2026-01-28 03:26:56“Lomb has been my friend for years,” his father replied, genuinely confused. “What are you talking about? We just lost contact for a while. You would’ve seen us at dinners together. Vacations. Everything.”
“Dad, please tell me this is a joke. Stop it. He doesn’t know anything about Ivy League schools. I swear he doesn’t. He came in a cab. A cab, Dad.”
A pause.
“Finn, can you call me back later?” his father said, distracted. “Something needs my attention right now.”
The call ended.
Finn stared at his phone. His chest tightened.
Tonight was already spiraling. Goodbye, University of Pennsylvania. Maybe goodbye to every school he’d ever planned on impressing. At this rate he’d be writing his admissions essay about resilience in the face of parental sabotage.
He glanced toward the sitting room.
Lombard was still there. Sitting. Existing. Cab-shaped.
And somehow, that made Finn want to cry.
Forty minutes later, they arrived at the venue.
Finn had given the driver strict instructions: park at the back. Far from the main entrance. Nobody was to see Lombard before they were safely at their seats, where lighting and distance could do their merciful work.
He had even gone so far as to announce — loudly, in the school group chat — “Guess who’s coming with me tonight? The breath and life of the Ivy League!!”
That message was aging like milk.
“Just pass through here,” Finn whispered, nodding toward a side entrance. “It’s like a secret route. Don’t worry. We’ll catch up with the others and still sit in our allocated seats.”
So far, the plan was foolproof.
Until it wasn’t.
“Hey, Finn!”
Finn froze. The voice was painfully familiar.
“Is that the man with all the Ivy League connections?”
A girl came running toward them, eyes wide with excitement.
“Were you trying to hide him from us? Don’t bother — my parents can’t wait to meet him. They’re at the front of the hall right now.”
The front of the hall. Finn’s stomach didn’t drop so much as file for relocation.
Lombard, for his part, had no idea why the boy was acting so odd, and had decided not to spend energy finding out.
Truthfully, he’d planned to make the night pleasant. But the moment he’d clocked what Finn was — one of those high school kids marinated in Ivy League dreams, convinced the world was a ladder and everyone else was a rung — his interest had died quietly in its sleep.
“Please, Finn,” the girl said brightly, gesturing them forward.
“Lead the way,” Lombard said. He had no intention of standing in a hallway all night, and Finn’s face — currently doing an impression of a hostage — wasn’t a compelling counterargument.
“Please… can we talk?” Finn tried, pulling at Lombard’s sleeve.
Lombard raised a brow.
“Please, can we just not go through the front door?” Finn begged.
“Why?”
“Because… I have a phobia. And it’s… it’s getting worse,” Finn stammered.
Lombard could tell he was lying. Of course he could. Children lied like they dressed — loudly, and with total confidence that nobody could see them. But he didn’t care enough to dig for the truth. If the boy wanted to lie, that was between him and his future therapist.
“You know what? I’m not a fan of back doors,” Lombard said, shrugging. Then he turned and walked toward the girl without waiting for a rebuttal.
Finn ran a hand through his hair. “Fuck you, Dad,” he muttered, with feeling.
He was so busy drowning in the fear of Lombard embarrassing him that he missed what was happening right in front of him.
The conversation. Between Lombard and the girl.
The one that was about to detonate his entire understanding of the evening.
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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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