Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 168

CHAPTER 136 PART 2

Elize Yarrow drew back her hand and slapped Atlas Lancaster across the face.

The sound of it filled Pearl on the Water’s thirty-second floor the way sounds filled enclosed spaces when nobody was making any competing noise – completely, immediately, with the kind of clarity that made every person in the room flinch and then go very still.

Atlas’s head turned with the impact. His hand came up to his face. He stood for one breath in the specific suspension of a man whose brain was processing an input it had never once anticipated.

Then he looked at her.

His eyes were not performing anything.

“You have no idea-” he started.

Elize picked up the beer bottle from the nearest table.

The man whose beer it was had already relocated himself three tables away. He watched her take it with the expression of someone who had made peace with the loss.

She brought it down on Atlas Lancaster’s head.

Not with the hesitation she’d shown with Dalton – that indecision was gone, burned out by everything the last twenty minutes had deposited in its place. This was committed and clean, and the bottle connected with the top of his skull and the glass held and Atlas Lancaster’s knees buckled and he went into the table behind him, sending glasses sideways across the tablecloth.

The four young elites at the corner table were on their feet.

The forty men in the perimeter were in motion.

Rafferty’s voice cut through the noise: take them, both of them, now—

Atlas Lancaster straightened from the table he’d caught himself on, one hand on his head, blood beginning its work at his hairline. His other hand was moving toward the exit – the instinct of a man in pain seeking distance – and he was calculating, even through the impact, because that was what Atlas Lancaster did, he calculated, and the calculation said get out, regroup, bring more—

Marcus’s hand moved.

The chopsticks came off the table in the same fluid economy of motion as the fork – no wind-up, no

and they left his fingers and covered the distance to Atlas Lancaster’s thigh and drove into the lateral muscle above the knee with dragon-precise placement, deep enough to find the nerve cluster that lived there and introduce itself comprehensively.

Atlas Lancaster went down.

Not forward, not sideways – straight down, the specific collapse of a leg that had received information it couldn’t process and had simply stopped participating. He hit the floor on his hands and one knee, the other leg extended at the angle the chopsticks had negotiated for it, and the sound he made was not dignified.

The room had been moving. Now it stopped.

Rafferty stood at the perimeter with his forty men and looked at the floor where one of Four Young Masters of Five -River Province was located, and then at the man sitting at table fourteen with an empty wine glass and the calm

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expression of someone who had ordered dessert and was still waiting.

“Call them off,” Marcus said.

Rafferty said nothing.

“Or don’t,” Marcus said. He looked at the window. The harbor lights were unchanged. “It’s a fast evening either way.”

Elize Yarrow stood in the center of the cleared space with the beer bottle still in her hand, breathing through her nose, watching Atlas Lancaster on the floor of Pearl on the Water’s thirty-second floor with the specific expression of a woman who had just made a decision that was going to change the shape of her life entirely.

She looked at Marcus.

“You said business,” she said.

“Yes,” Marcus said.

“Is this part of it?”

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