The stale air in the overheated boardroom at YK Industries made my red silk tie feel tight. Way too tight. With trembling fingers, I tried to loosen the noose slowly strangling me. Finally, I yanked hard enough to release the knot, and then just let the tie hang there as I sucked in a breath.
Sitting next to me on one side of the long oak table was my twin brother, Eddy. Like me, he wore a black blazer and white button-down shirt, but his tie was blue. He’d gotten his hair cut about the same length as mine, but gel made his stand straight up, so at least we didn’t look as identical as we could have. Mom was on the other side of Eddy, along with our lawyer, John something or other. He was trying to explain to Mom why Phil was still running our family’s billion-dollar software company.
Phil. The right-hand man of my father, Rex Yanakakis, founder of YK, his own Yanakakis family legacy. Together, they kept our family in the Compound.
Roughly two thousand days. Two thousand days of my life spent underground. And why?
Because my father lied.
Lied to all of us. To my mom, to my sisters. To me.
He made us believe there was a nuclear attack and our only hope for survival was to enter the Compound, the lavish underground refuge he had built, so we could survive what no one else on the planet could. We were desperate; we willingly entered that silver door beyond which lay a sanctuary of my father’s making. A place of the kind of luxury and excess that we were used to.
