Page 51 of Twisted Empire

14

Tatum

Elias stared at me,eyes burning curiously. “Tell me.”

My stomach squirmed with excitement and daring. My mind was working overtime, flitting from one thought to another at the speed of light. I didn’t even know where to begin.

Finally, I took a deep breath and centered my brain on one thought. “We know one person can’t stop Crown and Dagger. Or even a few. They wouldn’t stand a chance. They’d be labeled a crazy conspiracy theorist, or worse, they’d be killed for trying. But it doesn’t have to be like that.”

Elias cocked his head to the side. “Go on.”

Raising my brows, I posed a question to him. “What’s the one thing regular people have that all the millionaires and billionaires in Crown and Dagger can never have, no matter what?”

“Debt?”

I rolled my eyes. “Apart from that.”

He shrugged. “What?”

“Numbers!” I said. “The elites in our society might have the majority of the country’s money and power, but there aren’t many of them. Not compared to the masses of regular people like me.”

“Ah.” Comprehension dawned on his face.

“That will never change, because the super-rich need millions of people below them in society. They need them to work for all their businesses and industries, so they can profit off their labor. But there’s always a breaking point.” I clasped my hands together in a pyramid on the desk. “That’s exactly why the third-level men in Crown and Dagger are so secretive. They’re afraid. If all the millions of regular people in this country found out what was really going on behind certain closed doors in high society, they’d reach that breaking point and rise up against them. They’d have to, because these men are literally enslaving, raping, and killing young women. Men, too. Like Henry. There’d be riots in the street until something was done to stop them once and for all.”

“True.”

“So they’re forced tooperate in the shadows,” I went on. I was babbling and starting to repeat myself, but I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out of me. “If they thought the general public couldn’t do anything to stop them, they wouldn’t even bother hiding the dark shit they do, right? But they do, because they know that no matter how much money or influence they have, sheer numbers will always win out in the end, and that’s what would happen if everyone found out the truth about them. They’d go down in flames. A hundred of them versus hundreds of millions.”

Elias wrinkled his forehead. “So what’s your idea?”

I drew a deep breath. “There’s one way to make sure the general public finds out exactly what’s going on. That’s what the start of my dream last night was about,” I said. I waved my hand at the page on the desk and continued. “Mellie said something to me about Henry once, when I asked if she was worried he’d ever speak out against the society. I guess it’s been on my mind a lot lately, enough to seep into my dreams. I even wrote it down earlier.”

Elias furrowed his brows impatiently. “What?”

“She said: ‘what’s he gonna do, call the New York Times?’ It seemed like a stupid idea, but it’s actually not entirely terrible, if you think about it.” I leaned forward. “I know the guys in Crown and Dagger probably have a ton of connections to traditional media sources and publishing companies so they can squash any negative press, but lucky for us, times have changed, right? These days, most people get their news from social media sites like Reddit or Facebook, not official sources like newspapers. So if we can get an article to go viral online and make sure a ton of people find about what’s happening in Crown and Dagger, all at the same time, those people will start to rise up against them. Then other people will be forced to listen and act too. There won’t be anything those sick society assholes can do about it. They’ll all wind up rotting in prison for the rest of their lives, and everything they know will be stripped from them. Their money, their power… all of it. They’ll never be allowed to control anything ever again, let alone hurt anyone.”

Elias rubbed his chin, lips set in a tight line. He didn’t reply.

My mood instantly deflated. “You already thought of something like this, didn’t you?” I said quietly.

“Yeah. Sorry,” he replied. He patted my hand. “It’s a good idea. Maybe the only one that could work. But it’s missing one major component.”

I sighed. I should’ve known. I was so enthusiastic and exhilarated about the idea that I hadn’t thought it through all the way. Now I realized how premature that excitement was. The idea was obvious. Too obvious. Of course Elias had already thought of it and all the subsequent problems that might arise from it.

“What is it?” I asked in a small voice.

He tapped a finger on my page, near the quote from Mellie. “You wrote it down right here. Henry couldn’t have called the media and told them anything, because he had no proof. It would be his word against everyone else’s. It wouldn’t be any different for us.”

The tail end of last night’s dream suddenly flashed in the forefront of my mind: Mellie wearing a suit made of tinfoil to mock her dead brother, laughing about how everyone would’ve thought he was a crazy conspiracy theorist if he ever tried to go public with what he knew.

“Shit,” I said miserably. “You’re right. We have no real proof.”

“Yup,” Elias said, gritting his teeth. “And no one’s gonna print anything without any proof, let alone make it go viral.”

I slumped back in my seat. “What about your DNA tests?” I asked with furrowed brows. “You said they proved Camille Gorham was your mother, and she went missing in 1992. Surely if people found out she had a baby after that in 1993 and we had literal scientific proof of it, they’d listen to us when we told them why.”

“That’s just one minor inconvenience to the society, so they’d find a way to cover it up. In fact, now that I’ve taken off with you, I’m willing to bet my father has already made it happen just in case we ever decided to try that tactic. I’m pretty sure a few senior directors at the FBI are Crown and Dagger guys, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to manage it.”

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