Page 115 of Unlocked

The elevator doors opened at the garage level.

They stepped out.

"My keys," Bunny said suddenly.

She put her hand in her bag and then turned back to the elevator and pressed the button. "I left them upstairs. I'll be two minutes." She stepped back in, and the doors closed before either of them could react.

Tatum and Josh stood in the garage.

The noises of the underground parking settled around them. Concrete and low lighting and the smell of oil and exhaust and the distant hum of the ventilation system. No one else was visible. No cameras that she could see from where she was standing, though she wasn't certain, and uncertainty was a problem.

She felt the shift immediately. The quality of the air between them changed the moment the elevator doors closed. Josh’s pleasant assistant performance dropped away like a coat he'd shrugged off. He dropped the bags.

"She's not going to be two minutes," Josh said. His voice was different without Bunny present. Flatter. More himself, whatever that was. "She never is."

"No," Tatum agreed.

Silence.

She kept her eyes moving without making it obvious. Exit signs. Stairwell door to her left, maybe fifteen feet. Car ramp to her right, further. Elevator directly behind Josh, which was useless. The bags were at his feet, and she couldn't get to them without going through him.

"You climbed on the outside of my building to destroy my apartment," Tatum said conversationally. "Twenty floors up. Quite impressive, actually."

She sensed his eyes on her.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"Of course you don't." She tilted her head slightly. "It doesn't really matter anyway. Archer replaced everything. Every. Single. Thing. Whatever you broke, whatever you tore apart, it's all been put back exactly as it was." She paused. "Better, actually. He upgraded a few things. That's what he does. Whatever you managed to damage, he fixes. That's just the reality of the situation, Josh."

Josh’s posture stiffened, and his eyes narrowed. "You think that's cute," he said quietly.

"I think it's true," she said.

She was watching him in her peripheral vision, and as she watched, the flatness in his expression shifted into something with more heat in it, something less controlled, the thing underneath the pleasant, helpful surface that she should have seen months ago and hadn't because she'd been looking at the surface the way everyone looked at the surface.

"You have no idea," he said, "what is actually happening right now."

"I have a pretty good idea," she said.

"You don't." He took a step toward her. "You think Archer Gray is going to come and put everything back together. You think this is something that can be fixed." He smiled, and it was nothing like his usual genial smile. "It doesn't get fixed, Tatum."

"Everything gets fixed," she said. "Eventually."

He moved.

She'd been waiting for it. She'd been saying exactly what she'd been saying because she'd been waiting for it, hoping for it, needing him to be angry enough to be stupid because angry and stupid was something she could work with.

He grabbed her arm.

She let him close the distance, and then she drove her elbow hard into his ribs, the way she'd driven it into the ribs of the man who'd tried to drag her into the white van, and felt the satisfying impact of it. Josh grunted, and his grip loosened. She turned and got both hands on his jacket and shoved him sideways into the concrete pillar beside the elevator.

He hit it harder than she expected. She hadn't known she had that much force in her.

She ran for the stairwell.

She almost made it.

He was faster than he looked and meaner than she'd given him credit for, and he caught her before she reached the door, one hand closing around her arm and yanking her back with a strength that surprised her, spinning her around and slamming her back against the concrete wall hard enough to drive the air from her lungs.