National Asset: The Marvelous Tyler Wood

Chapter 281

Still Tyler’s grip was a cold, iron thing around the boss’s throat, but his voice low and smooth as oil poured over glass carried farther than his hands.

Tyler’s eyes didn’t wander. They found the man who had humiliated his mother, the man who had pressed that obscene card against her forehead, the man whose men had written “a lesson” across her shutters in acid and malice. Tyler’s mouth formed each word deliberately, letting them land like blows.

“You think you can humiliate my mother and walk away?” he said, every syllable a promise of consequence. “You came for threats; you came for fear. You picked the wrong family to scare.” The boss’s struggles were frantic now, hands clawing at Tyler’s wrist, at air, at the reason this house would no longer feel safe. The other Bushmans hurried to the edge of the room, flitting between a show of control and the naked panic they had never expected to swallow. Phones were half-raised, then dropped, useless in the face of the thing standing in fr