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 f**king 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 ass**le’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 f**king 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 f**king 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 on Jack. Everything happened at once. He pulled the trigger as Jack dove for the ground, knowing what was coming. There was a loud CLICK! from downstairs and—

All the lights in the house went out.

The gun fired in the dark, and the bullet whizzed over Jack’s head. Not wasting a moment, he leapt up and ran for Lombard. Lombard reacted more quickly to the surprise of the darkness than Jack had hoped; he took off into the hallway. Lombard fired wildly behind him, and bullets hit the walls beside Jack. He kept going. Gaining on Lombard right before the stairwell, Jack saw his chance—he dove and tackled Lombard full-force. Grabbing for Lombard’s gun, Jack pushed him backward at the same time, using all his strength to hurtle them toward the wooden banister. Jack braced himself—this was going to hurt—as they slammed against the banister and broke through with a loud crack.

Tangled together, both men plummeted thirty-five feet down the open staircase.

They landed hard on the first-floor foyer. Jack heard the sickening sound of breaking bone as he crashed on top of Lombard, who screamed out in pain.

Jack instinctively lunged for Lombard’s gun, gritting his teeth at the flash of pain in his chest—he must have broken a few ribs. Fighting off a wave of dizziness from the shock of the fall, he pushed away from Lombard, stood up, and pointed the gun at him.

Jack caught his breath and wiped blood off his forehead with his sleeve. One of the bullets had hit the wall so close to his head he’d been cut by a flying piece of plaster.

“Almost had it there, Lombard,” he panted. “Almost.”

Jack heard footsteps above him. He looked up and saw Cameron running down the stairs. Seeing him, she stopped on the landing between the first and second floors and sank against the wall in relief. Jack realized then that he and Lombard must’ve fallen through the stairwell right past her.

With a look of shock, Cameron peered up at the third floor, all thirty-five feet up, then back at him. “My God, Jack.”

She caught sight of Lombard through the moonlight and swallowed. He lay on the floor before Jack with his right leg bent at a grotesque angle beneath him. Breathing heavily, he clutched his right arm to his chest and watched Jack warily.