The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 728

The nearest guard had barely closed a hand around Alex's arm before Jennifer was between them, and the guard found himself suddenly very interested in looking at anything else.

"Take your hand off him." Jennifer didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to.

The Warden badge at her collar did most of the work for her. "Or you can explain to your employer why a mere security had to intervene at his own daughter's guest."

"This doesn't concern the Wardens." David stepped in close, chin up, playing to the room he'd already gathered. "This is a Calder household matter. An unregistered outsider, causing a disturbance—"

"He hasn't raised his voice once tonight. You have." Jennifer's eyes cut to him, flat and unimpressed.

"I've been standing right here. I watched you dig up gossip about a man's beast and go looking for a fight you didn't get. That's not a disturbance. That's you, losing gracelessly, and trying to make security clean it up for you."

"You're defending him now?" David's mouth curled. "Careful, Warden-Commander. People might start wondering exactly what you're getting out of this."

"What I'm getting out of this is a banquet that doesn't end with a lawsuit against your family for assaulting a guest." Jennifer didn't blink. "You better stop, or I file the complaint myself, tonight, in front of everyone currently enjoying the show."

David held her stare for one more beat, doing the math on how that would look tomorrow, and lost his nerve for it.

He waved the guards back with a short, irritated flick of his hand and turned to find somewhere else to be, muttering something under his breath that nobody bothered asking him to repeat.

It should have ended there.

...

It didn't get the chance to.

A Warden runner cut through the crowd not two minutes later, breathless, straight for Jennifer.

"Commander." He kept his voice low, but not low enough that Alex, standing right beside her, missed a word of it.

"District command's pulling the detachment. There's a situation breaking at the east market — a fire, maybe worse, still confirming. They want every available body reassigned, effective now. This posting's flagged as secure. Yours is the closest unit they can move."

Jennifer's jaw tightened. For a moment she looked like she wanted to argue with a superior who wasn't even in the room to argue with.

"Understood," she said instead, because that was the job. She looked at Alex — one short, unreadable look — and didn't say whatever she'd been about to say.

"Watch yourself," was what came out instead.

Then she was gone, her Wardens peeling off the walls and out the doors behind her in tight, practiced formation, and the banquet hall was, for the first time all night, entirely without them.

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