She Used Me for a Dare… Now I Own Her Mother

Karl sat at the small iron table, the glass of whiskey forgotten in his hand.

A cold evening wind blew up from the cliff, rustling the garden plants around him, but he barely felt it. He was completely lost in his thoughts.

For fifteen years, he had worked as a mercenary. He had fought in dirty border conflicts, taken contracts no one else wanted, and done whatever it took to survive, earn money, and build a name. He understood pain. He had broken bones and taken bullets, and he knew death was always part of the job.

Yet in all his years of blood and grit, he had never tasted a humiliation this vile.

No matter how hard he tried to focus, he couldn’t get the image out of his head: Naomi. His wife, a hardened operator who barely let anyone into her personal orbit, sitting submissively in the lap of another man.

And he could still see that man’s hands roaming freely across her body, touching places only he was supposed to know, without the slightest hesitation.

Worse than that was Naomi’s reaction. She hadn’t pulled away. She hadn’t fought back. She had leaned into his touch, her breath short, letting another man hold her and claim her right out in the open.

He knew why she was doing it. They needed every scrap of information they could bleed out of him, and this was the most optimal way to drop an arrogant man’s guard. But knowing that didn’t stop the humiliation from burning like acid in his gut.

’I’ll kill you with my bare hands,’ Karl promised silently, his teeth grinding until his jaw ached. ’The second this job is done, I will gut you for putting your hands on her.’

If it were any other contract, he would have drawn his weapon and blown the bastard’s head off right there in the lounge. But he couldn’t walk away. The payout was simply too massive... the kind of money that could buy an early retirement and wipe away fifteen years of blood for good.

And that was precisely what had made him suspicious from day one. In fifteen years of selling his rifle, Karl had learned that excessive pay was always a warning flare.

Clients never threw life-changing sums at mercenaries for a routine babysitting gig. In this line of work, that kind of money meant only one thing: the employer was hiding something lethal, hoping the hired help would die before realizing how deep the water really was.

It hadn’t taken long for Karl to uncover the truth.

Watching Cole day in and day out, piecing together the old man’s habits and the strange silence surrounding him, Karl had finally understood why none of the rival families had managed to wipe him out.

Raymond Cole was no helpless, ruined tycoon drowning in his grief. He was a ruthless strategist who knew exactly how to keep the powerful families at bay. And he certainly wasn’t a mid-stage Enhanced, as the contract’s file had claimed.

The old bastard was sitting at the absolute peak of the Enhanced Realm — a monster perched on the razor’s edge of breaking through to the next level, waiting for the right moment to strike.

​He was still lost in thought when the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

​It wasn’t a sound at first... it was that sudden, suffocating shift in the air, the unmistakable prickle of killing intent cutting straight through the cool cliffside breeze.

​His knuckles whitened against the neck of the glass bottle. Slowly, without making a single sudden twitch that might invite a bullet, he angled his head, glancing over his shoulder along the crushed slate pathway.

​Through the dim amber glow of the garden lanterns, he saw them.

Seven or eight men. Moving in a tight, staggered wedge, their boots touching the wet stone with feather-light discipline. Dark windbreakers, loose utility jackets, and hands resting inches from their waistlines where the heavy outlines of concealed handguns pulled at the fabric. Their postures were low, their spacing textbook, their eyes cold and dead.

A decade and a half in the private mercenary trade told him everything he needed to know in half a second.

These weren’t hotheaded bouncers or cheap street enforcers hired to throw drunken punches.

They moved with the cold rhythm of a coordinated hit team. From the way they cleared the foliage to the balance in their strides, not a single man in that pack was an amateur... every one of them was a hardened operator operating at his level or above. And they were closing the distance with predatory speed.

’What the fuck did this old bastard do?’

A vicious curse flashed through his mind, his heart hammering against his ribs. His tactical brain fired in overdrive, running through every possible vector of escape.

To the rear: a sheer cliffside drop into the dark valley.

To the flanks: open balustrades and manicured flowerbeds that offered zero ballistic cover.

To the front: the only path back to the hotel, completely choked by eight armed killers.

They were caught in an absolute kill box. If bullets started flying, this terrace would become a slaughterhouse in under five seconds. His right hand instinctively drifted toward his jacket lapel, fingers twitching toward the grip of his concealed sidearm, calculating whether he could dive over the wrought-iron table and scramble into the treeline before they drew down on him.

”Leave the iron where it is.”

The gravelly, unbothered voice cut through the tension like a blunt blade.

Cole hadn’t even turned around. The old man remained lazily draped over the cold stone balustrade, gently swirling the liquor in his tumbler, watching the neon arteries of the city below as if he were entirely alone under the night sky.

”Don’t worry about them,” Cole said, his voice flat, gravel-rough, and eerily calm. ”Just pour the drink.”

Karl stared at the old man’s back, a hot spike of fury cutting through the cold adrenaline in his veins.

’Just pour the drink?’

Was this bastard out of his mind? Did he honestly believe that sitting on peak Enhanced strength made him a god?

Karl could read the lethal signatures coming off those men like an open book. The dense, controlled breathing, the grounded balance, the coiled tension in their legs... these weren’t ordinary hitmen. At least three or four of them carried the unmistakable weight of Peak Enhanced like them.

Eight armed professionals against two men caught on an open ledge with nowhere to run. A direct fight was suicide. The math didn’t lie, and the outcome was already written in stone.

Karl’s jaw tightened until his molars ached. He was a mercenary, not a martyr. He had survived fifteen years of war by knowing when to pull the trigger and when to cut his losses. He wasn’t about to die for a client’s stubborn ego.

Still, the thought gave him pause. Cole had outmaneuvered the major families for years. A cunning bastard perched at the very peak of the Enhanced Realm didn’t just walk into a corner to be butchered. He had to have a backup plan... some lethal counter Karl couldn’t see yet.

​Gritting his teeth, Karl pushed down the instinct to dive for cover. He filled the tumbler to the brim, stepped up to the balustrade, and thrust the glass into Cole’s line of sight.

​”You’re insane,” Karl whispered, the words barely audible over the wind rushing up the cliff. ”We have five seconds before they bracket us. Shouldn’t we be finding an exit instead of having a drink?”