Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 164

CHAPTER 134 PART 2

“Then put your arm somewhere convincing.” She settled against his chest with the comfort of someone who had decided that if she was committing to a performance, she was going to give it everything. “Atlas is watching.”

Marcus’s arm settled at the back of the chair, and the overall picture presented to the restaurant — to Atlas Lancaster specifically – was of two people who had been in this arrangement for considerably longer than this evening.

Atlas Lancaster was gripping the edge of the table.

Not visibly, not in any way that his training would permit to show, but the knuckles were making decisions that his composure hadn’t approved.

From the corner table, his friends were no longer pretending to eat,

Haddon Mitchell, who had arrived from up north as Atlas’s guest and who operated under the impression that his family’s regional influence in northern Five-River Province constituted a general license to behave however he liked, leaned over to Atlas and said something. Atlas’s jaw moved. Mitchell nodded once with the decisive energy of someone who had identified a problem and selected an instrument.

He stood up.

Mitchell was the kind of person whose physical presence was organized around communicating that he took up space intentionally. He wore his suit jacket open, a lit cigar between two fingers, and he crossed the restaurant floor with his chin at the specific angle of someone who expected the room to adjust to him rather than the other way around.

He stopped at table fourteen and looked at Marcus with the expression of someone examining something they found beneath their usual standards of attention.

“Hey.” He pointed the cigar. “You. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t need to. But that girl sitting on your lap belongs to Atlas Lancaster, and whatever you think you’re doing tonight, you need to understand—” He tilted the cigar over Marcus’s head and flicked the ash deliberately, “—that there are people in this province you do not want to bother.”

The ash fell.

Or it would have.

Marcus’s hand moved.

It was not a large motion. It covered perhaps eight inches of space. But it happened between one moment and the next with the dragon-enhanced speed of something that operated outside the normal processing window of human perception, and what it did in that space was: intercept Mitchell’s hand, locate the specific finger holding the cigar, and apply pressure in the direction that finger was not designed to travel.

The crack was small and precise.

Mitchell’s face went through surprise, incomprehension, and agony in approximately half a second. The cigar left his fingers. Marcus caught it without looking a clean catch, two fingers, the same casual motion as picking up a pen- and in the same unbroken movement reached up and placed it, burning end leading, between Mitchell’s open lips.

Mitchell’s own forward lean did the rest.

The sound he made was not a word. It was the sound of a man whose tongue had just received information it

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hadn’t consented to and was transmitting that information to every available nerve at once. He folded. His knees went. He hit the floor beside the table with one hand pressed to his mouth, eyes streaming, making a series of sounds that contained no consonants.

The restaurant watched.

Marcus looked at the empty space where Mitchell had been standing. Then at Atlas Lancaster. His expression had not changed by any measurable degree throughout the entire sequence.

“Your friend needs water,” Marcus said.

Atlas stood up from his chair.

His excellent posture was back, and beneath it was something that wasn’t performing anymore – the genuine, cold, structural fury of a man who had been humiliated on his own territory in front of his own people and was now doing the rapid arithmetic of response options.

“Rafferty,” he said, to the air beside him.

A man materialized. Compact, quiet, the specific quality of someone whose job was to receive instructions and produce outcomes.

Atlas said something to him in a low voice. Rafferty nodded and moved toward the exit.

Atlas turned. He looked at the corner table. “Simeon.”

Simeon King looked up.

“Your brother’s downstairs,” Atlas said, and his voice had recovered its smooth surface. “I had someone let him know you were here. He’s waiting.” A pause. “You can go. I have no issue with the King family.”

Simeon looked at Elize. The look was comprehensive – it contained concern, a question, an apology, and the acknowledgment that she had no leverage to change what was about to happen.

Elize gave her a small nod.

Simeon stood, collected her bag, and paused at the table’s edge. She looked at Marcus Steel once – the full look, the one she’d been assembling all evening from the airport advertisement and the supreme card and the cigar and Mitchell still semi-conscious on the floor – and whatever conclusion she arrived at lived in her expression for one visible second before she tucked it away.

She left without another word.

The restaurant had thinned around table fourteen with the organic instinct of people who recognized a perimeter.

Atlas stood on one side of it. Marcus sat on the other, Elize occupying his space with the committed energy of someone who had burned the boat and was now entirely on the island.

“Pour me some wine,” Marcus said,

Elize reached for the bottle without hesitation, filled his glass, then filled her own from the same pour, held it up toward Atlas in a small, deliberate toast, and drank.

Atlas’s eye twitched.

Marcus lifted his glass. Set it down. Looked at the harbor with the expression of a man who found the view more interesting than his current company.

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