Page 90 of Unlocked

"Fisher is the part I'm least certain about," Archer admitted. "I don't think he's the Curator. But I think he's connected to whoever is. The international backing, the money movements, the Lisbon camera… It all points to someone using Fisher the same way someone is using Davis. As an instrument."

Armand nodded slowly. "Someone who prefers to remain invisible."

"Yes." Archer looked at him. "I need to find them before the board meeting, or Davis and Fisher will control the narrative."

"I will have what I can for you in forty-eight hours," Armand said. He rose from the chair, unhurried as always, and picked up his coffee. At the door, he stopped and looked back. "The Wellington girl," he said.

Archer met his gaze and said nothing.

"Tatum is good for you," Armand said. "I say this not as flattery but as an observation, you understand. You have been operating alone for too long. It makes a man rigid. She is making you less rigid." He paused. "That is not a criticism."

"Armand." He looked pointedly at the door and cocked his head.

"Oui, oui, I am going." He held up one large hand. But he didn't move immediately. He stood there looking at Archer with dark, perceptive eyes that had read rooms on three continents for forty years. "You care for her," he said. "More than you are comfortable with. More than you have let yourself care for anyone in this job. And that frightens you, because caring for someone in your position makes them a target."

Archer said nothing.

"But consider this," Armand said. "She is already a target. Not because of you. Because of who she is and what she is doing. She has made certain people uncomfortable. You did not create her danger. You are simply the person most motivated to end it." He tilted his head slightly. "That is not a weakness, mon ami. That is a reason."

He opened the door and left.

Archer sat alone in the quiet office.

He thought about Tatum in that lounge, gripping her coffee cup. He thought about her in the hallway afterward, saying no, not really when he’d asked if she was all right, the exhaustion in it, the relief of being able to say it to someone without having to manage the consequences.

He thought about the forehead kiss, which had not been planned. Which had been something else entirely. Something from that older, rawer version of himself that he'd spent twenty years disciplining into something more useful.

He picked up his phone and sent a message to Marco. I need everything you have on Stuart Wellington. All of it. Fast.

Then he set the phone down and stared at the wall again.

Armand was right. He knew it. He'd known it since last night, when he'd sat beside her on the couch and watched her hold a bag of frozen peas to her head. When he’d refused to admit how much it cost him to stay on his side of the distance he'd put between them.

He cared for her. More than was wise. More than was safe, for either of them.

The question was what he was going to do about it.

He didn't have an answer. Not yet.

But for the first time in a very long time, he found he didn't want to push the question away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Tatum had been staring at the same page for twenty minutes.

Not because it was difficult to read. Because what it said kept landing in her chest in a way she needed a moment to sit with before she could move on.

She pushed back from the desk, rolled her shoulders, and looked at the wall of notes she'd built since Ryker had handed her the thumb drive. It was past nine. She hadn't eaten since the coffee and doughnut that morning, which felt like it had happened in a different lifetime.

She pulled the laptop back and kept going.

The files were meticulous. Whoever did this, whatever they did for Archer, they were extraordinarily good at it. The bank records were layered and dense, but organized in a way that suggested someone who understood exactly what they were looking at when they pulled them. They’d done the initial mapping for her. All she had to do was follow the money.

So she did.

The first thing she noticed was the subtle sloppiness.

It was the kind of thing she would have missed if she weren’t looking for it. But Tatum had been living inside financial documentation for months, and she had developed an instinct for the places where careful people got careless. It usually happened in one of two ways. Either they were tired, or they were arrogant.