2026-01-28 18:43:48Every step faltered the moment Cassian stepped forward.
The escorts slowed. Then stopped. The man stopped too. He wore a faint, polite smile—the kind reserved for faces you might recognize but can’t quite place. He waited, curious enough… but not impressed. “Hello,” Cassian said smoothly. “I’m Cassian. I understand you have something important to attend to in a few minutes. A lot of kids’ lives are about to be shaped forever by your decision tonight.” He smiled, generous, measured. “That’s why I won’t insist on the coffee I suggested earlier.” “Oh,” the man nodded. Coffee? He had no recollection of that. “I came with a friend’s kid,” Cassian continued, stepping slightly closer. “To show support. He has the most intelligent idea in this room. Truly brilliant. Not choosing him would be a waste of your time—and frankly, a discouragement to his very real dream of studying at Yale.” The man regarded him for a brief second. “I shall see,” he said calmly—and resumed walking. Cassian didn’t move aside. Instead, he closed the distance again. “By the way,” he added lightly, “what’s your daughter’s name again? I saw her once and—I’ll be honest—I fell in love. I’m thinking marriage plans.” The man stopped. This time, he stepped back. The smile vanished. Irritation settled plainly on his face. “What,” he asked slowly, “are you getting at?” Oh, shit, Cassian thought. Did he just… cross a line? The flicker in the man’s eyes—sharp, cold—told him everything. This wasn’t going how he wanted. “Your daughter… I mean, she’s a very beautiful woman—your face, everything—” “She looks exactly like her mother,” the man cut in sharply. Cassian froze for a split second. “Oh, yeah. I mean… yes. She does,” he stammered, already sensing the tide turning against him. Still, he shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to salvage bravado. “To be frank… I want to marry your daughter. Give me her number—I’ll call her right now.” “First off,” the man said, voice calm but firm, “I don’t see you as a fitting husband for my daughter. Second… if you think you can match even half the merit of the men she’s turned down, good luck getting her number. Lot of voicemail waiting for you.” Cassian opened his mouth—“I was just…”—but the man was already walking away, dismissive. Panic flashed through Cassian’s chest. He couldn’t let this end like this. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lombard striding toward the front doors like he owned the whole damn place. That smug bastard. No. Tonight, he was going to crush him. Show him exactly what it meant to cross a Belmont. Throwing pride aside, Cassian lunged forward and bolted after the man. “Sir… I guess you’re already offended,” Cassian panted, trying to match the man’s pace. “But all I’m saying is… you should consider this kid. I already sent your PA his name.”. “A message?” the PA asked, confused as if it were a foreign language. Then he glanced at Cassian. “You sent me a message?” “No, please… this isn’t a joking matter,” Cassian tried, heart racing. “I didn’t get your message, Cassian. If I had, I wouldn’t have said I didn’t,” the PA said sternly. The man shot Cassian a warning glance. “I… I can’t lie about that,” Cassian admitted, fumbling with his phone. He quickly pulled up the messages and forwarded them. Yep—total mix-up. He’d sent them to another PA entirely. Names got crossed. Classic. The man stared at him, then, with a cold, “don’t cross my path again” glare, turned and started walking away. “You almost got me in trouble!” the PA hissed at Cassian before sprinting to catch up with the man. Cassian didn’t feel embarrassed—yet. Wait… if he wasn’t the one who sent that message that made the PA reorder the schools, then who did? Someone else was pulling strings. And whoever it was… had to be from his friend’s school. He dashed inside immediately, cutting through the crowd before the break ended. “Hey,” he called over to the kid, who was cautiously sipping his drink. The other students from his school wouldn’t even dare touch water, nerves rattled like crazy. “Is there a problem, Cassian?” the boy’s father asked. “There might be,” Cassian said sharply. “I need the full list of names of the other students presenting alongside your son—right now.” “Um…” the father glanced at his son, who was now happily digging into his steak, sauce smeared across his mouth. The kid shrugged, oblivious. Cassian’s eyes narrowed. “I need it now.” He made a quick call, rushed out everything he had to say. “Sir, we checked through everyone, no one has the connection to pull this off. The only person odd is Lombard August. And he was seen having a talk with the man in his car just a few seconds ago.”
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Chapter 310
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
Chapter 309
Vivienne genuinely believed she was orchestrating a beautiful reunion.Lombard’s instructions had been vague and urgent, so she’d improvised with her whole heart. She’d called Julian first — told her, half-whispering like it was a delicious secret, that Drake had come by earlier in a state, saying things about not being good enough for her, and that if Julian wanted to catch him while his guard was down and his heart was open, she should come now, this exact morning, before he talked himself back into hiding. It was the kind of story that questioned no logic: it explained why Drake was already there, it flattered Julian’s role as the one who could reach him, and it was urgent enough to override the strangeness of the hour. Julian had been in a car within fifteen minutes.Then Vivienne had called Drake — and, knowing exactly the condition the man was in, she had not led with anything dumb. She’d told him Julian had turned up at her door in tears, frightened after everything at her pa
Chapter 308
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
Chapter 307
Back in the car, the rest of the Belmont family had just gotten a clear look at the other man climbing out of Barrett’s vehicle behind Toby — and their blood turned to water.They recognized him immediately. The heir of the C&R Consortium. The same man Riley had tried to lock up and, in a fit of her own temper, tried to kill some days ago — the man she’d assumed was still safely contained, without ever confirming it. And the moment he clocked that Riley was standing free in the open air, casually threatening a member of the Cataract team, it was going to become a disaster for all of them.Riley, of course, had absolutely no idea of any of this. She was still at the gate, still building her charge, still operating under the belief that this was a morning about Mireya and an apology and a doorbell.The C&R heir stepped fully out of the car, saw Riley, and stopped short — genuinely shocked. Wasn’t this the same person who was supposed to be locked away? Who had, in his own home, come at
Chapter 306
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.
Chapter 305
“Get my phone. Find out who those bastards are,” Lombard snapped under his breath, threading the car through a corner that had not been designed for this speed.Drake grabbed the phone, took pictures out the back window between bursts, and fired them off to the number Lombard barked at him. In less than two seconds, a name came back in the chat.Drake’s eyes widened.“Who the fuck is it?” Lombard demanded, zigzagging through another sharp turn.“Hearse,” Drake read out. “It says — it’s Hearse.”Lombard slowly brought the car to a halt.“Why the fuck did you stop?!” Drake exploded. “Continue driving!”“He just announced his presence to us,” Lombard said, almost thoughtful. “It’s the dance you do before you take your prey. You have to make a show of it first.”“This is no time for poetic talks!” Drake snapped, trying to shake the man out of whatever trance he’d dropped into.And at the corner of his eye, he watched it happen: the car that had been raining bullets simply drove past them.
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