2026-01-05 17:06:31She was serious.
Kai frowned and took half a step back. The thought This woman plays dirty had just flashed through his mind when Maya borrowed the momentum and sprang into the air, a vicious flying kick sweeping straight at him.
She was far lighter than a typical power-type fighter. Her waist drew a taut, dangerous arc in midair—a flawless blend of power and grace, mesmerizing to watch.
“Nice!”
“This one’s over!”Everyone was convinced—there was no way Kai could dodge again.
But he did.
These flashy, ornamental moves were a joke to him even back when he was a child—so weak they weren’t worth a single counter. As expected, Kai didn’t even bother to change his expression. With a slight shift of his body, he cleanly dissolved the entire force of the strike.
When Maya overextended and missed, he even had the leisure to grab her and keep her from hitting the ground too hard.
That moment of casual mercy was where everything went wrong.The opposing forces collided, and Maya was pulled straight into his chest. A soft yet overwhelming impact slammed into him; her lips brushed past his neck, her warm breath grazing his skin.
The ring fell into dead silence.
The sudden intimacy exploded like a spark with no warning.
Kai’s scalp went numb. He released her at once, stumbling back with both hands raised, hurriedly looking toward the crowd as if searching for witnesses.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!”Below the ring, Lila shouted, both anxious and furious, “Kai! Get down here! Stop fooling around!”
But Maya gave him no chance to retreat.
She closed in again, her eyes completely bloodshot.
“Shut up,” she said coldly. “If I don’t beat you into submission today, I won’t call myself Maya.”
Forced to engage, Kai blocked while lowering his voice. “Just now really wasn’t—”
He didn’t finish.
Her fist was already there.
She wasn’t listening.
Kai’s gaze darkened. He finally got serious, catching an opening and preparing to end the farce with a single move.
Then—
“Stop!” Lila shouted from below.
Kai instinctively pulled back his strength and shoved Maya away instead. But his fingers tightened—and snagged the tie of her outer garment.
Rip.
The sound was soft, and deadly.
The outer layers slipped free and fell onto the ring.
The moment Maya looked down, time seemed to freeze.
The lights showed no mercy. Left in only her close-fitting undergarments, her tense lines fully exposed, cold air brushing her skin, her breathing faltered.
The crowd went silent—then came a wave of sharply suppressed gasps.
Eyes flooded in from every direction.
Maya’s face drained from flushed red to stark white in less than a second.
Then anger swallowed everything.
She snapped her head up, eyes blazing like wildfire. Shame, loss of control, the humiliation of being watched—she crushed it all deep into her bones.
She didn’t retreat. She couldn’t.
“Enjoying the view?” she growled, her voice hoarse and vicious.
The next instant, she lunged. Her legs clamped toward Kai’s head like iron shackles. One bit more force and the outcome would be unthinkable.
Kai made the call instantly, raising his hand.
“I forfeit!”The room stayed frozen for three heartbeats. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
Then someone started clapping, breaking the awkward tension.
The sound broke the spell. Suddenly everyone was cheering, whistling, shouting Maya’s name—partly for her “victory,” partly to cover their own discomfort at what they’d just witnessed. The noise was deafening.
Daniel scrambled onto a table, his earlier humiliation completely forgotten. His face was flushed with vindication, his voice loud and triumphant. “Finally! Someone put him in his place!” He raised his glass high. “Drinks on me tonight! Everything—whatever you want! It’s all free!”
The crowd roared louder, surging toward the bar.
Lila shoved through them, running toward the platform. She pulled off her jacket as she climbed up, throwing it over Maya’s shoulders, wrapping it tight around her. “Are you okay?” Her voice was urgent, worried.
Maya’s hands shook as she pulled the jacket closed. Her face was still flushed—whether from exertion or humiliation, it was impossible to tell. She wouldn’t look at Lila. Wouldn’t look at anyone.
Lila glanced back at Kai, her expression a mix of anger and desperation. Her eyes screamed one message: Get out. Now.
But Maya’s gaze finally lifted, locking onto Kai. Her voice was low, shaking with suppressed rage. “This isn’t over. You hear me? We’re not done.”
Kai opened his mouth to respond—
BANG.
The main doors slammed open so hard they crashed against the walls.
Six figures in black masks stormed through, moving fast and purposeful. Every one of them had a gun, pointed right at the crowd.
The music cut off mid-beat. Conversations died mid-word.
The lead figure raised his weapon higher, his voice cutting through the sudden silence like broken glass. “NOBODY MOVE! Hands where I can see them! NOW!”
The elites froze, drinks halfway to their mouths, laughter dying in their throats.
“Everyone sit down! If anyone tries to run, I start shooting!” The leader’s eyes swept the room, cold and calculating. “Hand over Lila Hartley. Now. And maybe the rest of you walk out of here alive.”
