Chapter 34
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.
He sat behind his desk in the quiet of the late afternoon and looked at his phone.
Tatum's tracker still showed her at the law firm.
She still wasn't answering his calls. He had told himself twice in the last hour that she was fine, that she was with her parents, that the law firm was in a public building full of people, and she was in no danger that he needed to personally attend to.
No matter how often he mentally repeated the facts…told himself Tatum was fine…he remained unconvinced.
He knew why he didn't believe it. It wasn't entirely rational, the fear sitting like a damn broody hen in his chest. He had people outside the building.
He had the tracker. He had no specific reason to think she was in danger beyond the general and persistent fact that she had been in danger since the moment she started looking into Granite Industries.
But…
But Bunny Wellington was her mother and Stuart Wellington was her father and he had stood in that lounge and watched Stuart apply pressure to his own daughter with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing it her entire life.
To her credit, Tatum had gripped that coffee cup and held her voice level.
However, he had seen what it cost her, and he had been thinking about it ever since in the spaces between everything else.
He stood up.
He got his jacket. Grabbed his gun. He told Ryker where he was going. He took the stairs.
Outside, the city was doing what the city always did, moving; loud and indifferent.
The late afternoon light cut between the buildings at the angle it only cut in October, sharp and golden and gone almost before you noticed it.
He walked. He could have taken a car. but he needed the air, and he needed the fifteen minutes of being nowhere in particular before he arrived somewhere specific.
He had been honest with himself today in ways he hadn't entirely intended to be.
The documents, the contingency plans, the phone call to the person who wasn't connected to any of this, all of it had required him to look clearly at all possibilities if tomorrow didn't go the way he needed it to go.
That he'd run out of time and options, and the board would do what the rules said the board had to do, meaning Archer Gray would cease to exist in any form, not just the one he'd been quietly planning to shed.
Fifty-fifty. That was what his gut told him. Possibly better than that if everything held together. Maybe worse if something he hadn't accounted for came apart.
He was not afraid of dying. He had made his peace with that possibility a long time ago, the same way he'd made his peace with most of the harder facts of his life, by looking at them directly and then deciding what to do with the time he had.
What he had not made his peace with was the thought of not seeing Tatum again.
He stopped at a corner, waited for the walk light with his hands in his pockets, and let himself think it clearly for the first time without immediately redirecting the thought toward something more manageable.
He was in love with her.
He had known it for a while in the way someone knew things they weren't ready to do anything about.
Known it when she'd said no, not really as he asked if she was all right, and the honesty of it had hit him somewhere he hadn't expected.
Known it the night at the Obsidian Club when she'd run after a killer and his heart had stopped in a way that had nothing to do with operational concern.
Known it each morning he'd left before she woke up and hated himself for it on the way back to his own apartment, not because it was the wrong thing to do for the reasons he'd told himself but because leaving her felt like something he wasn't going to be able to keep doing indefinitely.
He was in love with Tatum Wellington, and he had spent weeks being very careful not to say so, not to act on it fully, not to let it become something she could count on, because men in his position did not get to have things they counted on.
They were targets. Everything close to them became a target.
He had known this, and he had tried, in his way, to protect her from it.
He had not done a particularly good job.
She was in that building right now, at a law firm connected to people who had built a criminal enterprise on a scale that still, even now, took his breath slightly, and he was walking toward it because he needed to see her and he was done pretending he didn't.
Gil Bennett still needed to be dealt with, as did Lou Anderson. So many loose ends. He needed them to be wrapped up if Tatum was to be well and truly safe.
Just once more, he thought. And then hated himself for the thought because once more implied a last time, and he was not ready to accept that.
The law firm on Park Avenue was in the kind of glass and steel building that announced its own importance. He nodded to the man Ryker had posted outside without breaking stride and went through the front door.
The marbled lobby was quiet. A receptionist looked up. He stated his name, asked for Tatum Wellington, and watched the receptionist's expression shift in the way people's expressions shifted when they were about to tell you something they'd been told to say.
"Ms. Wellington is in a meeting," she said. "She's asked not to be disturbed."
"I understand," Archer said pleasantly. "Tell her Archer Gray is here. She'll want to know."
The receptionist picked up her phone, looking like she wasn't entirely sure she should be interrupting. She spoke quietly, listened, and then looked up at him with an expression that had changed again, less certain now, more careful. "I'm afraid Ms. Wellington is unavailable at the moment."
Archer looked at her for a moment. Then he said, "Thank you," and walked toward the elevators.
"Sir, I'm going to need to ask you to—"
He pressed the button. “I’m going to the garage. I parked down there.”
The elevator opened.
He stepped in. Unfortunately, it was actually going down.
He would take it down and then back up again.
He knew which floor the partners' offices were on because he knew everything about the environments that contained people he was responsible for, and Tatum had been his responsibility since the night her apartment was torn apart and he'd charged the replacement to himself. In retrospect, when he’d done that, he’d known he was in trouble.
If he were being honest, she was his responsibility from the moment she’d joined the Society.
Looking back now, he had to acknowledge that he’d had her join the board so he could be closer to her.
He would find her. He would see her face and know she was all right, and then he would initiate the conversation he should have had days ago, the one he'd been avoiding because he didn't know how to have it without saying things that complicated everything.
He didn't care about the complication anymore.
He had fifty-fifty odds on tomorrow, and he was not walking into that without telling her. Whatever it cost him. Whatever it changed. Whatever happened after.
She deserved to know.
And he needed to say it, just once, out loud, to her face, while he still could.