Chapter 327: Watch Your Back

Durnik had been watching from the back the whole time.

This was his order. Hold Lucas. Keep him inside. Do not let him walk out clean. From where he stood, he had seen the security move in, heard the word *interrogation* get thrown around, and waited for the trap to close the way it was supposed to.

Then the outcome arrived.

One of his men went down hard with blood pouring through his fingers. Others followed, shoved, folded, or frozen in place. And in the middle of it, Lucas was still standing, calm enough to ask who else still had the balls to come forward.

That was the first clean shock of the night.

Durnik had expected resistance. He had not expected his men to look disposable in under a minute. The entrance no longer looked like a controlled hold. It looked like a public failure with an audience. Phones were up. Guests were staring. The story was already leaving his hands.

He could not allow that.

He started forward.

Then faster.

Lucas had just turned toward the exit when a familiar voice cut across the entrance.

"Lucas!"

He stopped.

Richelle turned with him.

Durnik pushed through the last of the guests hard enough that one man had to step back with a glass still in his hand. The chairman’s face was tight, flushed, already cracking under the weight of what he had just watched happen on his own instruction. People shifted aside. Some still held their phones higher.

Richelle still did not fully understand the war sitting between the two men, so she spoke first, sharp with leftover anger.

"Durnik, please. Next time train your security. They just harassed us here~"

He cut her off hard, eyes locked on Lucas.

"Who gave you the fucking permission to step foot in here?"

The words landed loudly enough for the nearest onlookers to catch every syllable. A few people went still. Someone near the coat area whispered, "Did he just say that out loud?" Durnik was no longer performing host charm. He was losing it in public, and it showed.

"Do you think you can walk out of here alive?" he continued, voice rising.

Richelle’s face changed at once. Shock first. Then disbelief. That was not dinner-host language. That was an open threat, thrown in front of guests, staff, and cameras.

Lucas only smiled.

He stood there and let the old man keep talking, patient in the ugliest way, as if he were waiting for Durnik to finish embarrassing himself properly before the night required an answer.

Durnik flung a hand toward the security still gathered around the wreckage of their own attempt.

"Take this bastard to my office."

The order hung in the air.

Some of the guards hesitated. They had already learned what approaching Lucas cost. Others looked from their bleeding colleague to the chairman, caught between fresh obedience and the memory of teeth on the floor.

None of them moved.

Durnik’s voice tore through the entrance again, higher and uglier than before.

"I said take this fucking bastard away! Are you all just going to stand there?"

Still nothing.

One guard’s eyes flicked to the man on the ground holding his ruined mouth. Another shifted his weight backward half a step, the kind of tiny retreat that said more than a full confession. A third looked at Durnik like a man silently asking whether the pay covered dental reconstruction and public humiliation in the same night.

Durnik’s face twisted.

"You’re all fired!" he shouted. "Every useless one of you! Don’t come in tomorrow! Don’t come in ever!"

The words left his mouth before sense could catch them.

A second later, the realization landed hard behind his eyes.

He had just dismissed the only men still standing between him and the problem he could not handle alone. The entrance went strangely quiet around that mistake. A couple of guests exchanged looks. One of the guards actually blinked, as if checking whether the chairman of the evening had truly fired his whole door team in front of half the room.

A low, badly timed sound came from somewhere in the crowd. Not quite a laugh. Close enough to make Durnik’s ears burn.

His anger had outrun his brain, and everyone nearby saw it.

He turned back to Lucas, breathing hard, left with nothing cleaner than a threat.

"You’d better keep your eyes open," he said, jabbing a finger through the air. "Watch your back. You think this ends here? You think you walk into my event, put hands on my men, and just drive home?"

Lucas still did not answer.

That silence made it worse.

Durnik’s mouth worked once, searching for something sharper, something that could recover the authority he had already spent. Nothing useful came. All that left him was heat, noise, and the public knowledge that his trap had failed in the most visible way possible.

"Watch your back," he repeated, weaker the second time because repetition always sounds weaker when the room has already stopped being afraid.

Then he spun and stormed off.

One of the men Lucas had put down was still on the floor in his path, half-conscious and blocking the way. Durnik did not slow. He kicked the man aside with a sharp, ugly motion, hard enough that the guard groaned and rolled, and kept going as if even the wreckage of his own order was an inconvenience he refused to look at too long.

A guest near the door muttered, "He just kicked his own security."

Someone else answered, "After firing them."

"Efficient."

The sarcasm floated just loud enough.

Durnik heard enough of it to stiffen, but he did not turn back. Turning back would mean facing Lucas again with no men, no clean story, and no dignity left to borrow. So he pushed deeper into the hall instead, jaw locked, ears burning, already inventing the private version of events he would need later.

Lucas watched him leave and smiled.

So that was it.

All that noise. All that authority. And when the moment asked for more than shouting, the old man folded. No direct move. No personal confrontation. Just a public tantrum, a mass firing he already regretted, a kicked body on the floor, and a weak warning thrown over the shoulder on the way out.

A coward in expensive clothes.

Lucas had been waiting for something cleaner. In a room full of rich people, cameras, and higher-society guests, any real strike from Durnik could have been answered hard and later dressed as self-defense. That was the opening he preferred. Let the host make the first violent mistake. Let the room witness it. Then end it without mercy and let the story protect the man who only responded.

But Durnik had not given him that chance.

He had only embarrassed himself and walked away.

Richelle stared after the chairman for a second, still processing the open threat, the firing, the kick, the whole collapsing performance.

Lucas turned back to Richelle.

"Come on," he said.

He guided her toward the exit and out into the cooler air beyond the hall, leaving behind the mess, the whispers, the phones, and a host who had proven in front of everyone that he could order a trap far more easily than he could stand inside one.