Twisted Empire: Dark Dynasty Book 3

by Hart, Stella

  “Jesus.”

  “I used to think that little knot would vanish as soon as I got my life together, but even after I got the scholarship to Roden, it was still there all the time. Sometimes I think it’ll always be there, even if I magically become the world’s first trillionaire.”

  I reached over and squeezed her leg while we waited at a stop sign. “I’m so sorry, Doll. I wish I could take it all away.”

  She gave me a watery smile. “You’ve helped.”

  “How?”

  “By trying to make me feel safe. That’s all I really want in the end. Security,” she said softly. “And with you, I feel like I can finally breathe a bit easier. Even now, with all this horrible shit going on. I know you’ll take care of me, and you won’t let anything bad happen to me.”

  “That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” I said softly, staring into her beautiful eyes. Knowing how much she trusted me made a powerful heat radiate through my chest, lifting my spirits high. After everything I’d put her through, she still saw enough good in me to believe me when I told her I’d always look after her. That meant the fucking world to me.

  “It’s just how I feel,” she said with a light shrug. “That’s what you wanted, right? Honesty.”

  “Yeah.” I returned her smile and then turned back to face the road as I stepped on the gas. “I’m guessing you don’t want to hear about my childhood, given what it was like compared to yours.”

  “No, I actually do,” Tatum replied.

  “Really?” I didn’t expect to hear that. The wealth and privilege I had all my life made me feel a dirty, creeping sense of shame when I compared it with everything she’d gone through, and I assumed it made her feel like shit to hear about all the stuff she’d missed out on.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’ll admit, some parts of it might make me a little envious, but honestly, I don’t think your life as a kid was much better than mine.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  “Because you might’ve had all that money and all those advantages, but you still grew up with your father, and he’s totally malignant. He made you feel like it was your fault your mom died, and he raised you in the most fucked up way, trying to force you to be like him.” She hesitated, letting out another heavy sigh. “My parents might be terrible, but I swear they’ve got nothing on that old bastard.”

  I let out a humorless chuckle. “That’s true. So we’re both kinda fucked up.”

  “Yeah. But we’re fucked up together,” she said, leaning over and rubbing my arm. Then she sat back and closed her eyes. “Go for it. Tell me a story from when you were a kid. Anything.”

  We talked about our lives for the rest of the drive, swapping stories and sharing intimate secrets. By the time we made it to Vermont, it seemed like we finally knew everything there was to know about each other, and I felt closer to Tatum than ever before. She didn’t judge me and I didn’t judge her, even when we revealed our most messed-up thoughts and experiences. We never would.

  Outside, the sky was pitch dark, the stars lost behind thick masses of clouds. The moon was out, but only a sliver of it, a pale crescent that did nothing to light up the night. It wasn’t easy for me to navigate my way to the area where the Ark was situated, because I hadn’t been there in years, but with the help of the old GPS in the van and my vague memories, I found my way there eventually.

  We turned down a long, winding dirt road and pulled up to an electric gate with a ‘Private Land: Keep Out’ sign attached to the side.

  I turned to Tatum with a smile. “We’re here.”

  12

  Tatum

  My heart raced with nervousness and anticipation as Elias stepped out of the van. He walked over to the right side of the gate. There was a tiny dark gray console there, and he opened it and pressed some of the fingers on his right hand against it.

  A light on the console turned green and the gate swung open.

  We drove for another ten minutes, deep into a valley. When another ‘Private Land’ sign appeared, Elias stopped the van. “This is it,” he said confidently.

  I peered around the darkness surrounding us. “Where?”

  He nodded to the left, and I squinted. On his side, there was a beard of ground cover spilling down over a mossy concrete wall.

  “That’s the door.”

  “That?”

  He smiled. “It’s not the proper door. Just the way in to the rest.”

  He led me over to it and lifted some of the leafy cover off the concrete, using the flashlight app on one of the burner phones to find another console. Then he pressed his fingers to it again and stepped back when it beeped softly.

  The wall swung forward a moment later. Elias ushered me forward.

  We were in a pitch black tunnel now. Ahead of us, I could see an enormous reinforced steel door, glinting in the light of the phone.

  “That’s more like it,” I said.

  Elias smiled again and ruffled my hair. “This isn’t the main entry either.”

  He stepped forward and opened another console box on the left side of the massive door. This one required a retinal scan as well as fingerprint identification, and within moments, the steel door was sliding open for us with a loud grinding sound.

  I tentatively crossed the threshold. It was cold inside, and Elias slung an arm around me and rubbed my shoulders as the steel door shut behind us with a clang. There was yet another retinal scan inside the small room we’d stepped into, and then my stomach lurched as we plummeted downward all of a sudden.

  I clutched Elias, my eyes wide. He stroked my hair. “Sorry, I should’ve warned you. This is an elevator.”

  “We’re going underground?”

  He nodded. “The main level of the facility is several hundred feet under. That’s where the entry is. The other levels are built into the mountain bedrock above it.”

