“Is that where you keep your bat suit?”
Nasa snorted, his lips quirking ever so briefly. “Storage facility slash fall-out shelter. You want a tour?”
Dillon would have been lying if she said no. So far, just as he'd described, every inch of the Perdition compound had been built with safety and protection in mind.
After hearing more than one person bust his balls about his overly-aggressive tactics in prepping, she was doggedly curious about Nasa's method.
“What about Lyon?”
Nasa looked at the toddler tucked under his desk and a smile quirked his mouth. He crossed the distance and crouched down to tug on the boy's boot.
Lyon looked back and yanked his headphones off with a scowl.
“What? Dis duh gud part, Unka!”
“I'll rewind it for you, killer. I'm gonna show Dillon my treasure room. Stay put, okay?”
Lyon put his headphones back on and gave a dismissive wiggle of his chubby hand.
“Wudebber! Wind it, now!” Nasa obeyed, chuckling when Lyon screamed, “STAHHP!”
Nasa then shot a text off—presumably to Ever to let her know her son was contained—and tilted his head to invite Dillon into his 'treasure room.'
She followed him down another flight of stairs, into a hallway wide enough to drive a truck or an SUV through. It was a long concrete box at least three hundred feet long with dozens of roll up doors on either side.
Dillon looked around with wide eyes, slightly in awe of how much labor the project would have entailed.
Nasa let her take it in, a set of keys jingling in his hands as he shortened his stride to stay beside her.
“When the original compound was destroyed, only the basement survived the explosions, and even then the ceiling had a few cracks in it from the impact of falling debris. So, I buried fifty shipping containers beneath the building.”
“Did you layer a steel plate and beam system between the basement ceiling and the concrete foundation of the compound?”
Nasa glanced down at her with a warm, appreciative look. “Yes. At the end of the hallway is the underground garage, accessed from the barn where we do most of our mechanical work.”
He opened doors and showed her storage containers packed full of supplies to ensure a single person could survive for a year or more.
She spied a towering stack of diapers in one container that would cover Ever's daughter until her sixteenth birthday; a wall of pink stuff in another container along with more baby supplies.
The contents of the next was an arsenal that could supply the takeover of a third world country—Nasa didn't comment on where he'd gotten the firepower—another one held auto parts and tools galore.
Honestly, all that was missing was an ark for the animals.
He led her all the way through the garage and showed her the emergency escape route, and the barn overhead where six enormous trucks sat—all of them white and nondescript.
Nasa explained to her the many ways the vehicles were equipped to survive anything from bomb blasts to epic floods.
“I wanted to make sure we had multiple escape routes that didn't require us to leave the safety of the building in the event of an attack.
"Athena wants to put in a greenhouse to ensure we always have access to clean food, but the only place to safely put it is smack dab in the middle of our training field.”
“You mean that astro-turf covered, post-apocalyptic gorilla playground you've got behind the barn?”
Nasa slanted a narrow look her way, but his lips twitched.
“It's a training field.”
Dillon gave a lofty nod. “Sure. With everything else you have in this place, I was shocked I didn’t discover a fancy home gym with all the latest equipment.”
“Damon is in charge of PT, and he doesn't believe in mirrors. Says only narcissistic douchebags go to an air-conditioned gym to watch themselves lift weights.”
“That's the only reason I'd go to the gym, but it was way more fun to watch all of you flipping a tractor tire up and down the astro-turf.”
It was so effortless, Dillon didn't even realize she was doing it until she caught a glimpse of Nasa’s knowing smirk.
She was flirting.
Thankfully, Nasa didn't call her out on it. He gave a grunt that sounded suspiciously close to a laugh and bent to open the rolling door closest to his basement lair.
“We kept trying for real grass but couldn't keep the fire ants or the sticker burrs from invading. The prospects were spending all their time babying the damn grass and not doing their jobs, so we scraped it all out and put down the astro-turf. No fire ants, no stickers. Traction can be tricky, but we make it work.”
Oh, she'd seen it work. She'd sat beneath the enormous oak tree with Elka between her legs, brushing her slick coat while trying to covertly watch the men making a trash-talking relay race of flipping the two tractor tires up and down the field.
Only a few were missing from each group, on patrol or rotation or whatever, and while it was a total wurstfest on the field, Dillon had eyes only for Nasa.
In his low-slung gym shorts and matching black tank, his body glistening with sweat, muscles bunching and flexing beneath tattooed flesh...
Dillon found herself captivated and desperate for a therapy session to get a handle on why she was attracted to someone she was terrified of.
Dillon knew Nasa was one of those men. A protector of women, children, and small animals. She'd really seen that side of him today in the way he'd eagerly welcomed Lyon, and in the way Nasa prepared a container for his brother's wives with everything a woman in a post-apocalyptic eventuality might need to make survival more comfortable.
Dillon wasn't terrified of him because of these things.
She was terrified because he saw her.
There was no hiding from someone like him, no pretending, no having to explain why she was the way she was. He knew.
Worse, he understood.
The men of Perdition lived with Nasa's paranoia induced proclivities every day and accepted him, warts and
