Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 183

CHAPTER 143 PART 3

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He crouched beside the couch and pressed two fingers to the side of her neck – not a medical assessment, a dragon one, the complete biological read that told him everything the night had deposited in her system and confirmed that the primary ingredient was wine and the secondary ingredient was the specific exhaustion of a person who had made several large decisions in rapid succession and had not yet had to live in their consequences.

“Elize,” he said.

She didn’t move.

“Elize.” Slightly louder.

A sound emerged from the robe that was not a word.

“The situation has developed,” Marcus said. “I need you conscious.”

The sound evolved into something closer to language. “Go ‘way.”

“No.”

A pause. Then one eye opened, assessed the light, and immediately closed again. “I made a mess,” she said, to the couch cushion.

“Yes.”

“A big one.”

“Yes.”

“Is it fixable?”

Marcus considered the honest answer to this question and decided that the couch was not the right location for it.

“Get up first,” he said. “Then we assess.”

Octavius’s men brought the three waiters to the service corridor forty minutes later.

They stood in a line with the specific quality of people who had made a professional calculation and arrived at deny everything as the only viable position. Clean postures. Neutral expressions. The studied blankness of people who had been briefed on what to do if this moment arrived.

Marcus looked at them.

“The devices,” he said to Octavius.

Octavius produced three phones – the supplementary ones, the ones with the weights that had been wrong and a small transmitter pulled from the housekeeping cart. He set them on the service table.

“Coded transmission format,” Octavius said. “Position reports every fifteen minutes. The last one sent before your arrival flagged your return to the building and estimated floor location.”

Marcus looked at the three waiters.

“Who operates the network,” he said.

The one on the left looked at the wall. The one in the middle looked at the floor. The one on the right looked at Marcus with the flat eyes of someone who had already decided.

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“We don’t know what you’re referring to,” the right one said.

Marcus looked at him for a moment with the patient attention of something that had heard this response before and was simply establishing that it had been given before proceeding.

He crouched in front of the man on the left – the one who was looking at the wall, which was the tell of someone trying hardest to be elsewhere- and placed his hand on the man’s foot.

“Last chance,” Marcus said. “Network operator. Client name. Transmission destination.”

The man on the left looked at the wall.

Marcus applied dragon-precise pressure to the specific point where the foot’s primary load-bearing structure met the ankle’s lateral support.

The sound the man made was involuntary and comprehensive. He went sideways, caught by the wall, one hand going to his foot with the instinct of someone whose foot had just received a detailed education.

Marcus stood.

The man looked up at him.

And then – in the specific voice of someone who had reached the end of the available options except one-he said: “Kill me.”

Quietly. Not dramatically. The request of someone for whom this was a genuine preference rather than a theatrical one.

“Please,” he added. With the same quiet.

The dead soldier mentality.

Marcus looked at the three of them at the blankness and the wall-watching and the please – and the dragon’s complete awareness processed what it was looking at.

Deeply embedded. Highly disciplined. Fearless of death.

Not amateurs. Not Atlas Lancaster’s local muscle.

Something older. Something that had built the network before any specific contract existed, that had spent six weeks placing these three people inside Miguel Abbott’s flagship hotel against a day when someone worth monitoring might walk through its doors.

He straightened,

“Keep them separate,” he said to Octavius. “No communication between them. No contact with anything external. “He looked at the man with the broken foot, who was managing the pain with the compressed dignity of someone who had decided that showing it clearly was the last thing they were going to give him. “And find a doctor. The foot.”

Octavius nodded.

Marcus turned toward the corridor.

279

NETH PARTI

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