  “I see.” I frowned as yet another potential problem occurred to me. “Hold on, I just thought of something. Won’t the people who run the company know we’re here? Wouldn’t they get some sort of alert saying that someone’s arrived on the land and accessed the elevator?”

  Elias nodded again. “They’ll probably get a notification from their security system informing them that I’ve accessed the place, but they won’t care. They’ll just think I’m visiting my apartment, and like I was saying earlier, owners are allowed to visit whenever they want.”

  I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. The elevator ground to a halt, and a door on the other side slid open.

  A light went on as soon as we stepped out into a foyer.

  “Motion sensors,” Elias explained.

  I barely heard him. I was already too entranced by what I saw. Even though he’d told me it was a luxury shelter, I still expected the majority of the interior to be gray and spartan. I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried.

  The foyer’s floor was dark polished floorboards with matching wooden panels reaching halfway up the walls. The top portion of the walls were painted a pretty shade of pale mint green and decorated with multiple oil paintings of landscapes and grand buildings. A sparkling chandelier hung above us, dangling from the center of a patterned plaster ceiling rose. Pure elegance and old-world charm.

  “Apparently green is a calming color,” Elias said, motioning to the walls.

  I nodded mutely and followed him to a wide double door with ornate golden handles. He pushed on one of the handles and guided me through, a hand on the small of my back, and I gasped as we stepped into an enormous atrium.

  The floor was polished marble, and black cast iron lampposts lit every corner of the vast space. In the center was a large gushing fountain, and a garden with short forest-green shrubs swung around the edges of the circular pool collecting the fountain water. The plants were probably fake, but they looked real.

  Above us was a massive fake skylight. At first I thought there was a painting or a giant photo of the night sky up there, but then I saw stars twinkling. />
  “Wow,” I breathed.

  “It’s a high-def screen playing a video,” Elias said. “It changes depending on the time of day. In the morning, it’ll be blue sky with floating white clouds and flocks of birds.”

  “That’s so cool.” With wide eyes, I walked around and took in the rest of the atrium. It was four stories high with sweeping cream stone columns for support. The ground floor had what appeared to be several restaurants, coffee shops, a whiskey bar, a cocktail lounge with a neon sign and a large casino with crimson carpets, along with wide corridors presumably leading to other parts of the level.

  Above that, on the higher levels, there were wide balconies with carved balustrades and hanging gardens. The plants were probably fake like the shrubs around the fountain, but they looked just as real. Beyond the balconies, I could see large wooden doors.

  “That’s the apartments up there,” Elias said, following the direction of my gaze. “Most of the community amenities are down here. There’s a tram that runs around this level with a few presses of a button.”

  I gaped at him. “A tram?”

  “Yes. This level is by far the biggest. It would take an hour to walk from one side to the other. So if a resident wanted to get in a workout at the gym and then hit the books in the library afterwards, they’d need to take the tram. Unless they really liked walking.”

  “Wow,” I said, still marveling at everything. I waved a hand at one of the restaurants. “It all looks so… real. I feel like I’m standing in some sort of European plaza.”

  “They got psychologists to help them design everything in a way that would make people feel as comfortable as possible. Like they were still out in the real world. Apparently there’s only so long humans can withstand being in a gray concrete box before they start to lose it.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I muttered.

  He stiffened. “I’m sorry.”

  A jolt of guilt hit me right in the guts. Elias was doing everything he could to help me and make me feel safe right now. I couldn’t make him feel like he had to apologize for the past forever. It wasn’t fair.

  “I shouldn’t have said that.” I took his hand and smiled. “This is seriously incredible.”

  He squeezed my hand and nodded at the restaurant I’d been looking at. “I’ll finally be able to take you on a real date. Except I’ll have to cook.”

  “That’s good enough for me. Besides, not everyone can say their first date was at an Italian restaurant hundreds of yards inside a mountain, right?”

  “Right.” He stroked my hair. “I can give you a longer tour tomorrow, to show you where everything is. But for now, let’s go to our apartment. It’s pretty late.”

  I followed him to another elevator. This one had dark red carpet inside. “How many people does this place fit?” I asked as we rode it up to the third level.

  “Probably around a thousand or so. The apartments can fit between five and fifteen people, depending on which one the owner bought, and there’s eighty of them. Then there’s also the staff quarters back down on the level we just came from.”

  “Wait, there’s staff here?” I widened my eyes and looked behind me as if I actually expected someone else to suddenly materialize in the elevator, mop bucket in hand.

  “They don’t live here. They’re trained by the development company and paid a stipend each year to make sure they keep living within close range of the shelter. If shit ever hits the fan, they have to make their way here. In return for helping out with the cleaning, cooking, maintenance and hydroponics, they get a free place to ride out the apocalypse.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a pinging sound, and the elevator opened. “I can’t remember exactly which one I bought, only that it was along here,” Elias said, striding ahead of me. “I’ll try a few doors.”

  He pressed his fingers to a scanner outside each apartment, and finally, the wide mahogany door to number twenty-four swung open.

  “After you.” He held an arm out in front of him.

