“And what is truth?” Lombard asked.“The truth is that my father-in-law might have been some kind of bad man in some years back, but years change people. And he might not have even fully understood what he was getting into at the time.”“Don’t insult his intelligence,” Lombard said, his eyes going directly to Drake.“What?”“No man — no man — accidentally gets involved in something that ends with two people dead, takes a company away from a child, and walks away without knowing exactly what he was a part of. That is not how that works.”“He was just part of a group. He was not the only one involved. And for all we know, he could have been the man in that room who was telling them not to go that far. He might even have been the one trying to stop the whole thing from happening.”“You sound exactly like you were there when it happened,” Lombard said flatly. “Like you just happened to walk past while a group of men were actively planning to destroy someone’s life, and you know for a fact

Abigail was driving way too fast and she knew it and she could not stop.She had figured out what she was going to do when she got to the Belmont family mansion — or at least, that was what she kept telling herself, because her hands were on the wheel and the car was moving and she needed to believe there was a plan behind it. But something else was happening underneath all of that. A memory was coming back. Not the vague feeling she had been carrying around for days, not the shapeless unease — an actual memory. About Cassian. And it was arriving in full detail, the way things arrive after being buried for long enough, fully formed and impossible to ignore now that it had started moving.She had been six years old.The image hit her so hard she grabbed the side of her own head with one hand. Her father. He had been there. He had been present in a way that she had never really given him credit for, because she had spent so many years being angry at him for the ways he had not been ther

Lombard turned back around and came back to her.“There are things about your father that you are never going to fully understand,” he said, standing in front of her now. “But here is what I think you and I both already know at this point — he was a selfish man. Not cruel. Not cold. Selfish in that very specific way of a person who decided very early on that the most important thing he would ever be was a good father. That that was the one thing he was going to prove, no matter what it cost him or anyone else. And he spent his entire life trying to make that true.”Abigail frowned. “What?”“I know how that sounds. But he spent years working for people he was never supposed to be anywhere near — organised crime, connected people, dangerous operations — and the reason it started was what the Belmont family did to you that day. When they took you. He did what they put in front of him. He signed whatever they needed him to sign. And that was the beginning of something that never really en

Toby’s plan had failed in the most spectacular possible way. She had it all mapped out — reach Alice, get her to the Patriarch’s party, have her bring along her boyfriend, who in this case would be Lombard, who was also going to be there anyway, and the whole thing would happen naturally in one room without anyone having to engineer anything too obviously. Clean, simple, the kind of plan that almost writes itself. Except that the second she said Lombard’s name to Alice on the phone, the conversation was effectively over. Alice had stated, flatly and with zero interest in negotiating, that she was not in any mood for any party, that she had zero interest in anyone named Lombard or anything connected to that name, including its bearers anywhere in the world. Then she had said a very polite goodbye. So now Toby was sitting in a parked car in a full mood, genuinely irritated at everything, when someone behind her honked. She checked the mirror. She was not blocking anything. The car

Back at the Belmont family house, the quiet had taken on a particular kind of weight. Everyone now knew. Mireya was not pregnant, had never been close to it, and the deeper they had gone into verifying all of it, the worse each layer became. It was not just that they had been misled — it was that every piece of evidence they had built their certainty around had turned out to be constructed. Every confirmation, every result, every moment where someone had looked at the situation and said yes, this is real — all of it had been arranged. And the embarrassment of that was sitting in the room like something they could not quite get rid of, because it did not just reflect on Mireya. It reflected on all of them. On their ability to know things. On the thing they had always said was their strength. Nobody said that last part out loud. They did not have to. Rowan was not answering. His numbers rang and rang without response. They had sent people to his house on multiple occasions throughou