Toby was barely three steps out of her grandfather’s room when she noticed the light down the hall — and the voices.The patriarch had visitors over.She had absolutely no idea who these people were, but it was surprising in itself: her grandfather, receiving guests at this hour of the night. The last time that happened, the company had been about to file for bankruptcy — and she was certain no such thing was happening now. It pulled at her curiosity, even though she had never in her life had any real ambition of eavesdropping.She stopped at the edge of the doorway’s spill of light.“I’ve already called for Hearse,” her grandfather was saying.Toby nearly choked on the air she was breathing. She caught it just in time. Nobody had detected her presence.Hearse. Even she knew that name. Everybody who had ever half-listened to the city’s worst stories knew that name — the man they said brought his own transport for the people he visited.“He’s the only one who could have helped us do th

“Start with his parents. Then everything else you remember,” Lombard directed.“Your father — he was set to take funding from the banks and keep building, the way he always had. But your father-in-law didn’t want that. His thinking was: if he had money sitting around, why should your father go to a bank at all? Owe a bank, when you could owe him? Your father said no — he’d rather pay a bank’s interest than wear that man’s collar. That was the first crack.”The first man swallowed, glanced once at Lombard, and chose survival.“There were others,” a second one rushed in, competing to be useful. “Your father outbid him on the harbour contract — publicly, in a room full of their people — and wouldn’t sell it back at any price. And once, at a gathering, your father corrected his figures in front of everybody. Just once. Politely, even. That man kept that one warm for years.”Drake stood very still through all of it, hand no longer over his nose. The smell had stopped mattering somewhere ar

It was only five in the morning, but not a single member of the Belmont family had slept a wink.The first problem was that they’d spent half the night trying to pin down Lombard’s location. The other half had gone to drilling Mireya on exactly what she would say — because it was decided now that nearly the whole family would be going with her to deliver the apology.But the biggest problem was the tracking itself. All those hours spent trying to fix Lombard’s position on a screen, and they simply could not hold it. It was the first time any of them had encountered a person who could be somewhere one minute and, the next, be gone off the map entirely — as if he stepped out of the world between refreshes. And there was no point going after a man you couldn’t find. If they couldn’t figure out where he was, there was no operation to run.Then, thirty minutes ago, a new location surfaced. And it had held — no movement for the better part of an hour.Which told them everything they needed.

Toby had been forced to call her guardian — her uncle — because she could not bring herself to fully trust anyone from the Cataract team. They weren’t people you trusted on sight. And in a night like this one, the devil you knew felt safer than the angel you didn’t.Not that she knew, for certain, that her uncle wasn’t quietly aligned with her grandfather. She didn’t. But he was the one risk she was actually able to take right now, so she took it — and now the two of them were here, at what Barrett kept calling Lombard’s house.“Sir,” Barrett called as he stepped inside — and that, too, was something Toby found herself turning over: that this enormous man knew Lombard’s home well enough to walk into it freely, panel codes and all.“I’m in the bedroom,” Lombard called back, his voice still laced thick with sleep.“I’ve got company. Toby, of the C&R Consortium, and her uncle. You want me to bring them in?”“No, silly. I’ll come out.” A groan, the sound of a man leaving a bed he’d only j

For the next several hours, Lombard and Barrett went over the plan and over it again, the whole Cataract team funneling in every scrap of intel they had until the shape of the thing was solid. The bones of it were simple, which was the only kind of plan Lombard trusted. The patriarch wanted a confession delivered to Lombard’s living face — that was the one appetite the old man could not talk himself out of, the vanity that had kept Lombard breathing when a smarter enemy would have had him shot in his sleep weeks ago. So the plan would feed that appetite. Lombard would let himself be taken. Quietly, without a struggle, exactly the way a broken man goes. Because the whole arrangement the trio had built their empire on ran on one belief — that grief makes men fold, that a Lombard with his Clara taken would crawl into his shell and stay there. He would give them precisely that man. He would walk into the room they prepared, wearing the defeat they’d ordered off a menu. And every step