Page 99 of Unlocked

And stopped dead.

Seated at a booth, eyes wide open, mouth slack, was Vincent Kelly with a small hole between his eyes. A single drop of blood rolled down his nose.

And just like that, Archer’s world was over.

What he was looking at wasn't just Vincent Kelly's dead body.

It was the end of everything.

Because after an incident like this, Archer Gray was finished.

The Society would demand his head. Literally.

And that meant Archer Gray had to die.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Tatum stared at the ceiling.

Again.

She was getting very good at contemplating this particular ceiling. The way the morning light moved across it. The exact shade of it in the early gray of before seven. She could probably draw it from memory at this point.

She turned her head. The other side of the bed was empty, the pillow barely dented, the sheet pulled back with the careful neatness of someone who had left deliberately and early and without wanting to leave a trace of himself behind.

She lay there for a moment and just let herself feel it. She'd promised herself she wouldn't do this. Wouldn't read things into it, wouldn't build something out of what was and wasn't there. She was a grown woman, and she knew what this was. She'd gone into it with her eyes open. She wasn't the type to fall apart over a man.

Except…

Except she was lying here staring at the ceiling, and the empty space beside her felt like a statement rather than just an absence, and the honest truth, the one she'd been pushing away for days now and possibly for much longer than that, was that she was in love with him.

There it was.

She closed her eyes. She was in love with Archer Gray. Head of the Lock and Key Society. The most controlled, most dangerous, most emotionally unavailable man she had ever met in her life. She was in love with him, and if she was being really honest, properly honest in the way she rarely allowed herself to be, it hadn't happened recently. It had been happening slowly and quietly for a long time. Since before any of this. Since the board meetings where he'd move through the room and she'd track him without meaning to. Since the moments when he'd say something precise and unexpected, and she'd feel the particular pleasure of a mind encountering another mind that worked in a way she recognized. Since the first time he'd looked at her, really looked at her, and she'd understood that being seen by Archer Gray was something different from being seen by anyone else.

She'd told herself it was admiration. Professional respect. The natural response to being in proximity to someone extraordinary. She pressed her palms against her eyes. She'd been lying to herself for months.

And now she was here, in his building, sharing her research with him, letting him bring her dinner and tuck her hair back from her face and kiss her like she was something he was afraid of losing. He’d even said it, and yet, it was absolutely crushing her because she knew with the clear-eyed certainty that had always been her most reliable quality, that Archer Gray was not a man who fell in love. He was a man who cared, in his controlled and precise and deeply guarded way, but caring and loving were different things, and she was not going to be the woman who confused the two and paid an emotional price for it.

She sat up as the rain started. A soft sprinkle at first and then a massive downpour. How fitting.

Enough.

She'd been avoiding her parents for days, and that had to stop. They were infuriating, and her father was frightening in ways she'd never fully admitted even to herself, but they were still her parents. She owed them a conversation. A real one, not the office standoff or the hallway retreat. She needed to tell them about Gil and Anderson. And she needed to tell them she was done with the firm, done with Anderson, done with all of it. She needed to say it properly and then she needed to go.

Because that was the other thing she'd been circling and hadn't let herself land on.

She needed to leave.

She could work the Granite Industries case from anywhere. The money trail was digital. The paperwork was in her files. Archer had his resources, and he would keep digging with or without her in the building, and if she found something, if she traced the money to wherever it had gone, she could send him the information, and he would do what he did with it. She trusted him on that. She did.

But she couldn't stay here. She couldn't keep waking up in this apartment and checking the other side of the bed and feeling that particular hollowness. She couldn't keep having dinner across from him and feeling the strong attraction to him and lying to herself about what it meant.

She couldn't keep being in love with a man who was going to keep walking out before dawn because that was simply who he was and what this was. She was not going to let it break her in a building that belonged to him, surrounded by people who worked for him, with nowhere to look that didn't remind her of exactly how deep in she'd gotten.

Florence, she thought. Or Ireland. Somewhere with no shell companies and no board meetings and no ceiling she'd memorized from lying awake thinking about a man who didn't lose sleep over anything.

She got up, showered, pulled on jeans and a sweater, and started making a mental list. What day was it? Wednesday. Her parents would be at the office already. They’d have had morning coffee and left their door open in case the staff had any questions or issues they wanted to talk about on Wednesday mornings.