Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Bunny opened her office door.
She looked at Tatum the way she always looked at Tatum when a decision about Tatum’s life had been made that didn't require Tatum's input, with the brisk, pleasant efficiency of someone moving on to the next item on a list.
"Josh," she called.
Josh appeared from the corridor with Tatum's two bags, one in each hand, carrying them with the ease of someone who had done it before. Which she now knew he had, over a balcony railing twenty floors up in the dark, and the knowledge of it sat in her stomach like something she couldn't digest.
"We're going," Bunny said, pulling on her coat.
Tatum looked at her mother. At the coat. At Josh and the bags. Gil had retreated somewhere during the conversation and was no longer visible, which told her that whatever was happening next was not something Gil needed to witness.
"Going where?" Tatum asked.
"The Hamptons." Bunny smoothed her lapel and picked up her handbag from the desk with the decisive movement of someone who had already moved on from the conversation they'd just had.
"We'll have some time together. Some space to talk properly.
You need time to adjust to everything, and the city isn't the place for it. "
"Adjust?" Tatum said.
"To your new life," Bunny said. "Which is a very good one, Tatum, if you'll allow yourself to see it that way."
She said it the way she'd always said everything, as though the matter were settled and the only remaining question was how quickly Tatum would catch up.
Tatum thought about her father. Waiting in the Hamptons.
In the house she'd spent summers in, where Stuart Wellington's particular brand of quiet control had saturated every room and every hallway since before she could remember.
Where there were no lobbies or corridors or other people.
Where the only exits were those Stuart allowed.
Her mouth went dry.
Bunny was frightening. Bunny was capable of things Tatum was still in the process of fully understanding, and the horror of that was going to take a long time to digest. But Bunny believed she was in charge.
Bunny operated as though she had built this and was therefore its master, and what she said was what happened.
Tatum knew better.
She had always known better. It was one of the things she and her mother had never discussed because discussing it would have required Bunny to admit the truth, and Bunny did not admit things.
Stuart called the shots. Stuart had always called the shots. And Stuart was in the Hamptons waiting for his daughter, and whatever Bunny thought this conversation in the Hamptons was going to look like, Tatum had a very clear idea of what it was actually going to be.
She didn't know yet how she was going to avoid it, but she was not getting in that car. Her life literally depended on it.
"All right," she said.
Bunny looked faintly surprised at the lack of resistance. She covered it quickly. "Good. Josh, bring the bags."
They went to the elevator. Bunny pressed the button for the garage. Tatum stood between her mother and Josh and looked at the numbers above the door, her mind moving a mile a minute.
Her phone was in her pocket; she could feel it but hadn't been able to use it since she'd walked into her mother's office, found the folder, and looked up to see the three of them in the doorway. She couldn’t answer Archer’s calls. She knew it was Archer. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.
Yet every attempt to reach for it had felt too risky, a signal she wasn't ready to send.
She needed to send a signal and get word to Archer.
The thought of him arrived with a physical tightening in her chest that was equal parts longing and terror.
Not because she doubted that he'd come. Because of what Bunny had said.
By now, the last piece of the puzzle is in play.
And the way her eyes had moved when Tatum asked what she'd done to Archer, that particular flatness, a damning refusal to answer.
The elevator doors opened at the garage level.
They stepped out.
"My keys," Bunny said suddenly.
She put her hand in her bag and then turned back to the elevator and pressed the button. "I left them upstairs. I'll be two minutes." She stepped back in, and the doors closed before either of them could react.
Tatum and Josh stood in the garage.
The noises of the underground parking settled around them.
Concrete and low lighting and the smell of oil and exhaust and the distant hum of the ventilation system.
No one else was visible. No cameras that she could see from where she was standing, though she wasn't certain, and uncertainty was a problem.
She felt the shift immediately. The quality of the air between them changed the moment the elevator doors closed. Josh’s pleasant assistant performance dropped away like a coat he'd shrugged off. He dropped the bags.
"She's not going to be two minutes," Josh said. His voice was different without Bunny present. Flatter. More himself, whatever that was. "She never is."
"No," Tatum agreed.
Silence.
She kept her eyes moving without making it obvious. Exit signs. Stairwell door to her left, maybe fifteen feet. Car ramp to her right, further. Elevator directly behind Josh, which was useless. The bags were at his feet, and she couldn't get to them without going through him.
"You climbed on the outside of my building to destroy my apartment," Tatum said conversationally. "Twenty floors up. Quite impressive, actually."
She sensed his eyes on her.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.
"Of course you don't." She tilted her head slightly.
"It doesn't really matter anyway. Archer replaced everything.
