into something less practiced and more honest. His eyes moved to Marcus for the first time, performing the same quick assessment that people always performed when they finally decided to look at him, and arriving at a conclusion that made his jaw tighten.

“Who asked you,” the man said.

Marcus looked at him. The dragon eyes were perfectly level.

“Get out,” the man said, his voice dropping. “Right now. Take a walk. The ladies and I are having a private conversation and you’re-”

“The drink is drugged,” Marcus said again. Calmly. To Elize, not to the man. “Don’t touch it.”

Elize stared at the glass. Then at the man beside her. Something moved across her face – the specific transition of a person who has just understood something and found the understanding enraging.

She picked up the glass.

“Hey-” the man started.

She threw the wine into his face.

It wasn’t a splash – it was a full, committed throw, the entire contents of the glass, and it covered him from his hairline to his collar. He sat for one breath in the silence of someone processing an outcome that hadn’t been in his planning.

Then he stood up, and his face was not performing anymore.

“You stupid little-” His hand came up.

Marcus Steel stood.

The motion was not rushed. It had the quality of something inevitable rather than reactive – a tide arriving, an outcome completing itself. He rose from his chair in the time it took the man’s arm to reach its apex, and the slap he delivered to the side of the man’s face landed with dragon-enhanced force before the man’s hand had finished its arc.f

The sound cut through every conversation in the restaurant’s northwest section.

The man’s head snapped sideways. His feet left the floor by half an inch. He hit the partition between tables with his shoulder and slid down it with the graceless momentum of something that had been moving in one direction and been redirected by something considerably more substantial.

Marcus stood in the silence that followed, utterly still, his dragon aura pressed against the edges of his composure like light behind a shade.

He looked down at the man on the floor with the expression of someone who had handled a minor interruption and was now waiting to see if there were further interruptions that required the same treatment.

The three companions by the table had not moved.

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at 131 AR11

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