Saintess's Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander novel Chapter 186

CHAPTER 144 PART 3

They took two cars. Marcus in the first, Miguel beside him – Marcus had told him to stay at the hotel and Miguel had looked at him with the expression of a man who had burned his bridge with the Lancaster family the previous night and had decided that halfway across was not a viable position.

The province’s eastern harbor district was different from the Elmsgate waterfront. Less developed, more industrial, the kind of area that cities always had somewhere the part where the legitimate economy’s supply chain met the parts of the supply chain that didn’t require documentation.

Northern Bay Park occupied a stretch of old waterfront that had been designated for redevelopment fifteen years ago and had not yet been redeveloped, which meant it was a large, partially maintained green space surrounded by the machinery of industrial logistics, with the specific quality of somewhere that looked like nothing was

happening and had been designed to look that way.

Marcus watched it approach through the car window.

Miguel was watching him with the careful attention of a man who had spent the previous twelve hours recalibrating his assessment of what he’d aligned himself with and still didn’t have a complete picture.

“Your wife,” Miguel said. “Quinn Hartford. The Hartford Group in Grayson City,”

“Yes,” Marcus said.

“Pendleton — you said you’d humiliated him for harassing her.”

“He sent people to the Hartford Group,” Marcus said. “Several weeks ago. A pressure exercise – the kind Pendleton runs when he wants to establish a relationship with a business that hasn’t asked for one.” He looked at the waterfront. “The people he sent didn’t return in the condition they arrived.”

Miguel was quiet.

Then: “Your hands,” he said.

Marcus looked at him.

“I’ve been watching your hands since yesterday,” Miguel said. “The way they move. The way the force is – calibrated. The precision.” He paused. “There’s no technique I know that produces what I’ve been watching. The speed, the accuracy. It’s not martial arts. It’s not combat training.” He looked at Marcus with the honest gaze of a man who had decided that asking directly was the only remaining option. “What are you?”

The car was quiet for a moment.

Marcus looked at Miguel Abbott – at the sixty years in his face, the forty years of building, the night he’d spent making the most expensive gamble of his career on the basis of a gold card and a quality he couldn’t name.

He looked at him properly, the way the dragon looked at things – the complete biological read, the full assessment, the information that ran beneath surface appearance.

He saw what he’d suspected since the airport.

“Pull up your left sleeve,” Marcus said.

Miguel blinked. “What?”

“Your left sleeve,” Marcus said.

Miguel, with the expression of someone who had learned not to argue with this man about small requests, pulled

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up his left sleeve. His forearm – the inner surface, where the subcutaneous reality of his circulatory system ran close enough to read if you knew what you were looking at.

Marcus looked at it for four seconds.

“Liver cirrhosis,” he said. “Stage two. Probably three years of development, possibly four. You’ve had the fatigue and the appetite inconsistency for about eighteen months. The jaundice would show occasionally in the whites of your eyes under certain light – you’ve been attributing it to stress and age.” He pulled his gaze up. “You’ve seen three specialists. The consensus was management rather than cure.”

Miguel’s sleeve was still rolled up. His face had gone through several expressions and was in the process of assembling them into something coherent.

“How,” he said.

“I know medicine,” Marcus said. The simplest answer, which was also the truest. “Seven days,” he said. “I’ll have something prepared. It won’t be comfortable to take but it will work.”

Miguel Abbott looked at him.

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