Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Tatum didn't move. She didn’t dare breathe.
Bunny glanced at the desk and then back at Tatum. Then she stepped forward and closed the door behind her. That was a message in and of itself. This was now a family matter. Josh and Gil were decidedly not family, no matter what they might have thought.
“I see you made yourself at home,” Bunny said, walking over to sit in the visitor’s chair. “By all means, sit behind my desk.” The malice in her tone matched the light in her eyes.
Tatum bit back the urge to argue with her mother, or to run from the office screaming. She took the easy way out and sat down. Her knees were weak as it was.
The late morning light streamed through the window behind Bunny, catching in her white-blonde hair. She looked, as always, immaculate and entirely in control of the room she was in. She folded her hands on her lap and looked at her daughter.
"How much did you find?" she asked.
Tatum's throat tightened. "Enough."
"How much is enough?"
"Thistledew," Tatum said. "The Cayman accounts.
The shell companies I've been tracing for months.
" She stopped trying to push down the horror that was rising in her throat.
She took a deep breath and started again.
"You used Grandfather's cabin, Bunny. You named a company after his cabin. Your own father-in-law."
Something moved across Bunny's face. So brief and so quickly controlled that Tatum almost missed it.
"Your grandfather," Bunny said, "was a disapproving old pain in the ass with no vision and a fondness for moral lectures that he had absolutely no business giving.
I thought it was only fitting to name it after something he loved.
I find the irony…delicious." The smug smile and malicious tone left no doubt that she spoke the truth.
Tatum stared at her. Had Bunny hated her father-in-law that much? "He built this firm."
"He built a perfectly adequate boutique law firm," Bunny said, with the particular precision of someone correcting a persistent misunderstanding. "Which was perfectly adequate for perfectly adequate ambitions.”
What was with the repetition? Tatum’s brain was misfiring, trying to deal with the shock. Suddenly, an urge to laugh nearly overwhelmed her.
As if oblivious, Bunny continued. “When I married your father, I saw what this firm could be and what it could do, and I built the rest of it.
Me, Tatum. Just me." She said it without heat, without pride even.
Just as a statement of fact. "Everything that matters about Wellington, Wellington, and Smith, I built.
The clients. The connections. The network.
Your grandfather thought he could take credit for it because his name was on the door. "
"He started it," Tatum said. "He gave you everything you had to work with."
"True. He did give us a foundation," Bunny said. "I built us an empire. Those are different things."
Tatum struggled to catch her breath. Every word was like a physical blow. Her entire world was dissolving before her eyes like cotton candy someone ran under water. What it left behind was a cold, harsh reality, one that made Tatum’s skin crawl.
Tatum looked at her mother and understood, with the clarity of the last piece falling into place in a puzzle, revealing the picture of why her grandfather had asked her to join the firm.
Not to carry on his work. Not to inherit his vision.
To watch. To be there. To be the person who might eventually see what Bunny was building and understand what it meant.
And to maybe, just maybe, be the conscience that stopped her mother.
Made her mother rethink what she was doing.
But he’d underestimated Bunny, or rather, overestimated Bunny’s love for Tatum.
But that meant her grandfather had known, even six years ago when he died, what Bunny was capable of.
What could become of his dream, and where Bunny’s ambitions could all lead.
Maybe not the specifics. Maybe not the shell companies or the offshore accounts or what the money was funding.
But he'd known that Bunny was doing something he couldn't see clearly enough to stop, and he'd put Tatum in the building, hoping she eventually would.
The sharp stab of grief for him took her breath away.
"Business was slowing down," Bunny continued, in the tone of someone explaining something obvious to someone slow.
"The legal industry changes. The old model of the boutique firm, the personal relationships, the long lunches, and handshake deals…
It was becoming obsolete. We needed new revenue.
We needed new connections. We needed to be part of something larger than what we were. "
“So you thought human trafficking was the next logical step?” Tatum’s voice cracked.
"We facilitated relationships," Bunny said with a scowl.
"We provided a service to people who needed a service and were willing to pay for it.” She shrugged, but it was obvious to Tatum that her mother was…
proud of her accomplishment. Nausea swamped Tatum, and for a moment she thought she might be ill.
“And the Ponzi scheme?” Tatum was almost afraid to ask.
“The financial structure around it was a means of moving money efficiently and discreetly.
The Ponzi scheme, as you call it, was Lebowitz's self-indulgent deviation from a system that worked perfectly well without his interference.
The business was growing. We needed a way to make the cash disappear.
An investment fund was a stroke of genius.
We provide a service. Our clients paid into our fund without ever expecting anything back, and we made money both from their payments and from the interest on the investments.
Yes, a stroke of genius of which I am particularly proud. "
"A service," Tatum repeated. Her voice was very quiet. "You're talking about human trafficking, Bunny."
Bunny didn't flinch. "I'm talking about providing what powerful people want and cannot obtain through conventional channels.
I'm talking about a network that has been running for years, that has generated more money and more influence than anything your grandfather's perfectly adequate firm could have produced in a hundred years.
" She tilted her head slightly. "I'm talking about power, Tatum.
Real power. The kind that doesn't answer to anyone. "
Tatum said nothing. She was aware of her own heartbeat, loud and rapid and very present. She was also aware that revulsion was rapidly rising in her chest like her heartbeat, and if she wasn’t careful, she would reach across the desk and choke her mother.
"That was always the goal," Bunny said. "Unlimited power.
Influence at every level of government and finance and law.
We are getting there. We are very nearly there.
" She glanced at her watch, the gesture so smooth and habitual it took Tatum a moment to register it.
"By now, in fact, the last piece of the puzzle is in play.
And when it is complete, we will have more power than you can imagine. "
"What does that mean?" Tatum said. "What last piece?"
"It means that certain obstacles are being removed," Bunny said. "It means that the people who stood between us and the next stage of this are no longer in a position to do so."
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.”