2026-01-28 03:27:11“Finn said you have a lot of connections in the Ivy League? Like, all of them?” the girl asked, eyes wide.
Girls this age were still easy to deal with. That was the only reason Lombard tolerated the question with a lazy smile.
“Not really,” he said.
“What? Finn said that!” she protested, like he was hoarding a national secret.
“Yeah. I graduated from one of them, got my master’s at another, then my PhD at a third. So — been to three of them,” Lombard explained, in the exact tone of a man reading out a grocery list.
Her jaw practically hit the floor.
“How did you do it? Did you have connections? Your parents are rich, right?”
“Huh. Not really. Went on scholarship,” Lombard dropped, like it was nothing.
Boom. Mind blown.
“Oh. My. God!” she cried. “Did you… also know people there?”
“Go to any of their offices and you’ll find my name on the list of professors they’d recruit if given the chance. Plus, I’ve held business and academic seminars at all of them. They were all making a fuss.”
Her eyes were about to leave her head entirely. Her mouth had been open long enough to qualify as architecture. And it was about to get worse.
A man suddenly stepped in front of them. He frowned for a long beat, then took another step closer.
“Lombard August?” the man asked, in the voice of someone who had just spotted a mythical creature grazing at a school event.
“Uncle? You know him?” the girl asked.
“What are you talking about?” the man said. “This is the man I’ve been telling you about! He’s everything you need to get into any college!”
Lombard gave a small, polite smile. “Thanks for the hype, sir.”
“And see?” the uncle beamed. “I told you — Lombard’s got to be the most humble man on Earth.” He crossed the distance and hugged him. “Where have you been all this time? No news, no scandals… I thought you were dead!”
“I was… dealing with life,” Lombard said, with the shrug of a man compressing two years of catastrophe into four words.
From a distance, Finn’s jaw dropped.
Lombard and the girl had stopped walking. They were chatting — warmly, familiarly — with the owner of a company that generated millions a year.
Holy crap.
Finn sprinted.
“Hold — wait!” he wheezed, arriving hands-on-knees, gasping. “Um — this man right here is Lombard. He’s…”
“Is he your father?” the man asked, a quiet smirk tugging at his lips.
“No—” Finn started. Then froze.
Wait.
If Lombard was his father, everything would instantly make sense. No questions. No digging. No embarrassment. Clean exit.
“Yes,” Finn said quickly. “He’s my father.”
Lombard glanced at him.
Didn’t say a word.
Which, if Finn had known the man even slightly better, would have terrified him far more than an objection.
“Dad, let’s go,” Finn continued, grabbing Lombard’s hand with a wild grin. “I’ve got a lot of people to show you off to. You are, after all, the walking guide to the entire Ivy League.”
And before Lombard could react, Finn was pulling him away.
“I’ll see you later, Lombard!” the uncle called after them. “I don’t have your number anymore!”
The girl beamed. “I’ll get in, right?”
“The heavens smiled on you,” her uncle said proudly. “That’s why you met Lombard.”
Finn didn’t slow down until they were well out of sight. His chest heaved. Sweat rolled down his back. He wanted — needed — to ask what Lombard and that man had been talking about.
But first, priorities.
He scanned the crowd until he spotted her.
Found you.
The woman his father had mentioned. The one assigned to assist if anything went wrong. Well. Things had gone wrong. Spectacularly. In a completely different direction than anticipated, but wrong was wrong.
Finn rushed over.
“I’m so sorry,” he blurted, “but for tonight, you are Lombard’s wife. And you are my mother. Please.”
She stared at him.
“We have to do this to get me this admission,” Finn rushed on. “I don’t want to hear an objection. Please.”
Desperation clung to him like sweat.
And the woman — who had come here expecting a quiet evening and possibly an awkward blind date — was about to discover that the night had much bigger plans for her.
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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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