Page 121 of Unlocked

The gun was small and dark, and Davis held it with the confidence of a man who had decided he was done talking.

"You should have taken me out when you had the chance," Davis said. "Back when the rules said you could. That was your mistake, Archer. Living by the rules when the rules were the only thing keeping you from doing what needed to be done." He shook his head. "Stupid."

Archer looked at the gun and thought about the Society in Davis's hands. About the information he carried, the access he would have, the reach. About a man with no guardrails and no conscience, and Fisher behind him like a fucking puppet master. He thought about what that looked like for the world that existed beyond these walls and these rules and this park.

He thought about Tatum in a hospital bed.

He thought about a lot of things in a very short amount of time.

"Fisher is going to eat you alive," Archer said. "You know that."

"Goodbye, Archer," Davis said.

The shot and the other shot arrived so close together they were almost one sound.

Davis's expression went from satisfaction to confusion to nothing in less than a second, and then he was simply gone, pink mist and the dark shape of a coat, and then only the railing where he had been standing.

Something hit Archer.

He registered it the way you registered things when your body understood before your mind did, a force, a heat, a sudden and comprehensive wrongness spreading from his left side outward.

The railing came up to meet his hands. Or his hands went down to meet the railing. He wasn't entirely certain of the geometry of it.

"Archer." Ryker's voice in the earpiece, no longer quiet or professional, stripped of everything except the specific quality of a man who was running. "Archer, talk to me. Talk to me right now."

He opened his mouth.

"Archer."

The river was very dark below him, and the lights of the city were reflected in it in long broken shapes. It was actually quite beautiful when you looked at it properly, and he hadn't looked at it properly in years because he was always looking at something else, always looking at the next problem, the next threat, the next thing that needed managing.

He thought about Tatum.

About the garage floor and her hand in his and the particular way she'd said I love you, plainly, without ceremony, the way she said everything when she meant it completely.

None of this had gone according to plan, he realized. Not the timeline, not the contingency, not the exit strategy, not any of it. Everything he'd built and prepared and accounted for had been overtaken by events he hadn't seen coming, which was not something Archer Gray did, except apparently it was… Apparently, he was capable of being completely blindsided by a woman in a cornflower-blue sweater with dark circles under her eyes who refused to back down from anything.

He thought about telling her he loved her in a parking garage, which was not where he would have chosen to say it if he'd been planning it, but then he hadn't been planning it, and maybe that was the point, maybe that was the only way it could have happened. Because Tatum Wellington had gotten past every planned defense he'd ever constructed, and the only things she'd reached were the unplanned ones.

He almost smiled.

He thought about what Tatum would say. She might tell him, “Mercury is in retrograde, Archer. What did you expect?”

"I'm coming," Ryker’s voice buzzed oddly in his ear. "Stay where you are. Archer. Stay where you are."

The railing was cold under his hands.

The river was very far below.

He thought, with the last of the clarity available to him, that he had told her he was coming back and he had meant it and he was going to have to find a way to make that true because the alternative was not something he was prepared to accept.

He thought: not yet.

And then the railing was gone, and the river came up to meet him, and the city lights scattered across the dark water and went out

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Bunny was sitting in the chair by the window, looking at Tatum the way she always looked at her, with the particular attention of someone taking inventory.