2026-01-28 03:26:24Chapter 2
Mireya rushed after Lombard, calling his name. By all rights the engine should have swallowed her voice whole — except the engine was dead, because of course it was, because the universe had apparently cleared its whole schedule today just for him.
The silence felt personal.
She reached his window just as he shoved the door open.
“If you leave like this,” she said gently, breathless, “you’re going to regret it. You just have to be patient. You don’t deserve me, and we both know that.”
Lombard laughed. It came out sharp and broken, like glass in a blender.
“You know what else we both fucking know?” he snapped. “You made me wait two years. Two years. And at the end of it, you stand in front of your whole family and tell me I was never even an option.”
Mireya made the sign of the cross.
“You knew my religion before we started dating.”
“That was because I thought you had sense!” Lombard barked. “Instead you’ve spent two years draining the life out of me. You told me to quit my job. You told me to go teach at that useless private school where the kids think they’re gods because their parents own things.”
She crossed herself again. Slower this time. Like a shield.
“I’m going to need a lot of prayers for you.”
Lombard stared at her. Really stared.
“You’ve got to be kidding me, Mireya.”
The name slipped out raw, unguarded. He hadn’t called her that in forever. Wasn’t allowed to. Only her parents could.
“Mireya.”
A man’s voice. From the porch.
Lombard froze. Slowly, he turned.
The man from inside was already walking toward them.
Someone else could call her that name?
Mireya smiled — soft, reverent. “He’s the chosen one. Only he and my parents can call me that.”
Lombard watched in a daze as the man pulled Mireya into his arms and kissed her.
Not a polite kiss. Not a holy kiss. The kind of kiss Lombard had spent two years being told was a one-way ticket to spiritual damnation.
They pulled apart, breathless.
“We should go back inside,” the man whispered against her ear. “I can’t wait to have you.”
She giggled.
Giggled.
Two years of “the body is a temple,” and this man had apparently been given a season pass to the temple.
Mireya turned to Lombard. “I’ll be waiting for you in the evening. You’re no longer allowed to stay in the main house, because of your unholiness. One of the rooms in the boys’ quarters.” She pointed. Casually. Like assigning a kennel.
Then she walked away with him.
Just like that.
Lombard stood there, watching them disappear inside. His life felt like a joke written by someone who hated him personally. If this were a movie, the director would have cut the scene for being unrealistic.
He walked to the front of the car and slammed his fist on the hood. Once. Twice.
On the second hit, the engine coughed back to life. So that was the trick. Violence. Good to know the car and the day were operating on the same principles.
From inside the mansion, laughter drifted out.
“He’ll be back begging.”
“Don’t let him near you.”
“What a joke.”
On the third try the engine roared properly, and Lombard drove out of the estate with every muscle in his body wound tight enough to snap.
He pulled over at a park. Reached for his wallet to buy an iced americano — because if the day was going to keep hitting him, he could at least be caffeinated for it.
Nothing. Not a single coin.
He sat in the car, staring through the windshield at high school kids laughing in the café. Kids who could afford coffee. He was twenty-eight and losing a financial comparison to children.
His phone beeped. Hope flared.
Then died.
Termination of Contract.
He read the email twice. Three times. No severance. No final salary. The Belmont family friend who owned the school hadn’t even waited until the end of the day.
A call came through immediately.
“Is this Lombard August?” An elderly voice.
“Yes.”
“Where should we drop your belongings? This is from the Belmont family.”
His stomach dropped. “Excuse me?”
“We have another service in an hour.”
Efficient people. Really. Two years of devotion, packed and couriered before lunch.
He gave them the park address. One bag arrived. That was all he had. Clothes, mostly overwashed.
He tried calling Mireya. Voicemail.
He leaned against the car, smiling like a madman. Two years. He’d quit a well-paying job. Worked in her family friend’s school. Paid eighty percent of his income as “religious rites.” The remaining twenty percent was to prove he was worthy.
Worthy. Of what, exactly? The boys’ quarters?
Two high school kids walked past him.
“He must be on drugs,” one muttered.
“Fucking idiot kids,” Lombard snapped, and they scattered like pigeons.
That was when the cops pulled up. Naturally. The day wasn’t done with him yet.
“Lombard August?”
“Yes.”
“This park belongs to the Belmont family. You’ve been reported for loitering. Pay a fine of two thousand dollars now or we seize your car.”
A laugh escaped him. A real one this time.
“Tell them to go fuck themselves.”
“Seize the car,” one officer said into his radio.
A tow truck appeared like it had been idling around the corner waiting for its cue. Chains clamped onto his sister’s car. His sister was going to kill him, assuming the day left anything for her to kill.
His phone vibrated. He rejected the call.
It rang again. Rejected.
The third time, he snapped. “What the fuck do you want from me now?!”
“Lomb?”
The voice made his heart stop.
He pulled the phone away, stared at the screen, then pressed it back to his ear.
“You’re still alive?!” he shouted.
“Lomb, I’m in trouble,” the voice said. “My son’s nanny left him. I need you to go to an address I’ll send and stay with him tonight.”
“I don’t—”
“I’ll compensate you. I know your time is valuable. I’ll send it now.”
His phone chimed.
Credit Alert: $100,000,000.
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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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