Twisted Empire: Dark Dynasty Book 3

by Hart, Stella

  Tatum shot me an expectant look, tilting her head to the side. “Are you being vague on purpose, or were you not finished?”

  “Sorry. I was thinking. Have you ever heard of a billionaire apocalypse shelter?”

  Her mouth hung open slightly. “Er… no. But I’m guessing it’s exactly what it sounds like.”

  I nodded and stuck the key in the ignition. “Yup. There’s a few of them around the place now,” I said as I pulled out onto the main road. “But the one Henry reminded me of is called the Ark. I haven’t thought about it in years.”

  “I’m picturing one of those Cold War fallout bunkers in someone’s backyard. Only with a Lamborghini parked outside.”

  I let out a dry chuckle. “It’s a little more than one of your standard-issue fallout shelters.”

  “So what’s it like? And how did Henry know about it?”

  “Remember the gang of friends from college I told you about this morning? The ones with the shitty nicknames, including him.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well, about five years ago, one of the guys mentioned something he’d seen online. It was the Ark. A luxury community doomsday shelter. You know how you sometimes hear about rich people—or crazy conspiracy theorists—building their own personal shelters on their land?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A community shelter is the opposite. Instead of riding out the apocalypse by yourself, you have a whole bunch of other people to keep you company. And in this case, they’re all super rich, because the private apartments in the Ark start at a million dollars.”

  Tatum arched an eyebrow. “So I’m guessing it’s enormous.”

  “Yeah. Massive. It’s built into the side of a mountain out of a decommissioned munitions storage facility. Totally fortified, and it has renewable power, water purification, and air filtration that can handle even the most toxic air. There’s also a hydroponic gardening setup on one level so residents can grow their own stuff.”

  “Wow.”

  “That’s not counting all the food rations that are already there. There’s a fuck-ton, as you can imagine. Enough to last years, all freeze-dried or canned so it doesn’t go off. There’s even a wine cellar, and from what I remember, it’s about triple the size of your old room at the Lodge.”

  “To be fair, if the apocalypse was happening outside, you’d want to get pretty drunk.”

  ”No shit.” I smiled again. Even after everything she’d been through, especially in the last couple of days, Tatum was still able to make witty little quips. It seemed like a fairly minor thing, but it was important. A lot of people who’d been tested the way she had would fall apart forever, never even speak again. But not her. She was brave, resilient, strong. She always wanted to keep forging ahead no matter what. I was proud of her.

  “Honestly, you’ve gotta see this place to believe it,” I went on. “There’s a movie theater, a bar, a gym, pools, a library, classrooms, hospital-grade medical center, and even a salon and day spa.”

  “Wow. I guess aside from drinking, you wouldn’t really have much to do with your time during the end of days, so you may as well paint your nails and put cucumbers on your eyes,” Tatum said with a thin smile.

  “Yeah. So anyway, a few of the guys and I went up there to check it out one weekend. We all knew it was a novelty thing that we’d probably never use, but something about it appealed to us. It was just so fucking cool. All this stuff, buried so deep in a mountain. So we bought a couple of the apartments, and now, if the world ever goes to shit and someone starts dropping nukes left, right and center, we have somewhere to go.”

  Tatum’s eyes widened. “You guys just casually dropped two million dollars in a weekend?”

  “Yup.”

  “And you forgot all about the place?”

  “Yup.” My face turned hot. It really was a disgracefully flagrant display of my wealth that I could manage such a thing.

  “Wow. We really do come from different worlds. I used to have trouble deciding if five dollars was too much for a sandwich, and I’m still leaning toward yes.” She sighed. “I don’t even know if I could spend two million dollars in a year, let alone a weekend. And I certainly wouldn’t forget about it five years later, either.”

  I reached over and patted her hand. “There’s one thing you’ll love about me having access to obscene amounts of wealth all my life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My father didn’t even notice when I paid for one of the Ark apartments. So he has no idea about it, and he’ll never suspect we’re there.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. He probably would’ve disowned me or sent me to a mental health facility if he found out I bought a doomsday shelter.” I snorted. “I remember a PA brought up the concept of the luxury shelters to him years ago, and he scoffed at it and fired the guy for presenting such a ridiculous idea to him. Way he sees it, if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, no one will even have time to make it to the shelters.” I paused for a breath. “Anyway, I think the Ark is the perfect haven for us. Thank fucking god Henry has a better memory than I do. I mean… had.”

  Merely voicing his name again sent a sudden shooting pain searing through my head as though someone had momentarily lodged an ice pick into my brain. I sucked in a harsh breath and pressed my lips into a thin line, trying to push back the wave of misery. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to grieve for Henry. I did. I just couldn’t afford to do it right now. Not until Tatum was out of harm’s way.

  She nervously twisted her hands in her lap. “How safe is the shelter, exactly?”

  “Like I said before, it’s literally the safest place imaginable. It’s built to withstand a nuclear strike, so once we’re locked in, no one has any hope of getting to us.”

