All Chapters of Saintess’s Worthless Husband Turned Dragon Commander: Chapter 211
- Chapter 220
241 chapters
CHAPTER 124 PART 1
The cigar had gone cold twenty minutes ago.Benjamin Abbott hadn't noticed. He sat behind his desk on the fourteenth floor of the Red Star Group's Grayson City offices, one hand pressing his phone to his ear, the other flat against the glass desktop, and listened to the line ring out for the fourth consecutive time. Ives didn't answer. Wesley Hartford didn't answer. Even Riggs — a man Benjamin had personally recruited from a private security firm that charged more per month than most people earned in a year — sent him straight to voicemail.He set the phone down.Then the video arrived.He watched it once without expression. Then he watched it again, slower, his jaw tightening on the second pass. The footage was shaky — clearly shot from a distance, Wesley's hand trembling — but the content was unmistakable. His niece. On her knees. Hair gripped in another woman's fist. Face already swelling.Benjamin Abbott pushed back from his desk and stood.The door opened before he reached it. Do
CHAPTER 124 PART 2
Beside him, Ives Abbott sat with her back against the boutique window, arms wrapped around her knees. Her face had not fared well. The left side was swollen and discolored, a thin line of blood tracing from the corner of her mouth. Her hair — formerly the kind of glossy that required professional maintenance — had not survived Cosmo's handling intact. She stared straight ahead with the particular expression of someone assembling their fury into a shape they could use later."You're finished," she said, very quietly. "All of you. When my uncle gets here—"Cosmo crouched in front of her.Ives flinched before the hand even moved."Keep going," Cosmo said pleasantly. "Tell me more about your uncle."Ives pressed her lips together."That's what I thought."Wesley had been scanning the far end of the corridor every thirty seconds with the desperate frequency of a man expecting rescue. His hands were still shaking when he leaned toward Ives. "I sent the video," he whispered. "Benjamin will c
CHAPTER 125 PART 1
The word left Benjamin Abbott's mouth and Dominic Allen was already moving.He crossed the corridor in four strides toward Ives, reaching to pull her clear before whatever was about to happen happened around her. It was the trained instinct of a man who had spent fifteen years managing violence professionally — extract the principal, then engage the problem.He didn't look at Cosmo.That was his first mistake.The kick came from his left with no warning and no sound except the displacement of air — a compressed, whipping force that passed close enough to his ear that he felt it before he heard it. Dominic's head snapped sideways on pure reflex and he dropped into a defensive crouch, one arm raising, the other planting — and the follow-through of Cosmo's heel grazed his forearm with enough transferred force to push him back three full steps across the marble floor.He caught himself against the boutique display case.The store behind him rattled.Dominic Allen stood very still for exac
CHAPTER 125 PART 2
The Subduing Tiger Fist was not a technique for surgical precision — it was designed for overwhelming kinetic force, the kind that ended fights through physics rather than skill. His right shoulder dropped, his weight transferred in a single committed surge, and his fist came forward with the full acceleration of a man who had knocked out opponents twice his size with the same motion.Cosmo didn't move backward.She moved inward.She slipped inside the arc at the last possible interval, one forearm redirecting the elbow rather than the fist, and the force that had been aimed at her face traveled past her shoulder and into empty air.Before Dominic could recover the momentum, her other hand found his wrist — found a specific point on his wrist — and applied pressure in a direction wrists are not designed to accommodate.The crack was clean and immediate.Dominic's breath left him in a single sharp burst. He staggered sideways, cradling his arm, his face draining of color so fast that L
CHAPTER 125 PART 3
He had not been there a moment ago. Benjamin hadn't seen him move. No one in the corridor had seen him move — not the Red Star fighters raising their arms, not Nicholas Lancaster against the column, not the mall employee still frozen at the corridor's end. One moment Marcus had been eight feet away. Now he was close enough that Benjamin could see the exact shade of his eyes, and the quality of the stillness in them was not the stillness of someone calm.It was the stillness of something very old deciding not to hurry.Benjamin's command died in his throat.Marcus's hand closed around Benjamin Abbott's collar — one hand, unhurried, fingers not even fully clenched — and lifted.Benjamin Abbott's feet left the marble floor.He weighed two hundred and ten pounds. He had not been physically lifted by another human being since he was four years old. The shock of it — the sheer mechanical impossibility of the casual ease with which it was happening — overrode every other response his nervous
