Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 179

CHAPTER 142 PART 1

The harbor district was quiet by the time Marcus finished with the last team.

Four teams in total. The eastern approach Red Widow had handled – he knew this because two of them had been found exactly where she’d said they’d be, and found in the specific way she worked, which left nothing uncertain. The harbor flank had been his, and the harbor flank had been straightforward in the way that things were straightforward when the person on the receiving end operated several categories above the people delivering the problem.

The fourth team had simply not been where their information said they’d be, which meant they’d received the signal about the first three and had made a professional reassessment. That was fine. Retreating professionals were less immediately dangerous than advancing ones, and whatever they reported back to whoever had deployed them was useful information regardless of its content.

Marcus Steel is in Five-River Province. The kill order is live. Eight people went in and the number that came out was smaller.

He walked back through the Elmsgate District as the harbor district’s overnight logistics resumed around him with the indifferent continuity of work that didn’t stop for human complications.

His phone showed two messages from Miguel Abbott – teams encountered at hotel, security handled, no casualties on our side and one from a number he’d given Truman Ridge six hours ago, before leaving Grayson City, because some meetings required advance scheduling even when the person you were meeting had spent thirty years waiting for them.

The message said: The house is ready. Come when you’re finished.

The Ridge Family’s Five-River Province villa was not the compound Marcus had visited in Grayson City.

That one had been the ancestral seat, the mountain estate, the place where the family kept its history and its pride and where Cosmo had introduced sixty of their guards to the permanent consequences of institutional forgetting. This one was operational — a working residence in Five-River Province’s northern residential district, walled, staffed, and lit at every perimeter point with the cautious energy of a household that had recently received news from home and was still processing its implications.

The guards at the gate saw Marcus Steel and the gate opened before he reached it.

He walked through. Across the courtyard. Into the main building where Truman Ridge was waiting in the study with the posture of a man who had been sitting upright for two hours and had not permitted himself to relax into the chair.

Truman Ridge was eighty-one years old. He had the specific quality of very old men who had survived everything they’d been through by understanding, at a cellular level, the hierarchy of the world they lived in. His eyes, when Marcus entered, went immediately to the floor – not fully, not the prostrated submission of someone breaking

but the direction of a man who knew exactly who he was looking at and wanted that knowledge to be visible.

“Holy Master,” Truman said.

“Sit,” Marcus said,

He took the chair across from the old man and looked at him with the patient attention of someone conducting an assessment they had already partially completed.

“Finnian,” Marcus said.

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Truman’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”

“He’s not fit to lead the family.”

“No,” Truman said. “He isn’t.”

“You know this.”

“I have known it for several years.” The old man’s voice carried the specific weight of a patriarch who had loved someone past the point of honest assessment and had arrived, late, at the cost of that love. “I hoped that his position would – that the responsibility would-”

“It didn’t,” Marcus said.

“No.”

Marcus looked at the study’s single window, which faced the northern residential district’s tree line. “The Ridge Family continues,” he said. “Under different terms than what Finnian assumed.” He turned back. “You’ll identify the next capable person in the lineage. Someone who understands what the family owes and why. That person leads.”

Truman absorbed this with the careful attention of someone receiving a judgment that was considerably more merciful than the one they had been preparing for.

“Thank you,” he said. Quietly. Without performance.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Marcus said. “I’m in Five-River Province to build something. The Ridge Family’s continued existence is connected to whether that building goes according to plan.” He leaned forward. “I need a foundation. A physical one. Something already established in this province that doesn’t require construction time.”

Truman was already reaching for the folder on the table beside his chair.

“I acquired it eleven years ago,” he said, setting it in front of Marcus. “When the province’s financial district began its second expansion. The original owner needed to liquidate quickly and the price reflected that.” He opened the folder. “I didn’t know then what I was preserving it for. But I kept it.” He looked at Marcus. “Some part of me always expected you would come here eventually.”

Marcus looked at the documents.

The Willson Building. Forty-two floors, harbor-facing, currently operating as mixed commercial tenancy with three anchor tenants on the lower floors and fourteen upper floors that had been held vacant for a decade under a holding company registered to a subsidiary that traced, eventually, to Ridge Family assets. It sat in the center of Five-River Province’s commercial district with the settled confidence of a building that had outlasted every economic cycle around it and was still standing at the center of everything.

Marcus closed the folder.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

Truman exhaled – the specific exhale of a man setting down something he’d been holding for eleven years.

Three attempts came that night.

The first arrived at two in the morning-four men over the south perimeter wall, disciplined spacing, good equipment. Marcus heard them on the gravel twelve seconds before they reached the building and met the first one at the corner with the dragon efficiency of someone for whom the encounter was less a fight than a series of administrative decisions. The other three reconsidered their profession and the south perimeter wall proved to be

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444 TUR 140 PART 1

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