What Money Cannot Buy

POV FREYA

The red light on my satellite phone blinked with urgent persistence. Three heavy-chassis armoured trucks had just sealed off the south exit at Dock Three, less than five hundred metres from my warehouse.

I killed the screen instantly. In my past life panic would have seized me; I would have called Wyatt or my father begging protection, never understanding that prey must never call on wolves for help.

I climbed silently up the metal catwalk running high along the building’s roof and peered through the ventilation slats.

Beneath the dim yellow glow of port lamps, vehicle doors swung open. These were not dock thugs or mercenaries. They wore sharp dark suits and matching ties: my father’s consortium private security detail, led by Wyatt’s own chief bodyguard.

Then the phone began to ring. An incoming call.

Wyatt Cole.

I pressed speaker, keeping my voice steady, cold, stripped of all feeling.

"What do you want, Wyatt?"

"Freya, stop this damned madness right now!" he roared, his voice shaking with a mix of rage and desperation. "Your father has called an emergency board meeting. Cross Corp stock dropped twelve percent at close because some fool leaked you sold your entire holding at fire-sale prices! Our joint accounts are frozen! Where on earth did you put the money?"

I looked down at the polished concrete floor that minutes before had held mountain upon mountain of supplies worth hundreds of millions.

"Somewhere your greedy hands will never reach," I answered calmly.

"You are destroying our families!" Sienna shrieked in the background, snatching the phone away. Her fake sobbing sounded shrill and grating through the speaker. "Freya, sister, please… Wyatt had financial commitments that depended on your inheritance. Father is having a hypertension crisis. If you come home now and sign the revocation of the sale, we can fix this with the lawyers…"

"Tell my father to take an aspirin," I cut in with a dry, sharp laugh. "And tell him to enjoy whatever value is left in his company, because in less than three months all that paper will not be worth using to light a campfire."

"Freya, do not you dare hang up!" Wyatt bellowed, reclaiming the line. "My men have the entire dock district surrounded. They saw you enter those storage buildings. You are not leaving there until you hand over the transfer access codes. Do you hear me? You have nowhere left to run!"

"You are making a beginner’s mistake, Wyatt," I murmured, my fingers brushing the cool surface of the jade ring. "You think I am trapped in here with you. The truth is you are standing outside wasting your time on an empty shell."

I ended the call, pulled out the satellite chip, dropped it to the ground and ground it beneath my tactical boot.

I made no attempt to leave through the main gate. From the building plans I had committed to memory hours earlier, I knew of a maintenance tunnel running underground, connecting directly to the drainage channel at Dock Four. I descended quietly via the emergency stairs, slid the heavy cast-iron cover aside, and stepped into the dark.

Twenty minutes later I emerged through a secondary outlet two kilometres beyond Wyatt’s perimeter, where I had left an unregistered, untraced dirt bike parked.

I accelerated along the coastal road as the cold pre-dawn wind cleared my mind.

The rush of securing everything I had bought began fading, replaced by the harsh, unvarnished truth learned so painfully in my former life.

Having food was not enough. Having medicine was not enough.

In the first two weeks of collapse, supermarkets and pharmacies were stripped to the foundations. But by day thirty, when real hunger bit and survivor bands organised with automatic weapons, the true slaughter began: raids on private bunkers.

I remembered with perfect, aching clarity what befell the tycoons who thought themselves safe in shelters built beneath their mansions: attackers blocked air intakes with toxic smoke, welded exits shut from outside, or set off homemade charges until the concrete gave way. Ten years of provisions meant nothing if men with dynamite could turn your sanctuary into a sealed tomb.

One place alone stood unbroken through five years of total chaos: Blackstone Fortress.

Carved more than eighty metres deep into solid granite in the northern mountain ranges, it was a former Cold War military installation completely rebuilt and reinforced by Vanguard Security, the nation’s largest private military corporation.

It boasted independent geothermal reactors, closed-loop hydroponic farms, reinforced concrete walls plated with titanium alloy capable of withstanding direct ballistic impact, and most importantly: ten thousand elite contractors, heavily armed, iron-disciplined, and unwaveringly loyal to one person.

Declan Mercer.

The man the underworld called "The Butcher of Ground Zero".

In my past life I had seen him only once, through broken binoculars: an unyielding commander with broad shoulders and an unreadable gaze, leading an armoured convoy that swept through a horde of three thousand infected in minutes without losing a single man. Everyone feared him. No one dared cross into his territory without his express permission.

But Declan Mercer had a weakness only someone from the future could know: a fortress holding ten thousand armed men devoured tonnes of supplies every week. By the second year his soldiers began falling not to fangs and claws, but to scurvy, missing antibiotics, and hydroponic crops ruined by blight.

He held the walls and the guns.

I held an inexhaustible larder.

The motorcycle roared up the steep winding slopes of Blackwood Mountain. At five in the morning thick mist clung to the pines when the paved road ended abruptly before a reinforced checkpoint, blocked by anti-tank barriers and electrified razor wire.

.50 calibre automated turrets swivelled on their mounts with a menacing hydraulic hum, locking straight onto my chest the moment I cut the engine.

Four guards in full black tactical gear, ballistic helmets and assault rifles emerged from the hardened booth, encircling me with perfectly synchronised movements.

"Vanguard Security restricted zone," the squad leader barked through his voice modulator, the muzzle of his rifle levelled at me from three metres away. "Dismount with hands visible. You are on private property under immediate-fire authority."

I did not raise my hands in surrender. I removed my helmet slowly, letting my dark braid fall loose over my shoulders, and met the soldier’s gaze through his tinted visor.

I reached slowly into my jacket pocket, pulled out a small military-grade encrypted data card, and dropped it at his feet.

"Give this to Declan Mercer," I said, my voice steady, not a muscle trembling. "Tell him it contains decryption codes for the supply satellite his convoy lost six months ago on the southern border. And tell him the woman who can feed his ten thousand mercenaries for the next decade is waiting at his gate."