Abigail would have argued firmly against the idea that Lombard had any kind of goofy side to him if anyone had raised it before today. She would have pointed out, with full confidence, that the man she had spent time around was precise, controlled, and completely uninterested in being anything other than exactly that. But that was before the last three hours. Because whatever had just happened in that hospital room was not something she had any previous data point for. He had sat at the edge of her bed and talked. And talked. And told stories that had no real point, no particular moral, no reason to exist in the world other than the fact that they had happened and were apparently funny to him in the retelling. And she had laughed at all of them. She did not even fully understand why. They were not objectively hilarious. They were just — something about the way he told them, the timing of things, the way he always seemed to know exactly when to raise an eyebrow or leave a silence —

Chapter 253 Vivienne had been playing with her phone for the past hour, setting it down, picking it up, and setting it down again. It had been more than twenty-four hours since she last heard from Lombard. In the context of a normal sibling relationship, twenty-four hours was nothing. Some people went weeks and called it a healthy dynamic. But this was not a normal sibling relationship, and Vivienne knew it, and the fact that she kept having to remind herself of that every twenty minutes was only making the anxiety worse. This is Lombard, she kept saying to herself as she paced her office, phone in one hand. This is Lombard. As if the name alone was a reason for the panic. She had locked her office door an hour ago and told her assistant not to bother her unless the building was on fire, possibly not even then. She had spent the better part of the morning trying to redirect her attention toward work, and every time she came close to something resembling focus, her brain would ci

“You still haven’t explained why you need people to think we’re married,” Abigail said, after a few minutes of quiet had settled between them. “I just like the idea of walking into a room with a beautiful woman and watching everyone wonder how I managed it,” Lombard said. “That’s a badge. Any man would agree.” “That’s a badge,” Abigail confirmed. “But that’s not why.” He gave her a brief sideways look. Then: “The Cataract team will be there tonight. As soon as anything starts to go wrong, I need you somewhere safe immediately. I want our cover to be natural, not something we are obviously building in the moment. A couple is a lot harder to separate in a room full of people than two individuals.” “And if I had said I wasn’t coming?” “Honestly?” He paused at a light. “I hadn’t thought through a plan for tonight at all until the moment you said yes. Once you did, everything started to come together fast. I had to move on it.” Abigail looked across at him. His eyes were fixed on the

At one end of the hall, Lombard and Abigail looked like the only two people in the room who had permission to exist the way they did.Close, easy with each other.The kind of couple that made you feel like you had walked in on something private.At the other end, Riley had arrived with Mireya, who looked like her world had been dropped from a great height and had not finished falling yet.And at yet another corner entirely, Rowan stood with Toby.Toby had been looking around the hall since they walked in, and she had not stopped. When her grandfather said feast, she had pictured a long table, people she actually knew, maybe a toast to whatever the doctors had told him this quarter.What she had not pictured was this.Half the people in this room were names she had only ever heard in conversations she was not supposed to be part of. The other half were faces she recognised from the kind of news coverage that only happened when entire economies shifted.There were heads of organisations

Lombard’s earpiece had been giving him signals for the last ninety seconds. By the time the Patriarch finished his invitation to Rowan, the picture in his head was complete enough to act on. “Two of you on the Patriarch,” he said, low and level, just above a breath. “Get him out. I don’t care how. The other two — Toby. Now.” He was already moving toward Abigail, one hand finding the small of her back, the pressure steady and calm. “What’s happening?” Abigail asked, reading his face and finding nothing she could interpret. “You’re going to the car,” he said. “Stay with whoever is in the driver’s seat and do not get out.” “Lombard—” He waved once at a man near the entrance who was already pulling the door open and moving without being told to. One of his. “Go.” She went. He watched her move and then turned back toward the hall. Abigail made it outside and found the car already running, a man she half recognised from the hospital transfers sitting behind the wheel. She got in.