  “What about other apartment owners? Or the owners of the company who developed it? Surely some of them come to visit sometimes.”

  I nodded. “From what I remember, the company sends a maintenance team out once a month to make sure everything is up to scratch. When we get there, we can find their paperwork and logs so we can figure out when they’re due back again. When that happens, we can just lay low for a few hours. They won’t care that we’re there, because owners are allowed to visit their apartments, but we still don’t want to attract too much attention.”

  “What about the other apartment owners?”

  “Some of them might like to visit the place once in a while, but I highly doubt it. I mean, these are millionaires and billionaires we’re talking about. When they go on vacation, they can go literally anywhere in the world. When you’ve got places like Florence, Chamonix and Bora Bora, why would you willingly stay in a nuclear shelter in the side of a mountain?”

  She shrugged. “Just for the novelty of it, like you were saying earlier.”

  “They already get that out of the way when they test it before buying.” I reached over and patted her leg. “Trust me, it’ll be fine. Even if another owner happens to show up for a little vacation, we have our disguises. We’ll give them fake names and say we’re testing out our own apartment, and then we’ll just avoid them as much as possible. We can also see when anyone’s coming.”

  “How?”

  “The place has a ton of security, including surveillance cameras outside, and there are a ton of alarm systems that get triggered when anyone comes onto the land. On the outside it’s silent, but down in the shelter, you can hear it immediately. So we’d know if anyone was coming from miles away, and we’d be able to see who it is from the control room with the CCTV footage.”

  Her shoulders relaxed, and she smiled faintly. “Okay, good.” She sat up straighter a second later. “Hold on, how do we get in? If you forgot the place even existed till now, I’m guessing you don’t have a key on you.”

  “No keys or passcodes. It’s set up so only approved people can open it via fingerprint and retinal scanning.”

  “Oh, wow.” She held up her cup of peppermint tea. “Well, here’s
to people with way too much money,” she said in a wry tone. “Their need for a luxurious place to hang out when aliens invade has given us a safe place to go.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Where is it, anyway?”

  “Southwest Vermont, near Bennington. It’s about a three hour drive from here.”

  “Wow. I never would’ve thought there’d be a massive doomsday shelter in Vermont, of all places.” She paused. “To be honest, I never would’ve thought anywhere would have something like the Ark. It seems a bit…” She trailed off.

  “Unfair?”

  “Yeah. If something apocalyptic actually happened to the world, I’m pretty sure I’d die along with almost everyone else, all because I can’t afford a secret underground shelter,” she said glumly.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I think my father might be right. Most of the people with access to places like the Ark wouldn’t make it there in time, no matter how much money they have. So if we go down someday, we’re probably all going down.”

  Tatum cracked a tiny smile again. I took a left onto a different road, and her eyes widened slightly.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. It’s just… this is the road you drive up to get to my old town. Fairwick. It’s weird being around here again after everything that’s happened.” She picked at a nail as she spoke. “For a second just then, I kinda felt like I was eight years old again, on my way home from a school trip or something like that.”

  I flashed her a brief sidelong glance. In all the time I’d known her, she’d never discussed her childhood.

  “I’ve never actually been to Fairwick. It’s weird, because I’ve always been so close to the area,” I said. “What was it like for you growing up there?”

  Tatum shrugged. “It was okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  I knew I was prying, but I wanted to hear about her experiences. Her childhood was a world away from my own, despite the geographical proximity, and that made me curious.

  “Well, it wasn’t easy growing up around so many people who seemed to have everything when we could barely pay our bills most months, but we still had more than a lot of people in this world, so I can hardly complain,” she said softly.

  “Hey, it’s not a competition. Just because other people have really shitty lives doesn’t mean yours wasn’t shitty at all. You’re allowed to say you had a rough time.”

  Her cheeks turned pink. “Hm. I guess.”

  “So tell me about it.”

  Another shrug. “It really wasn’t that bad. My parents never hit me or screamed at me, I had clothes and an education, and we almost always had food.”

  I raised a brow. “Almost always?”

  She looked down at her lap. “Sometimes I’d have to skip breakfast or go eat dinner at a school friend’s house because my parents were totally broke and couldn’t afford to buy anything. But that only happened a few times.”

  I winced as she spoke. I knew her story wasn’t unique, and like she said before, a lot of families out there were even more impoverished than hers. Still, the thought of someone in this country being forced to skip meals because they simply couldn’t afford it utterly blew my mind. I felt like an over-privileged asshole for feeling that way for even one second, but I couldn’t help it. The concept just seemed so alien to me.

  “I’m sorry things were like that for you,” I said. “It’s fucking unfair.”

  “Like I said, it wasn’t that bad. I always got food eventually. The worst part was when my parents fought about money. They’d yell at each other for hours about the same stuff over and over, always trying to figure out how and where their lives went so wrong.”

  “That must’ve been shitty to hear as a kid.”

  “Yeah. A few times they even said they shouldn’t have had me. Trust me, that sucked way worse than skipping a meal.”

  “What the fuck? They said that to your face?”