CHAPTER 126 PART 1
The word hung in the air above Crystal Plaza's third floor like smoke after a detonation.Elder brother.It had come through the phone speaker clearly enough for everyone in the corridor to hear — Aaron Jackson's voice, stripped of its earlier casualness, carrying the particular weight of someone who had just oriented himself by a fixed star. Benjamin Abbott heard it, and the first thing that moved across his face was pride.He straightened slightly. Lifted his chin. The assumption settled into place with the comfortable speed of a man who had spent decades being deferred to — Aaron Jackson was calling him elder brother. Of course he was. The Abbott Family's relationship with Grayson City's underworld authority was long-established, mutually profitable, carefully maintained. It made complete sense.He turned toward Marcus Steel with a new quality in his expression. Something close to pity.Marcus was looking at the phone with mild amusement."Aaron," he said into the speaker, "Benjami
CHAPTER 126 PART 2
He moved toward the seating area near the boutique entrance, and Nicholas Lancaster — without being asked, without any visible instruction — had already positioned a chair. The timing was so precise it could only have been deliberate. Marcus sat. Nicholas stepped back to a respectful distance.The gesture was small. Its meaning was not.Several of the Red Star fighters exchanged glances. The math of the corridor had been continuously revised over the last fifteen minutes, and the current calculation was not landing in their employer's favor.Benjamin Abbott's composure broke along one edge."You think this is settled?" His voice came out louder than he intended, filling the hall with the compressed pressure of a man who had too much pride and not enough options. "Red Star Group has three hundred men in Grayson City alone. The entire fifth floor of this building is mine — every exit, every stairwell, every service corridor. You're sitting in my building, at my table—""You don't have a
CHAPTER 127 PART 1
Benjamin Abbott had a threshold.Every powerful man did — a line beyond which pride stopped being an asset and became a liability, where the rational calculus of survival finally outweighed the irrational arithmetic of face. Benjamin had simply spent so many years never reaching that line that he had stopped believing it existed for him personally.Marcus Steel had found it in under an hour.Benjamin's chest was tight. His jaw was locked. Twelve men stood behind him in various configurations of uselessness, Dominic Allen was still sitting against the wall with a broken wrist and the expression of a man who had said his piece, and Aaron Jackson had just informed him over a phone speaker that Grayson City's underworld infrastructure would move against him if he pushed further. Every avenue had been closed, not violently but methodically, the way a man who knows a building's layout locks doors before the argument starts.And still."You think you've made your point," Benjamin said. His v
CHAPTER 127 PART 2
"Two will do," Marcus continued, with the same conversational tone he might use to confirm a restaurant reservation. "I'll send them to West Lake Pier. Half an hour. If you're late, the fish situation becomes your problem."A sound came through the phone that wasn't quite speech."I have Benjamin Abbott," Marcus said. "I have Ives Abbott. West Lake Pier. Thirty minutes." He paused. "Bring a bag.""You—" Miguel Abbott's voice cracked open and what came out was not composed. "You touch one more hair on my daughter's head and I will personally—"Cosmo looked at Ives.Ives Abbott saw the look and opened her mouth to scream.Cosmo slapped her.The scream became something less structured. Ives grabbed her face with both hands and her voice, when it emerged, had abandoned its previous register entirely. "Daddy — Daddy, please—"Marcus held the phone toward the sound for two seconds.Then he raised it back to his ear."Threats," he said pleasantly, "mean nothing to me. The next call you recei
CHAPTER 128 PART 1
The notification arrived four minutes and fifty-three seconds after Miguel Abbott had said done.Quinn Hartford felt her phone vibrate against her palm. She looked down at the screen with the composed attention she brought to most things — methodical, unhurried — and then she stopped moving entirely.The number on the screen was not the number she had been anticipating. The number on the screen was not any number she had been prepared for. She read it twice, then a third time, her Saintess aura flickering at the edges like a candle in a sudden draft."Quinn?" Anna leaned over her shoulder. A pause. Then: "Quinn."Lance pushed in from the other side. She looked at the screen. She looked at Quinn. She looked at Marcus Steel, who was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets watching Benjamin Abbott's men assist their employer into a standing position with the detached patience of a man waiting for a crosswalk signal."That's nine billion," Lance said."Four," Quinn said quietly. "Th