Page 112 of Unlocked

Tatum thought about Kelly. About North. About Lebowitz. About Davis and whoever else was involved. She thought about the Curator's cleanup crew and the Obsidian Club and the body that had vanished without a trace.

"You killed North and Lebowitz," she blurted, her heart slamming against her rib cage. “I saw you stab Lebowitz in the club. You didn’t hesitate. You leaned over and said something to him as you ended his life. How could you?”

“How could I? Lebowitz brought trouble to my door. Lebowitz jeopardized everything I built.” Her eyes blazed. “He couldn’t be allowed to live. He would have caved under the pressure. He even tried to blackmail me.” Her voice was icy. “He got what he deserved. They all did.”

“And Father? Where’s he in all this?” Tatum’s voice cracked. How could this be happening?

Bunny let out an unladylike snort. “Your father calls himself the Curator. He thinks he built everything and that he runs it with an iron fist. But it was me,” Bunny practically growled. “I came up with this solution. I put it into play. I built the contacts. And I’m wrapping up loose ends.”

The horror wasn’t loud. It wasn't the screaming, violent kind of horror that Tatum had always imagined would accompany a revelation of this magnitude. Instead, it was a quiet, ice-cold wave that washed over her. It was the horror of looking at a face she had known her entire life and understanding that she had never actually seen it clearly before. That the woman who had criticized her clothes, pressured her about cases, air-kissed her at galas, and told her exhaustion was a luxury had been building this…this evil empire for decades and had never once lost a moment's sleep over any of it.

“You killed for what? An empire built on human slavery?” Revulsion brought bile up her esophagus. The smile was slow in forming, but it made the hair stand up on the back of Tatum’s neck.

“Lebowitz had taken my perfect concept, my perfect business model, and he ruined it with his greed.” Bunny’s eyes flashed, and her hands gripped the arms of her chair. “He had to pay and pay dearly for it. I needed him to know that I was personally exacting revenge for what he cost me. And a message had to be sent to others.”

Tatum couldn’t get her brain around everything. She needed time to process it all. Like decades and hours of therapy to even begin to understand how all this happened.

"Your grandfather thought," Bunny said, and there was something in her voice now that indicated amusement, "that putting you in this firm would keep me in line. That having his precious granddaughter watching from the inside would be a check on my ambitions." She shook her head slightly. "Ridiculous. You were always going to be part of this, Tatum. You are the heir to this. All of it. Not just the firm. All of it. And you are brilliant, and capable, and you have proven over the last several months that your instincts are extraordinary. You found things that we didn't think anyone would find for years. That is remarkable. You are remarkable."

Tatum felt sick. The first real words of praise from her mother and they were tainted by this monstrosity.

"I don't want it," she said.

"You don't want it yet," Bunny said. "That's different."

"I will never want it."

Bunny looked at her with the patient, slightly sorrowful expression of a mother correcting a child who doesn't yet understand how the world works. "We had to accelerate the timeline somewhat," she said. "Lebowitz's greed was one factor. He went outside the structure and brought in people we hadn't vetted. That complicated things." She paused. "And then there was your interest in Archer."

The temperature in the room dropped.

Tatum went very still.

"That," Bunny said, "was a wrinkle we did not anticipate. We knew you were on the board. We knew you were investigating Granite Industries. That was manageable, even useful in some ways… It gave us visibility into how close anyone was getting. But your relationship with Archer Gray." She said his name with the same precise inflection she used for everything, no heat, no emphasis, just the word itself placed with surgical accuracy. "That created a problem. He is not a man you can manage from a distance. He is not a man you can manage at all. And you gave him access to you and therefore to us."

Tatum's heart was hammering.

"What did you do?" she said.

Bunny looked at her watch again.

"Mother." Tatum's voice cracked on the word for the first time. "What did you do?"

Bunny met her eyes, and her face was devoid of expression. Not cruelty, not regret, not the faintest shadow of what a mother's face should hold when her daughter was standing in front of her, barely holding it together.

Nothing.

"What is necessary.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Archer had been moving since dawn, and it was now late afternoon. He was tired in a way that had nothing to do with his body.

He'd sent the documents to three separate locations. Encrypted. Backed up. In the hands of people he trusted completely. Individuals he’d never had reason to doubt. The kind of people who existed in the margins of his life, known to no one in the Society, connected to nothing that could be traced back to him. If tomorrow went badly, if the board did what the rules said the board should do, the information would survive him. Davis's violations. The Curator's money trail. The connection between the trafficking network and the Society's own members. All of it was protected and preserved. Every detail pointed in the right direction.

He'd met with the team again at three. Ryker had the board presentation ready. Flynn had pulled every frame of footage from the morning and had three possible explanations for how Daniela had gotten the weapon in, none of them good, all of them fixable. Cash had confirmed the meeting location at Riverside Park was clean. Rush had people in place.

Everything that could be done had been done.