The storm came without warning.
Lightning cracked across the skyline, illuminating the city in stark white bursts that turned towers into skeletal silhouettes. Rain lashed the streets below, a relentless sheet that made headlights smear into pale rivers. The wind howled against the glass of my apartment, rattling the panes like an animal clawing to get in.
I sat in darkness, a glass of whiskey untouched on the table beside me. My father's words still echoed through my skull, sharper than the thunder outside.
You'll regret saying that. You'll come around. You always do.
I hadn't come around. Not this time. Not ever.
And yet, lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling as rain pounded the roof, I wondered if he was right. His empire was everywhere — in the towers that bore his name, in the advertisements plastered across billboards, in the boardrooms where his voice still rang even in his absence.
How do you escape a man who's built into the bones of the city?
I was still asking myself when the phone rang.
It wasn't my cell. It was the landline — the one no one used, the one that only rang when something was wrong.
I picked it up, throat dry. "Hello?"
A voice on the other end, clipped and professional. "This is Central Mercy Hospital. Are you related to Alexander Hale?"
My stomach dropped. My mouth went dry. "I'm his son."
There was a pause. A silence that spoke louder than thunder.
"You need to come immediately," the voice said. "Your father's been in an accident."
And just like that, the world tilted.
The hospital corridors smelled of bleach and fear. Bright fluorescent lights hummed above me, buzzing like angry insects. People moved quickly, nurses in scrubs, doctors with clipboards, families clutching each other with wide, desperate eyes.
I stumbled past them, my chest tight, my throat closing. The world blurred around me until all I saw was the nurse at the reception desk, her lips moving, pointing me down a hallway.
My feet carried me forward, heavy and unsteady.
A doctor waited outside a door, her face carefully arranged into professional calm. She had the look of someone who had delivered bad news so often it had become routine — but no amount of practice could soften the blow.
"Mr. Hale?" she asked gently.
I nodded.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Your father was in a car accident. Severe internal injuries. We did everything we could…"
The words dissolved into static. I caught fragments — impact… critical bleeding… time of death…
Dead.
My father.
The man who seemed unbreakable. The man who had built towers from nothing but willpower and ruthlessness. The man I had screamed at only hours ago, told I would rather be nothing than his shadow.
Gone.
I don't remember sitting down, but suddenly I was in a plastic chair, my hands shaking against my knees.
He can't be dead. He doesn't die. He doesn't bend, doesn't break, doesn't stop. He's always there, looming, commanding. He can't just be… gone.
The doctor's lips moved again. "We'll give you time."
Time.
What did that even mean?
They let me see him.
The room was cold, quiet. Machines hummed softly, their screens blank now. His body lay still on the bed, draped in a white sheet pulled to his chest. His face was pale, lips parted just enough to look like he might draw breath again if I waited long enough.
But he didn't.
I stood there, staring at him, willing his chest to rise, his eyes to open, his voice to thunder through the room and tell me I was wasting time again.
Nothing.
The silence was unbearable.
I swallowed hard, my throat raw. "I didn't mean it," I whispered. The words cracked like glass in my mouth. "God, I didn't mean it."
But the silence didn't answer.
The days that followed blurred together.
Condolences poured in from people who hadn't seen him in years, board members who called him a visionary, politicians who called him a titan. The funeral was a parade of black suits and whispered platitudes.
They spoke of Alexander Hale as if he were marble carved into human form: brilliant, commanding, unstoppable.
Not one of them spoke of the man who carved his will into me with every word, who built me like another structure in his empire, brick by brick, until I couldn't breathe.
And I smiled. I nodded. I shook their hands.
All while screaming inside.
The will was read in a mahogany-paneled room filled with lawyers and vultures in tailored suits.
The lawyer, glasses perched low on his nose, cleared his throat. "As per Alexander Hale's final testament, all assets, holdings, and properties are bequeathed to his only son."
The words barely registered. My father's empire, billions in assets, entire corporations — all of it dumped into my lap like a mountain.
I couldn't breathe.
I could almost hear him whispering: Now you'll see. You'll have no choice but to carry it.
But as the room buzzed with murmurs, as the vultures circled, measuring me, waiting to see if I would falter — something shifted inside me.
It wasn't obedience. It wasn't surrender.
It was fire.
That night, I wandered the halls of his mansion, the empire he had built in brick and stone. Every room reeked of him — his paintings, his trophies, his endless proof of power.
But when I stood in his study, surrounded by his shadow, I made a vow.
If I had to carry his legacy, I would reshape it.
Not into what he wanted.
Into what the world needed.
The storm had taken him. But it had left me with his fortune.
And I swore I would not waste it.
I would build something he never could.
Something alive.
Something hidden.
The sanctuary below.