Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 184

CHAPTER 144 PART 1

The one on the left broke at seven forty-three in the morning.

Not because Marcus applied more pressure – he hadn’t. The foot injury was complete and nothing further had been added to the inventory. The breaking happened because the man had been sitting in the service corridor for forty minutes with nothing to look at except his two colleagues’ identical blankness and his own assessment of the available futures, and the math had eventually produced a different answer than it had the first time.

He looked at the floor.

“Cesar Pendleton,” he said.

The other two didn’t react. They had either anticipated this or they were too committed to their own silence to afford the energy of acknowledging someone else abandoning theirs.

Octavius wrote the name down. Marcus looked at the man.

“Tell me the full structure,” Marcus said. “What you know of it.”

The man exhaled — the specific exhale of someone who had made a decision and was now on the other side of it, where the decision was irrevocable and the only remaining question was how completely to commit. “The

network was placed six weeks ago. Three of us – we were recruited separately, each through different contacts. The pitch was simple: monitor guest traffic, flag significant arrivals, transmit position reports on a schedule.” He paused. “The money was real. The protection promised was-” He stopped.

“Was what,” Marcus said.

“Pendleton’s protection.” The man looked at his broken foot. “In Five-River Province, that’s not nothing.”

“I know what Pendleton’s protection is,” Marcus said. “Keep going.”

“The network isn’t just Pearl on the Water. There are – I don’t know how many properties. I only know this one. But the coordinator I report to suggested the scope was significant. Every major hotel and venue in the district.” He looked up briefly. “Whoever Pendleton was building this for, it wasn’t a small operation.”

Marcus looked at Octavius. Octavius was already on his phone.

“Was there a specific trigger?” Marcus said. “Something that activated the network beyond the standard monitoring schedule?”

The man was quiet for a moment.

“A name,” he said. “We were given a list of names. If any of them appeared as guests, we were to increase transmission frequency and provide real-time position tracking rather than scheduled reports.” He paused. “Your name was on the list.”

Marcus said nothing.

“It was added recently,” the man said. “Within the last two weeks. Before that the list was different – province families, business figures. Your name arriving on it was-” He stopped again,

“Was what,” Marcus said.

“It was flagged differently from the others,” he said. “Priority one. Separate transmission channel. Direct to Pendleton himself rather than through the coordinator.” He looked at Marcus with the expression of someone who had just delivered information and was not entirely certain what it would cost them. “Whoever you are,

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DIMETER 143 PARTI

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Pendleton wanted to know the moment you set foot in Five-River Province.”

Miguel Abbott, when Marcus relayed the name, did something he had not done once during the entire previous evening of restaurants and beer bottles and assassination attempts and the Lancaster family filing out of his hotel.

He sat down.

He sat down in the armchair in the suite’s main room and looked at the harbor view with the specific expression of a man whose assessment of the situation had just been revised upward by a significant margin.

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