Every. Single. Thing. Whatever you broke, whatever you tore apart, it's all been put back exactly as it was.
" She paused. "Better, actually. He upgraded a few things.
That's what he does. Whatever you managed to damage, he fixes.
That's just the reality of the situation, Josh. "
Josh’s posture stiffened, and his eyes narrowed. "You think that's cute," he said quietly.
"I think it's true," she said.
She was watching him in her peripheral vision, and as she watched, the flatness in his expression shifted into something with more heat in it, something less controlled, the thing underneath the pleasant, helpful surface that she should have seen months ago and hadn't because she'd been looking at the surface the way everyone looked at the surface.
"You have no idea," he said, "what is actually happening right now."
"I have a pretty good idea," she said.
"You don't." He took a step toward her. "You think Archer Gray is going to come and put everything back together. You think this is something that can be fixed." He smiled, and it was nothing like his usual genial smile. "It doesn't get fixed, Tatum."
"Everything gets fixed," she said. "Eventually."
He moved.
She'd been waiting for it. She'd been saying exactly what she'd been saying because she'd been waiting for it, hoping for it, needing him to be angry enough to be stupid because angry and stupid was something she could work with.
He grabbed her arm.
She let him close the distance, and then she drove her elbow hard into his ribs, the way she'd driven it into the ribs of the man who'd tried to drag her into the white van, and felt the satisfying impact of it.
Josh grunted, and his grip loosened. She turned and got both hands on his jacket and shoved him sideways into the concrete pillar beside the elevator.
He hit it harder than she expected. She hadn't known she had that much force in her.
She ran for the stairwell.
She almost made it.
He was faster than he looked and meaner than she'd given him credit for, and he caught her before she reached the door, one hand closing around her arm and yanking her back with a strength that surprised her, spinning her around and slamming her back against the concrete wall hard enough to drive the air from her lungs.
She fought. She got a hand free and raked it across his face. He howled, then grabbed her wrist and pinned it above her head and got his forearm across her collarbone, pressing, using his weight to hold her still, and she kicked and connected with his shin. He didn't even flinch.
He was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before.
The pleasant performance had evaporated.
What was underneath it was something cold and jaded, and she understood, with the clarity that came from genuine fear, that this was who Josh had always been and everything else had been costume.
"Stop," he said quietly. "Just stop."
She stopped. Not because he told her to. Because she needed to think and she couldn't think while she was fighting. Besides, fighting wasn't working.
He was breathing hard. So was she. The garage was silent around them.
"You are such a nuisance," he said. The word was precise. Almost gentle. Like a verdict. "Do you know that? You have been a nuisance since the beginning. We had a plan, a very good plan, and you just kept pulling at it. Couldn't leave it alone."
"People lost their money," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "People lost everything."
"People made choices," he said. "And some people's choices cost more than others.
" He tilted his head slightly, studying her face the way she'd seen him study her mother's face a thousand times, looking for the angle, looking for the lever.
"Your mother gave you everything, you know.
This whole situation, the firm, the membership, all of it.
She built that for you. For your future. And you just threw it in her face."
"My mother built a criminal empire," Tatum said. "And helped hurt people who couldn't defend themselves."
Something moved across his face. Not anger. Something closer to contempt. "She is extraordinary," he said. "And you have never appreciated her. Not once. Not for a single day of your life." The pressure of his forearm increased slightly. "She deserves better than you."
Tatum looked at him and understood something she should probably have understood much earlier. This wasn't about Bunny's instructions. This wasn't about the plan or the Curator or the Hamptons or any of it.
This was personal.
Josh had been devoted to Bunny for years with an intensity that went far beyond professional loyalty, and she had always assumed it was ambition, proximity to power, the need to attach himself to someone formidable.
But looking at his face right now, she understood it was something else entirely.
Something that had been building for years in the particular way obsessions built, quietly and completely, until they became the organizing principle of a person's entire life.
"You could have been part of something remarkable," he said.
"You still could be. But you won't. You're too stubborn, too righteous, and too much like that miserable old man who thought he could keep your mother small.
" His expression hardened. "So we're going to the Hamptons, and you are going to listen.
You are going to understand what is expected of you. And if you can't manage that—"
He leaned in close.
"Then honestly," he said, very quietly, "you become a problem that needs solving. And I have been solving problems for your mother for a very long time."
She didn't look away. She made herself hold his gaze and not reveal just how terrified she was.
"With you gone," he said, his voice had dropped to something almost conversational, almost gentle, "I would be very happy to take your place. I should have had it years ago."
The elevator dinged behind him.
The doors began to open.