Page 114 of Unlocked

He stepped in. Unfortunately, it was actually going down. He would take it down and then back up again. He knew which floor the partners' offices were on because he knew everything about the environments that contained people he was responsible for, and Tatum had been his responsibility since the night her apartment was torn apart and he'd charged the replacement to himself. In retrospect, when he’d done that, he’d known he was in trouble. If he were being honest, she was his responsibility from the moment she’d joined the Society. Looking back now, he had to acknowledge that he’d had her join the board so he could be closer to her.

He would find her. He would see her face and know she was all right, and then he would initiate the conversation he should have had days ago, the one he'd been avoiding because he didn't know how to have it without saying things that complicated everything. He didn't care about the complication anymore.

He had fifty-fifty odds on tomorrow, and he was not walking into that without telling her. Whatever it cost him. Whatever it changed. Whatever happened after.

She deserved to know.

And he needed to say it, just once, out loud, to her face, while he still could.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Bunny opened her office door.

She looked at Tatum the way she always looked at Tatum when a decision about Tatum’s life had been made that didn't require Tatum's input, with the brisk, pleasant efficiency of someone moving on to the next item on a list.

"Josh," she called.

Josh appeared from the corridor with Tatum's two bags, one in each hand, carrying them with the ease of someone who had done it before. Which she now knew he had, over a balcony railing twenty floors up in the dark, and the knowledge of it sat in her stomach like something she couldn't digest.

"We're going," Bunny said, pulling on her coat.

Tatum looked at her mother. At the coat. At Josh and the bags. Gil had retreated somewhere during the conversation and was no longer visible, which told her that whatever was happening next was not something Gil needed to witness.

"Going where?" Tatum asked.

"The Hamptons." Bunny smoothed her lapel and picked up her handbag from the desk with the decisive movement of someone who had already moved on from the conversation they'd just had. "We'll have some time together. Some space to talk properly. You need time to adjust to everything, and the city isn't the place for it."

"Adjust?" Tatum said.

"To your new life," Bunny said. "Which is a very good one, Tatum, if you'll allow yourself to see it that way."

She said it the way she'd always said everything, as though the matter were settled and the only remaining question was how quickly Tatum would catch up.

Tatum thought about her father. Waiting in the Hamptons. In the house she'd spent summers in, where Stuart Wellington's particular brand of quiet control had saturated every room and every hallway since before she could remember. Where there were no lobbies or corridors or other people. Where the only exits were those Stuart allowed.

Her mouth went dry.

Bunny was frightening. Bunny was capable of things Tatum was still in the process of fully understanding, and the horror of that was going to take a long time to digest. But Bunny believed she was in charge. Bunny operated as though she had built this and was therefore its master, and what she said was what happened.

Tatum knew better.

She had always known better. It was one of the things she and her mother had never discussed because discussing it would have required Bunny to admit the truth, and Bunny did not admit things.

Stuart called the shots. Stuart had always called the shots. And Stuart was in the Hamptons waiting for his daughter, and whatever Bunny thought this conversation in the Hamptons was going to look like, Tatum had a very clear idea of what it was actually going to be.

She didn't know yet how she was going to avoid it, but she was not getting in that car. Her life literally depended on it.

"All right," she said.

Bunny looked faintly surprised at the lack of resistance. She covered it quickly. "Good. Josh, bring the bags."

They went to the elevator. Bunny pressed the button for the garage. Tatum stood between her mother and Josh and looked at the numbers above the door, her mind moving a mile a minute.

Her phone was in her pocket; she could feel it but hadn't been able to use it since she'd walked into her mother's office, found the folder, and looked up to see the three of them in the doorway. She couldn’t answer Archer’s calls. She knew it was Archer. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. Yet every attempt to reach for it had felt too risky, a signal she wasn't ready to send.

She needed to send a signal and get word to Archer.

The thought of him arrived with a physical tightening in her chest that was equal parts longing and terror. Not because she doubted that he'd come. Because of what Bunny had said. By now, the last piece of the puzzle is in play. And the way her eyes had moved when Tatum asked what she'd done to Archer, that particular flatness, a damning refusal to answer.