Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 180

CHAPTER 142 PART 2

The morning was clear and bright in Five- River Province’s way – the harbor catching early light at an angle that Grayson City’s inland position never quite managed, the air carrying the salt of a coast that had been awake for hours already.

Marcus walked out of the villa’s front gate at seven in the morning in a clean jacket.

Truman Ridge watched from the study window with the expression of a man watching the tide come in.

The residential district’s northern walking path ran parallel to the harbor’s inland waterway – a maintained greenway where the district’s residents walked their dogs and ran their morning routes and performed the specific social theater of people who lived in expensive addresses and wanted each other to know they were the kind of people who exercised outdoors.

Marcus walked it alone. His dragon senses were at full extension, mapping the radius in all directions with the quiet efficiency of something that had been doing this for a long time and found it no more demanding than breathing.

He sensed the old man at sixty feet.

He was jogging. Seventies, apparently — the kind of slow, careful jog that that age produced in people who still insisted on it, slightly bent forward, feet not quite clearing the path surface with every stride. He wore a gray tracksuit and a cap against the morning light, and beside him, on a long lead, an energetic terrier was conducting its own investigation of the path’s margins.

Marcus watched him approach with the dragon’s complete awareness.

The gait was wrong. Not the jog – the jog was convincingly imprecise, the right kind of uneven for a seventy-year

old on a morning route. The weight distribution was wrong. The specific quality of someone who had been trained to disguise their center of gravity and was disguising it almost perfectly, but not quite. And the dog-

The dog’s lead was too short for a genuine walk. Its movements were controlled in a way that didn’t match an animal following its own curiosity. And underneath the animal sounds it was making, Marcus’s dragon senses detected something else – a weight distribution that no terrier produced naturally, a density around the torso that had nothing to do with terrier.

The old man drew level.

“Morning,” he said pleasantly, slightly breathless in the correct way.

Marcus’s hand came up.

He caught the dog mid-air.

It had left the ground on a spring-loaded mechanism concealed in the collar, triggered by a pressure plate in the lead’s handle – a clean, professional activation designed to deliver the explosive package directly toward the target at chest height. Marcus’s hand closed around it before it covered half the distance, his dragon speed reducing the gap between release and arrival to something the device’s timer hadn’t been calibrated for.

He held it out.

“Yours,” he said, and pressed it back toward the old man with a force that the old man had to receive or be hit by.

The old man caught it.

His face did not produce a single expression for approximately two seconds while the recalibration happened.

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Then he moved. The jogging posture was gone entirely the real center of gravity emerged, the real footwork, the real person underneath the seventy-year-old theater. He reached into the tracksuit’s left pocket and came out with a syringe small, professional, the kind of delivery system that worked when it worked and left nothing traceable when it didn’t.

He was fast.

Marcus was not there.

The dragon had moved laterally before the arm was fully extended, and the follow-through of the syringe strike hit empty air, and Marcus was behind him before the miss had finished registering.

“The arm,” Marcus said pleasantly, from behind the man’s right shoulder.

The arm broke at the elbow with the clean precision of dragon-applied force that knew exactly where bones made their compromises.

The syringe hit the path.

The old man – no longer old, no longer jogging, currently kneeling on the greenway path with one arm hanging at an angle it hadn’t previously occupied and his morning-run theater completely concluded – looked up at Marcus with the specific expression of someone at the end of their professional options.

“Who sent you,” Marcus said.

The man said nothing.

Marcus looked at the terrier, which had retreated to the end of its lead and was regarding the situation with the alert confusion of an animal that had not signed up for this morning.

The dog is real,” Marcus said. He crouched to its level. The terrier sniffed his hand, made a decision, and allowed itself to be scratched behind the ear. “At least someone here had honest intentions.”

He looked up at the man on the path.

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