The house was too quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that feels peaceful — no, this was the kind that settled into the bones, heavy and suffocating. The kind that followed you from room to room, filling every corner with absence. My father's absence.
It was strange, how the death of one man could make an entire mansion feel like a mausoleum. The servants moved in hushed tones, their footsteps muffled, their voices low. Even the clocks seemed to tick more cautiously, as though afraid of disturbing the dead.
I wandered through the halls like a ghost.
His portraits stared down at me — oil paintings of him in tailored suits, arms folded, chin raised in defiance of the world. His trophies glinted in glass cases: awards, honorary degrees, medals gifted by governments and corporations alike. Each artifact was another reminder of his reach, his dominance.
He had filled these halls with himself.
Now they felt hollow.
I found myself in his study.
It was exactly as he'd left it, and yet everything about it felt foreign. The oak-paneled walls loomed heavy. The massive desk sat like an altar, papers still stacked in precise, ordered piles. His scent lingered in the air — leather, ink, the faint tang of his cologne.
This was where he had ruled. Where he had broken me. Where his voice had cut deepest.
I sat in his chair. For the first time in my life, the seat didn't feel like judgment. It felt… empty.
I opened the drawers, half-expecting to find more contracts, more ledgers, more instruments of power. And I did. But beneath them, buried at the back of the drawer, I found something else.
A sketchbook.
My breath caught. I pulled it out with trembling hands, flipping it open.
The pages were filled with clumsy drawings in pencil and crayon. Animals — wolves, hawks, turtles, dolphins. Each one drawn with the eager intensity of a boy who loved what he saw, even if his hands weren't skilled enough to capture it.
My drawings.
I remembered them. I remembered showing them to him, once. Proud, hopeful. I'd wanted him to see what I saw in them — the beauty, the strength, the life.
He hadn't looked. He'd set them aside without a word. Later, I'd overheard him dismiss them: He wastes time doodling when he should be learning numbers.
And yet… he hadn't thrown them away.
He had kept them.
Why?
The question burned in my chest. Maybe he had meant to mock me with them. Maybe he had simply forgotten to discard them. Or maybe — though I could barely believe it — some part of him had valued them enough to hold on.
I flipped page after page, my heart pounding with each forgotten drawing. The wolf with its head raised in a howl. The hawk in mid-flight. The turtle swimming through imagined waters.
And then, almost without thinking, I pulled a blank sheet from the desk and laid it over the sketchbook.
This time, I didn't draw an animal.
I drew a building.
The lines came fast, urgent. A tower of glass and steel rose on the page, the kind of thing my father would have loved — sleek, pristine, corporate. But beneath it, the lines changed.
Levels. Stacked one on top of the other, descending into the earth like the roots of a vast tree. Each level spread wide, filled with habitats: forests, rivers, caves, skies.
A world below the world.
A sanctuary.
For the wolves, the hawks, the turtles. For the ones hunted, the ones forgotten, the ones lost.
By the time I stopped, the page was filled edge to edge. My hand ached. Ink smeared across my skin. But I couldn't look away from what I'd drawn.
It was impossible. Insane.
And yet, it was the first thing in weeks that made me feel alive.
The city pulsed outside the study windows, alive with neon and headlights. From here, it looked untouchable, invincible. But I knew better. I had seen the cracks — the poachers, the traffickers, the corporations chewing through ecosystems like parasites. To them, animals were commodities. Life itself was a resource to be exploited.
I thought of the wolf in my sketchbook. Of the hawk. Of the jaguar I had once seen on a trip with my mother, before she grew sick and before my father made the world too small for either of us to breathe.
What if there was a place no one could touch them?
What if I used his fortune not to build another monument to myself, but to erase the empire he had left behind and create something new?
A refuge.
The sanctuary below.
The first person I told was Marcus.
We sat on the balcony, the city sprawling beneath us. Marcus leaned against the railing, cigarette glowing between his fingers, his broad shoulders tense. He had been my father's head of security for years — ex-military, sharp-eyed, loyal to a fault. He had watched me grow up, watched me break under my father's demands, but had never interfered.
I handed him the sketch.
He stared at it for a long time, smoke curling from his lips.
"You want to build an underground zoo," he said at last.
"Not a zoo," I snapped. "A sanctuary. A refuge. A place where they'll be safe."
His eyes flicked up to mine, sharp and skeptical. "Disguised as an office building."
"Yes."
He chuckled, low and humorless. "You're insane."
I didn't back down. "So was my father, in his own way. He built an empire out of nothing but ambition and fear. Why can't I build something out of hope?"
Marcus studied me, the way he used to study a room for threats. His gaze lingered, weighing, measuring. Finally, he exhaled smoke and shook his head. "You'd need architects. Engineers. Scientists. You'd need secrecy tighter than Fort Knox. Money isn't the problem — keeping this hidden is."
"I'll find the people," I said. "People who believe in this."
"And if you can't?"
I looked back at the city, the storm clouds rolling in again.
"Then I'll do it myself."
That night, I didn't sleep.
Instead, I spread notebooks across the floor of the study. I sketched habitats, airflow systems, water filtration designs — crude, clumsy things, but alive with possibility. I scribbled notes on species, ecosystems, food chains. My pen couldn't keep up with my thoughts.
By dawn, my fingers were stained with ink, my eyes bloodshot, my body shaking with exhaustion. But I didn't care.
Because for the first time in my life, I wasn't hearing my father's voice.
I was hearing mine.