  I stepped inside and looked around our temporary home. It was much bigger than I expected. Directly ahead of us was a living room with a wide-screen TV, black leather modular sofa, coffee table and bookshelves stacked with reading material. To the right of that was a spacious bedroom with a king-sized sleigh bed and a tall fake window with thick curtains, stretching from one wall to another. A small door on the far side of the bedroom led to a walk-in closet.

  On the left of the apartment entryway, wide arched passageways branched out, each one leading to other areas of the apartment. There was a kitchen with marble counters, an enormous bathroom, smaller spare bedrooms with built-in closets, a study, and a playroom. There was even a small room for pets, complete with toys, little beds and litter trays.

  “Not what you expected for a nuclear shelter, right?” Elias said, amusement lighting his handsome face as he looked down at my wide eyes.

  I shook my head. “I know it’s worth a ton, but still, I never expected it to be this nice.” I swept a hand around. “I mean, this apartment is twice as big as the house I grew up in and ten times as pretty… and it’s inside a mountain! It’s crazy.”

  He nodded. “There’s something else I have to show you,” he said, taking my arm and pulling me back out to the main area with the master bedroom and living area.

  He stepped over to the wall and pressed a button on a white keypad. The curtains swung back, revealing another high-definition screen in place of the window. On the screen was a sweeping panoramic view of a city at night with bright twinkling lights and skyscrapers in the distance.

  “Wow. I still can’t get over how real it looks,” I said breathlessly.

  “Just wait,” Elias said. “Watch this.”

  He pressed another button on the keypad. The screen changed. Suddenly it was daylight outside and our apartment appeared to be situated in a beautiful garden.

  It was magical. The artificial light somehow looked completely natural, and the sight of the sundrenched blanket of pink, red and yellow flowers just beyond the window seemed to warm the room. White butterflies flitted amongst the blooms, levitating midair. In the distance was a fountain with a statue, a stone path winding through a patch of trimmed green lawn, and a thick clump of tall fir trees.

  “Holy shit,” I said, eyes widening with incredulity. “This looks even realer than the last one.”

  “We’re not done yet.” Elias pressed another button.

  We were in New York. Then Rome. Then Fiji. Rio de Janeiro, Prague, Barcelona, Melbourne. He kept going through the locations, each one more stunning than the last, and I marveled at the sights, feeling like I’d actually traveled to each and every one of the gorgeous places all within the last few minutes.

  “You can choose between day and night, and you can basically be anywhere in the world you want,” Elias explained. “For now, we should probably stick with night so we don’t mess up our sleeping patterns. But the location decision is yours.” He paused and looked at me, eyes twinkling. “So where would you like to sleep tonight, Doll?”

  I smiled shyly. “Let’s go to Paris.”

  With the click of a button, the Eiffel Tower glittered in the faux night outside our room. Close by, a wide river glinted under the moonlight, and colorful city lights stretched endlessly into the distance. Just ‘below’ our window was a baroque stone bridge with pedestrians crossing over it, looking like little ants as they swept past.

  I relaxed my shoulders and breathed deeply as I took in the gorgeous view. For the first time in months, I felt truly safe. Unrestrained. Like we were really in France, staying in a luxury hotel without a care in the world.

  It was bizarre how I could feel so much freer in here—a shelter several hundred feet inside a mountain—than I did in the outside world, and yet that was exactly how I felt. But I wasn’t complaining. This place was amazing.

  “I need to have a shower.” Elias nodded toward one of the passageways. “It’s been a couple of days s
ince my last one.”

  I smiled gently. “Well, somehow you don’t smell bad at all. But a hot bath would be good to help you relax.” I squeezed one muscular arm as I spoke, running my free hand up his hard chest. “There is hot water, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “How does the whole water situation work here, anyway?” I said as I padded into the bathroom after him. In the center of the tiled room was an enormous freestanding marble tub, big enough to fit four or five people.

  “There’s a massive tank with enough water for several years farther inside the mountain,” Elias said. “Everything that gets used in sinks, showers and baths goes down the drain into another area where it can be purified and reused.” He scratched his chin, brows drawn together in thought. “From what I remember, there’s also a huge underground freshwater reservoir near the area, and the shelter has pipes leading to it. So if the tank water ever ran out for whatever reason, there’s enough to last forever in that reservoir.”

  “So I can draw you a bath without any guilt?” I said, raising a brow as I crouched down and turned the hot water tap on.

  “Yes.” Elias watched me as I filled the bath and flicked on the whirlpool jets on the side, making the water bubble and froth like a hot tub. “I like you like that,” he said in a low voice, taking one step closer to me.

  “Like what?” I looked up at him. “Near a tub?”

  “No. On your knees.”

  I flashed him a demure smile. “Maybe I like it too.”

  “I know you do.” His eyes gleamed with dark lust. “Now strip.”

  “What?” I raised my brows.

  “You heard me. Strip. Then get in the tub on all fours and wait for me.”

  “But the bath is for you. I was just going to go to slee—”

  Elias yanked me to my feet and cut me off, one hand clamping over my mouth. I could feel his cock straining against the front of his pants. Thoughts of him fucking me suddenly clouded my vision, and I moaned against his hand.