Page 107 of Unlocked

Nobody named a company after a cabin. Nobody named a company after anything personal, anything that could be traced back to a real person, a real place, a real memory. That was the entire point. The whole architecture of what she'd been tracing for months was built on anonymity, on names that meant nothing, on addresses that didn't exist, and people who weren't real.

Except this.

This meant something to someone.

She picked up the folder with fingers that weren't entirely steady and opened it.

The documents inside were dense and technical, yet she understood every word of them. She understood them with a clarity that came from knowing she’d been looking at it from the wrong angle for months, and then suddenly turned it and saw the whole shape of it at once.

Thistledew was a holding company. Registered in the Caymans. Incorporated three years ago. She recognized the law firm listed as its registered agent…she'd seen that name before in the offshore structures she'd been tracing, a small firm in George Town that specialized in exactly this kind of construction.

And the companies it was connected to.

She knew those names.

She'd been trying to find them for months. She'd traced them to dead ends in Tokyo and followed them through six layers of transfers. She’d built a wall of documents in her secret room, trying to understand how they connected.

They connected here.

They connected to a holding company named after her grandfather's cabin.

They connected to her mother's desk.

The room felt very small suddenly. The air felt thin. She was aware of her own breathing in a way she normally wasn't, too loud, too shallow, and she made herself slow it down, and stand straight, and hold the folder to read what was in front of her, even though part of her, a very fundamental part of her, did not want to know what the folder could reveal.

She kept reading.

The money she'd been tracking. The offshore accounts. The shell companies that dissolved into other shell companies in other countries. The wire transfers she'd followed through six, eight, ten layers of obfuscation. They all connected to Thistledew. And Thistledew connected to accounts that she would need to trace further, that would take time and resources to fully untangle, but that bore the unmistakable fingerprints of someone who understood both the law and offshore banking at the highest level.

Someone who had built something like this before.

Someone who had been building things like this for a very long time.

She thought about what Kelly had said. North told me Anderson had a boss. He didn't know who. But he knew for a fact Anderson was getting told what to do.

She thought about Gil in the conference room with his jacket off.

She thought about Bunny with her immaculate desk and her immaculate life and her thirty years of corporate litigation. Her mother had contacts in every corner of the financial and legal world, and an absolute, uncompromising need to control everything within her reach. She thought about her mother’s posture and the way she moved.

She thought about her father. Quiet. Methodical. The man who destroyed people who refused him, systematically and without leaving fingerprints.

She thought about her grandfather, who had given her the firm and the Society membership and had tried, she understood now, to put her in exactly the right position to find something.

Her throat tightened.

She closed the folder carefully and set it back in the stack exactly as she'd found it, slightly out of alignment, put down in a hurry.

She looked up to find Bunny standing in the doorway.

With Gil beside her.

And behind them both, her bags still in his hands, his clothes changed now into something dry and fresh, stood Josh.

The three of them looked at her across the dim office, and nobody said anything, and for a single, suspended moment, the only sound was the blood rushing in Tatum's ears and the distant muted noise of the city forty floors below.

She looked at her mother's face.

Bunny's expression was composed and still, giving nothing away, the same expression she'd worn at a thousand galas and a thousand dinners and across the breakfast table on a hundred ordinary mornings of Tatum's childhood.