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Chapter 278
Marcus was nine now, tall enough to reach the low branch of the tree outside the kitchen window without being lifted, something Kai still hadn’t quite adjusted to, the sight of his son reaching for a branch that used to require a boost. They were raking the same leaves that fell every year from the same tree, a job neither of them particularly loved and both of them did anyway, every October, without much discussion about whether it needed doing.Lila had gone inside twenty minutes earlier to start dinner, leaving them to it the way she usually did, and the yard had settled into the particular quiet of two people working side by side without needing to fill every minute with talk. Kai liked that about raking with him now. Marcus had stopped needing constant conversation to feel comfortable in the silence, had grown into the kind of quiet that didn’t need managing.“Dad,” Marcus said, not looking up from his own pile, rake dragging steady across the grass. “What was the proposal.”“Wha
Chapter 277
Constance had told him, on the bench outside the hospital, that there would be something coming to him eventually, not soon, not on any schedule she’d name, and that he should let it come in its own time instead of asking her about it again. He’d agreed to that, mostly because arguing with her about timing had never once worked in his favor. He hadn’t meant to count the weeks. For the first month he genuinely didn’t, busy enough with Priya’s rollout and the last of the season’s harvest that the promise sat quietly in the back of his mind without demanding attention.By week seven he’d started counting without quite admitting to himself that he was doing it.The package arrived on a Tuesday, plain padded envelope, no return address, his name in handwriting he recognized instantly even though he’d only seen it a handful of times, on margin notes in old documents, on the single page she’d signed for him once before. Eleven weeks exactly, though he only did the math after he’d already ope
Chapter 276
Constance announced her retirement in an email three sentences long, sent to a distribution list of exactly four people, no subject line flourish, no preamble, just the fact of it stated as plainly as she stated everything else that mattered.Kai read it twice at his desk before he fully absorbed what it actually said, and immediately began, in his head, planning something larger, a proper send off, the board room, catered food, a chance for the whole Institute to say what her thirty years had actually meant to the place. He called her within the hour to start arranging it.She cut him off before he’d gotten more than two sentences into the idea.“No.”“You haven’t even heard what I’m proposing.”“I don’t need to hear it. I already know the shape of it, and the answer is no.” Her voice carried none of the frailty of the hospital months earlier, sharp and entirely certain, the version of her he’d first met eighteen months ago. “I want a Tuesday afternoon in Archives. Coffee. Nothing el
Chapter 275
A year and a half in, Dahl still ran his corner of the Materials Lab exactly the way he’d run it from the beginning, technically compliant, spiritually untouched. Kai stopped by that October mostly out of habit, not expecting anything to have shifted, and found what he always found, review documentation filled out completely, correctly, on time, with all the warmth of a man filing paperwork he considered beneath him.“Everything’s in order,” Dahl said, not looking up from his bench.“I can see that.”“Then I assume you’re not here to lecture me.”“I’m not here to lecture you,” Kai said. “I stopped doing that about a year ago. I noticed it wasn’t working.”Dahl glanced up at that, something almost like amusement crossing his face before it disappeared again. “Took you long enough.”“You do the review. You do it correctly. You’ve never once missed a deadline or fudged a number.”“So what’s the complaint.”“There isn’t one,” Kai said, and meant it more than he expected to when he said it
Chapter 274
The flight out was quiet, Priya running through note cards she’d clearly written and rewritten a dozen times, Kai reading in the seat beside her and doing his best not to look like he was watching her do it.“You don’t have to sit in the back,” she said, somewhere over Ohio, not looking up from the cards. “You could sit up front. It would probably look more supportive.”“I’m not here to look supportive,” Kai said. “I’m here to be the person you can’t quite forget is in the room and also can’t lean on. Those are different jobs. The back does both better than the front.”“That’s a strange kind of support.”“It’s the only kind that’s actually useful today.”The room, when they got there, was smaller than the consortium’s glass conference room, a department library at one of the five institutions, maybe twenty people arranged around a long table with the slightly skeptical posture of people who’d been told about a framework and hadn’t yet decided whether to believe in it. Kai took a seat
Chapter 273
Lila had the folding tables set up before Kai had even finished his coffee, dragging them out from the garage while the morning was still cool enough to make the work easy.“You could’ve waited for me,” Kai said, coming out to grab the other end of the second table.“You were slow,” she said. “The tomatoes weren’t going to wait for you either.”Marcus was already at the end of the driveway when they got the tables positioned, arranging baskets in rows with the same seriousness he brought to everything in the garden these days. He’d grown a full head since the frost, since the row he’d insisted on choosing himself the winter before, and something about the way he stood now, steady, sure of his own hands, made Kai stop for a second just to watch him work.“What’s the sign say,” Kai asked, though he could already read it from where he stood.“FREE, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED,” Marcus said, holding it up like he expected an argument.“Lila mentioned you two had a discussion about a donation jar.”
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