Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 163

CHAPTER 133 PART 1

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Atlas Lancaster had excellent posture.

It was the kind of thing that became noticeable when everything else about a person was being carefully managed the straight spine, the squared shoulders, the chin at a precise and practiced angle. He had pulled a chair to the edge of table fourteen with the smooth entitlement of someone who had never been told a table wasn’t available to him, and he sat with the specific quality of a man who was performing relaxation rather than experiencing it.

He looked at Marcus Steel.

Marcus was looking at the harbor.

“I feel like we got off on the wrong foot,” Atlas said. His tone carried the warmth of someone who had decided that charm was the correct instrument for this situation. “I’m Atlas Lancaster. Given that you’re clearly someone worth knowing in this province, I think—”

“Are you talking to me?” Marcus said.

“I—yes.”

“I thought so.” Marcus turned from the window. He looked at Atlas with the mild attention of someone identifying a sound they hadn’t been able to place. “You can stop.”

Atlas’s smile held. “I just thought, since we’re at the same table—”

“We’re not at the same table,” Marcus said. “You pulled a chair over. That’s different.” He looked at the chair. Then at Atlas. “What do you actually want?”

The smile thinned by one degree. “I wanted to introduce myself properly. Given that you’re sitting with my fiancée, it seemed-”

“Brother,” Atlas tried, leaning forward slightly with the specific energy of someone attempting a social reset. “I think if we just-”

Marcus looked at him.

“Brother,” Marcus repeated. The word came back out in a register that had nothing to do with warmth. He tilted his head. “Why do you keep calling strangers brother? Did something happen to you as a child? Were you deprived of love? Do you need someone to call? There are services for that.”

The table went silent.

Elize Yarrow made a sound that she converted at the last second into a cough, pressing her knuckles against her mouth. Beside her, Simeon King looked at the ceiling with the focused intensity of someone trying very hard not to contribute to an atmosphere.

Atlas Lancaster’s excellent posture became, for approximately two seconds, slightly less excellent.

“That’s “He stopped, Reset. The smile came back, but it was operating on backup power now. “That was unnecessary.”

“Probably,” Marcus agreed, and turned back to the harbor.

Atlas sat in the specific silence of a man who had walked into a social environment with a complete plan and was now holding the plan’s pieces and trying to determine which order they were supposed to go in. At the corner table, his friends were watching with the particular attention of people who had front-row tickets to something

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they hadn’t expected.

Marcus looked at the empty chair on his left. Then, apparently arriving at a conclusion through some internal logic that he didn’t announce, he looked at Elize.

“Your engagement,” he said. “It’s arranged.”

Elize’s expression shifted. “Yes.”

“You don’t want it.”

“No.”

Marcus considered this for a moment with the unhurried calm of a man doing arithmetic. “Then you have a girlfriend,” he said.

Elize blinked. “I have a-what?”

“A girlfriend,” Marcus said. “Someone you’re seeing. Which is why the engagement doesn’t work.” He glanced at Atlas, then back at Elize, and the quality of the glance was the complete communication: you can use this or not. Your decision.

He expected her to hesitate. To weigh it. To maybe offer a tentative performance that bought them both a few

minutes of social cover.

Elize Yarrow stood up.

She crossed the three feet between her chair and Marcus’s with the deliberate, unhurried stride of someone who had made a decision and was executing it with complete commitment. She reached the chair where Marcus sat. She put one hand on his shoulder.

And then she sat down on his lap, turned into his chest, and said, “Darling. I was wondering when you’d say something.”

The table went completely still.

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