The distinctive sound of the slide of a gun chambering a round echoed through the room.
With his hand frozen at his harness, Jack looked over his shoulder. He took in the man standing in the doorway, aiming a gun right at his head.
“Lombard,” Jack growled.
“You almost had it there, Pallas. Almost,” Lombard said. “Now take the shoulder harness off. Slowly.”
The first thing Jack noticed was that Lombard didn’t have a silencer on his gun. Which meant that Cameron was still alive downstairs. Lombard had come after him first.
“I said take the shoulder harness off. Now,” Lombard said quietly.
Jack read the look on Lombard’s face and knew he wasn’t bluffing. He unhooked the harness and set it on the floor. He’d be no good to Cameron if Lombard blew his brains all over the office wall right then and there.
“Kick it over here,” Lombard said.
Jack complied. His eyes remained trained on the trigger of Lombard’s gun. One twitch and he’d be out of that chair. Dive to the floor, pull the desk over, and use it as a shield. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was something.
Then Lombard changed the game.
“Cameron Lynde,” he called out loudly, his voice reverberating through the top floor. “I have a gun pointed at your boyfriend’s head. If you’re not on the landing in three seconds, I will kill him.”
Jack forced himself to sound calm and controlled. “Get out of the house now, Cameron. Let me handle this.”
Lombard didn’t so much as blink. “Three seconds, Cameron. One, Two—”
“Don’t.”
The single, shaky word came from the landing a half a floor below them.
“Good girl, Cameron,” Lombard said.
The three of them remained in a holding pattern. Lombard in the doorway, pointing his gun at Jack, Cameron out of view on his other side, halfway down the stairs.
“If I hear a gunshot, I’ll run,” she called up. “And I know it’s me you really want.”
“Neither of you has to get hurt—I know a way we can work this out,” Lombard said.
“Don’t listen to a fucking word he says, Cameron. Get out of the house now,” Jack ordered her.
“I want to make a deal,” Lombard said, talking over him. “That’s all. You’re a prosecutor, Cameron—you can make it happen. And this gun in my hand gives you one hell of an incentive to do just that. I know things—like the name of the person who told me about you. There’s a mole—a big one. I can help you nail him. But we need to talk about this face-to-face. How do I know you’re not standing there with a phone in your hand, calling the police right now? So come up the stairs slowly, with your hands in front of you. Do it now, Cameron. Or Jack dies.”
It almost sounded convincing. Jack prayed she wouldn’t fall for Lombard’s speech. “It’s a setup, Cameron. You come up those stairs, and we’re both dead.”
There was a pause. Cameron remained strangely silent. Debating her options, presumably.
Jack knew the time to act was now. In his mind, there was only one option, and that was getting her as far away from Lombard as possible. No matter what it took.
She’d said she would run if she heard a gun shot. He had to count on that. He would draw Lombard’s fire and give Cameron a chance to escape. He wouldn’t stop until he reached Lombard, no matter what hit him.
Other men had tried to kill him before. For Cameron’s sake, he was willing to see if this asshole’s luck was any better than the others.
Jack got ready to make his move.
Beads of sweat formed at Lombard’s brow. He called down again, and his voice was strained and anxious. “You’ve got two fucking seconds, Cameron, so either get your ass up here or say good-bye to Jack.”
“Okay! I’m coming,” Cameron shouted up urgently.
But she wasn’t on the landing anymore. There was the faint sound of a door opening—it came from the hallway on the floor beneath them. A hinge squeaked. Something metal rattled.
“She’s getting a goddamn gun,” Lombard hissed.
Fortunately, Jack knew the layout of the house a lot better than Lombard. Not a gun, he thought, realizing precisely what Cameron was up to.
She was fucking brilliant.
The door she had opened, the one closest to the stairs, was her linen closet. And while there wasn’t a gun stashed in there—at least not one that Jack knew about—there was something else that could help them.
The circuit breaker.
Lombard snapped, having had enough. “Fuck you both.” His eyes narrowed in