  “Oh, no. Never to my face. I overheard,” she murmured. “It upset me, but I understood after a while. It made sense.”

  My brows twisted into an incredulous frown. “You actually thought it was normal that your own parents said they shouldn’t have had you?”

  “Not exactly normal. It just made sense to me at the time. I was a burden on them.”

  “Jesus, Tatum, they chose to have you. It was their responsibility to take care of you, not make you feel like a fucking burden.”

  She looked out the window, hands folded on her lap. I pressed my lips together and gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white.

  Until now, I never realized how much of a number Tatum’s parents had done on her. Obviously, they were terrible enough to sell her to my father like she was nothing more than an object, but to force her to spend her entire childhood feeling like a drain on them made it even worse. The thought of her hearing her own mother and father discuss how they wished she didn’t even exist on occasion made me hot with rage. I wanted to beat them both over the fucking head with a tire iron.

  “You don’t get it,” Tatum finally said, turning back to me. “Having no money can really mess with people’s minds. It eats you up inside because you can never stop thinking about it and wondering when you’re finally gonna lose it all. So I never blamed my parents for thinking of me that way.”

  I grunted. “I still think they’re pieces of shit.”

  She pursed her lips. “Well, I agree with you now that I know they sold me to the society, but back then, I really thought I understood their point of view. I even tried to help them out so I’d be less of a drain. I worked a lot. Babysitting, waitressing, stuff like that.”

  “Did that make things easier?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Most of what I earned went to my parents for bills and rent, but sometimes I’d be able to squirrel a bit away for nice things for myself. Like a dress for prom, or new shoes.”

  “At least you learned the real value of a dollar, I suppose,” I said, trying to find the silver lining. “I never had to. I could just buy shit whenever. When I was a kid it never even occurred to me that something like a new phone was the equivalent of a hundred hours work for someone like you.”

  Tatum snorted at that. I raised a brow. “Did I say something stupid? I didn’t mean to make you feel bad or anything.”

  “Sorry. It’s not you. You just reminded me of something I always heard when I was younger, when you said that I learned the true value of money.”

  “Yeah?”

  She stared out the windscreen, forehead creasing. “A lot of people try to romanticize poverty for some reason. I would hear this stuff all the time when I was young, from the people I worked for, or my teachers at school. They’d act like being poor is some sort of gateway to becoming a good, happy person with morals and convictions. Like it’s this more pure way of life, where you end up building a ton of character for yourself because there’s no money to be corrupted by. But that’s just not realistic. At least it wasn’t for me.”

  I cocked my head to the side. “Go on.”

  She waved a hand. “Sure, maybe a broke person understands the value of a dollar more than a super-rich person who’s never had to work a day in their life. But being poor doesn’t automatically make you a better, happier person like all these people would have you believe. It wears you down, makes you feel like you’re living on a razor’s edge. That can really screw you up after a while, like I was saying earlier, and sometimes, you end up being a worse person instead. Look at me. I wound up being resentful and angry at the world most of the time. Not proud of it, but it’s true. And look at my parents. They might’ve been better people under different circumstances, but after all the years of struggling, they wound up fucking selling me. Their own daughter.”

  A bitter note had crept into Tatum’s voice. I had a feeling she’d wanted to get this stuff off her chest for a while but never felt comfortable saying it to anyone else out of guilt or shame or some other intangible emotion.
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br />   “I’m not saying all broke people wind up like that,” she went on, shaking her head. “Of course not. Most are decent people who’d never do anything like that to their kids. In fact, a lot of the most generous people I’ve ever met were poor. I’m just saying, it’s not as noble and pure and happy as some people make it out to be. Being poor actually really fucking sucks.”

  “Yeah, I get what you’re saying.”

  “I sound like an asshole, don’t I?” she said glumly.

  I shook my head. “No, you sound honest. I like it. I want to know everything you think. Everything about you. Even the things you feel like you should hide from everyone else.”

  She looked at me, brows drawn together quizzically. “You really wanna know everything? What it was really like for me as a kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell you a story.” She chewed her bottom lip for a second. “One time, I bought some new shampoo and conditioner because we ran out at home. The bag split when I was walking back from the store, and the bottles broke open and splattered all over the sidewalk. I cried for three fucking hours.” She exhaled deeply. “It was just seven dollars worth of stuff. Most people would probably buy more and maybe be a little annoyed about having to go all the way back to the store. But me… all I could think about was how that extra seven dollars might be the difference between getting our electricity shut off that month or not. Doesn’t that sound totally crazy to someone like you? Crying for hours over seven dollars and a bottle of shampoo?”

  “Nope. Not crazy at all. Sounds like you were fucking stressed.”

  “Yeah. I was. And that’s my exact point. That’s what it’s like being broke your whole life and never knowing anything else. You end up with this horrible stress knot in your stomach that never really goes away.” She sighed deeply. “You can never relax properly, because there’s this constant fear that if you do for even a second, everything will come crashing down on your head, and your life will get even worse.”