Page 43 of Twisted Empire

12

Tatum

My heart racedwith 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.

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