Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 161

CHAPTER 132 PART 1

The blood on Dalton Martin’s face was drying.

He was still on his knees in the cleared space beside table fourteen, and the restaurant around him had settled into the particular quality of silence that existed when a hundred and forty people had collectively decided to stop pretending they were looking at anything other than exactly what was happening.

Elize Yarrow stared at him.

Then at Marcus Steel, who had returned to his fish.

Then back at Dalton.

“I need to understand something,” she said. “He was threatening to have us removed” she gestured at the now- absent wall of leather jackets, “-thirty seconds ago. And then you said check please and he just-” She stopped.” He just did that.”

“Yes,” Marcus said.

“That’s not a complete answer.”

“It’s the whole answer.” Marcus glanced at the gold card still sitting on the table’s edge, then at Elize. “How familiar are you with Moonlight Group’s membership structure?”

Elize looked at the card. She picked it up without asking and turned it over once. Her expression changed in the specific way of someone who had just located the variable that solved the equation – the slow blink, the slight parting of the lips, the internal recalibration happening visibly behind her eyes.

“Tyler King asked Miguel Abbott three times for a diamond card,” she said slowly. “Three times over two years. He runs shipping infrastructure across the entire eastern province.” She set the card down. “This isn’t a diamond

card.”

“No,” Marcus agreed.

“This is―” She looked at it again. “Where did you get this?”

“Airport. This afternoon.”

Elize thought about the afternoon. About the arrivals hall. About Miguel Abbott’s Bentley pulling away from the curb while she and Simeon were arguing about the line for Pearl on the Water.

“The Maybach,” she said. “At the curb. Uncle Davis said it was Miguel Abbott’s car.”

Marcus said nothing.

“That was you,” Elize said.

Simeon leaned forward. “What are you two talking about?”

“He knows Miguel Abbott personally,” Elize said. “Miguel gave him the supreme card himself. Which means—” She looked at Dalton, still kneeling, dried blood on his temple and fresh blood from the bottle mixing with it in an unpleasant gradient. “Which means Dalton just spent twenty minutes threatening and harassing someone under Miguel Abbott’s direct personal protection.”

Simeon processed this, “Oh.”

“Yes,” Elize said.

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“So when Dalton saw the card he-”

“Understood exactly what he’d done, yes.”

They both looked at Dalton Martin on the floor. Dalton had the expression of a man doing ongoing mental arithmetic that kept arriving at the same deeply uncomfortable answer.

Elize stood up.

She walked to the bar. She picked up a beer bottle – one of the brown glass ones, solid and satisfying in the hand – and walked back to the space beside table fourteen. She stood over Dalton Martin. She raised the bottle.

And then she stopped.

The bottle stayed in the air.

Dalton looked up at her. His eyes were not defiant. They were not even afraid, precisely – they had passed through afraid and arrived at a kind of exhausted resignation, the expression of a man who had already accepted the outcome and simply wanted it to be over.

“Do it,” he said.

Elize’s grip shifted. Shifted back. The bottle stayed raised.

“Why aren’t you doing it?” Simeon asked.

“I’m doing it.”

“You’re holding a bottle above a man’s head.”

“I’m about to do it.”

“Elize-”

“I know what I’m doing, I’m just-” She exhaled. “I’m doing it right now. I’m about to-”

“You’re dilly-dallying,” Marcus said, without looking up.

“I am not dilly-dallying, I am preparing-”

Marcus set down his fork, stood up, stepped beside her, wrapped one hand around hers on the bottle, and brought

it down.

The crack of it across Dalton’s head was clean and immediate. Glass held. Dalton made a sound between a grunt and a sigh and pressed one hand to his skull where the impact had landed.

Marcus sat back down.

Elize stared at her hand. Then at Dalton. Then at Marcus,

“That was my moment,” she said.

“You weren’t using it,”

“I was building to it-”

“He was going to be there all night.” Marcus picked up his fork. “Sit down.”

Elize stood in the cleared space for one more second with the expression of someone who was genuinely annoyed

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and also genuinely exhilarated and was trying to decide which of those to lead with. Then she laughed short, surprised, the kind that came out before it could be curated – and sat back down.

She looked at Simeon. “Your turn.”

Simeon straightened. “Absolutely not.”

“Simeon-”

“I don’t hit people.”

“He was going to drug you,” Elize said. “Twenty minutes ago. He was going to pour something into your drink and then—” She stopped, because the full implication of the rest of that sentence was landing on her friend’s face in real time, and she watched it arrive.

Simeon looked at Dalton on the floor.

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