Page 88 of Unlocked

He was thinking about Stuart Wellington.

More specifically, he was thinking about the way Stuart Wellington had sat in that lounge chair and spoken to his daughter. The tone of it. The precision of it. The way he'd delivered the threat with the kind of calm that came from decades of practice, from knowing that the person across from you had been conditioned since childhood to respond to it in exactly the way he intended.

Don't make me demonstrate how.

Archer's jaw tightened.

He had known men like Stuart Wellington his whole life. He had grown up surrounded by them, in the back alleys of London and Rome and Paris, men who used quiet voices to communicate the most violent intentions. Men who understood that real power didn't need to raise itself to make a point. He had learned from those men. He had become something more controlled and more dangerous than any of them.

But right now, sitting in his office, he didn't feel controlled.

He felt something older and rawer than that. Something from before the suits and the measured responses and the careful, deliberate construction of Archer Gray, head of the Lock and Key Society. A product of the streets. The boy who had survived by understanding instinctively who the predators were and getting to them before they got to him.

Stuart Wellington was a predator. He'd looked at his own daughter across a coffee table and applied pressure with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it a thousand times before and never once questioned whether he should.

Archer had noted the way Tatum had gripped that coffee cup. The way her knuckles turned alabaster with the force of her grip. The slight stiffening of her spine. He’d been proud of the way she'd fought to keep her voice level when every instinct she had was probably screaming at her to back down. He knew that feeling. He'd felt it himself, a very long time ago, before he'd learned how to make other people feel it instead.

She shouldn't have to feel it. Not from her own father.

Not from anyone.

He stood up. Sat back down. Drummed his fingers once on the desk and stopped.

He needed to make some calls. He needed to find out exactly who Stuart Wellington was, what he was involved in, and what his pressure points were. Not because Stuart had done anything that fell within Archer's jurisdiction as head of the Society, not yet, anyway. But because Archer Gray, the controlled and measured and deliberately constructed version of himself, had looked at that man in the lounge and felt something ancient stir in his chest.

He picked up his phone but paused when a knock came to the door.

He set the phone down. "Come in."

The door opened, and Armand Fontaine filled the frame. He was holding a coffee cup in one large hand and wearing the expression of a man who had something to say and had already decided exactly how he was going to say it.

"Mon ami," he said, closing the door behind him. "You look like you are planning to kill someone, yes?"

"Armand." He waved the man toward the armchair across the desk from him.

Armand lowered himself into the chair across the desk with the unhurried ease of a man who operated on his own schedule and always had. "But first I tell you what I came to tell you, and then you can proceed to plan to kill whoever it is you are planning to kill."

Archer leaned back. "Go ahead."

Armand set his coffee on the edge of the desk, folded his hands, and looked at Archer steadily. "Davis and Fisher. They are moving."

"They're always moving."

"Oui, but this time they are moving toward something specific." Armand paused. "Lisbon."

Archer went still. "The Society space in Lisbon."

"They are having a camera planted there," Armand said. "As we speak, I believe. Someone working on the maintenance staff, my people believe, though they are still confirming. The camera, it will be discovered by someone entirely uninvolved. Someone credible. Someone whose finding of it will look completely accidental."

The cold in Archer's chest settled into something harder. "And the witnesses?"

Armand raised an eyebrow.

"They already have witnesses," Archer said. "Don't they."

"Three," Armand confirmed. "Each one is prepared to swear they personally observed hidden cameras at different Society locations. Different cities. Different times. These accounts are consistent without being identical, which means someone coached them carefully."

"Who are they?"