Page 125 of Unlocked

She looked at him. "Armand⁠—"

"Non, non." He held up one large hand. "Listen to me. Leave it with me. That is not your work to do. It never was." He leaned forward slightly, his elbows on the table, his dark eyes very direct. "What you did… Finding the money, building the case, surviving what you survived, that was your work. And it is finished. You have done more than anyone had the right to ask of you." He sat back. "Let me finish the rest. This I can do. This I want to do."

She sat with that for a moment. The idea of letting someone else carry it. Of walking away from Wellington, Wellington, and Smith, and the partners' offices on Park Avenue, and her mother's immaculate desk with the folder named after a cabin to humiliate a man who thought ill of her.

"I'll think about it," she said.

Armand smiled, just slightly. The smile of a man who had learned that I'll think about it from a stubborn woman was very often the beginning of yes.

"Think about it," he said. "And in the meantime, finish your toast, s'il te plaît."

She almost smiled back. Almost.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Tatum arrived at the Society early and stood outside the building for a moment before she went in, looking up at it the way she hadn't allowed herself to look at it since she'd come back. The facade was the same as it had always been, solid, discreet, and entirely unremarkable to anyone who didn't know what it was. She had stood outside this building on a hundred different occasions over the years, and it had never felt the way it felt now, weighted with everything that had happened inside it and everything that hadn't happened since.

She went in.

Armand was already in the small sitting room off the main corridor, as she'd known he would be. He rose when she entered, that old-world courtesy that was entirely natural to him and never felt performative.

"You slept?" he asked.

"A little," she said, which was more or less true.

She sat beside him and kept her voice low. Around them, the building was beginning to fill, staff moving with the purposeful quiet of people who understood that today was significant.

"I've been thinking," she said.

Armand waited.

"Your offer," she said. "I want to take you up on it. Florence first, I think. And then Ireland." She paused. "How soon can it happen?"

Armand's expression didn't change, but something in his eyes did, a warmth that he didn't try to conceal. "Today," he said. "Right after this meeting. I have everything arranged. It was arranged some time ago, in fact." He said it without smugness, simply as a fact, the fact of a man who had always known she would get there eventually. "You say the word, and it happens."

"Today," she said.

"Oui."

She looked at her hands for a moment. "Okay," she said. "Today." She cocked her head. “What do I do about my parents? They will come looking for me.” She knew that Armand would have taken care of this already, but she was curious.

“Ah, it is a sad day. You will be killed in a hit-and-run. Your body will be so badly mangled in the accident that identifying you will be impossible. Your parents, that is, your father, will have to have a closed-casket funeral. We will all mourn your loss.”

“So, I get a new name and a new…everything?”

“Yes. You will go to Ireland first, though, oui? I will have everything you need waiting there for you. It is agreeable?”

Tatum let the idea of a brand-new life starting today run through her mind for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, that will work.”

“Wait, you said my father will have the funeral. What about Bunny?”

“Your mother will be arrested for two homicides. Archer found a hair at North’s apartment, and he had it analyzed. He also had his people pull video from all the businesses around the Obsidian Club, and it shows your mother arriving and then leaving. She is still carrying the mask on the sidewalk. The video shows her tucking it in her pocket.”

Tatum’s eyebrows hit her hairline. “But that’s all circumstantial.”

“Oui, but there are other things that add to it, files that the police obtained from an anonymous source that outline many of Bunny’s illegal dealings.”

“And my father?” Tatum asked, hardly able to draw a breath.