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Rope was everywhere I looked. And the final death in my book had been suicide by hanging.
“You know, Cassandra said Alastor had a kid.” Violet tilted her head to the ceiling. “It was in an interview. Everyone seemed so convinced it was a boy, but he actually never said.”
Yet another small marble bust of Julius Caesar held the books in place—and the slender book resting against it had a familiar yellow cover.
Once they were upstairs, I crossed the dining room and selected the book—my book, my first book, with my real name gracing the cover—off the shelf and slipped it under my jacket.
“I have an idea to help us find Alastor, and I need your help. I know you want to catch him as badly as I do.”
I was a psychiatrist.
When you refuse to play, you lose your turn. Fourth game begins at sundown. Your challenge is simple: survive the night. Each guest must remain locked in their room from sunset to sunup. If anyone leaves their room, they lose.
“Curtis Shelton of Oakland, California, was a chef at a two-star Michelin restaurant in San Francisco. He mishandled a poultry dish, which resulted in the severe food poisoning and subsequent death of a customer.”
No one on this island is innocent. Except you.”
“I hired the staff for their ability to be blackmailed into silence after the game. I hadn’t actually decided what to do with them.” Alastor’s heavy breaths came steady, but his next words slipped like a single droplet of ice water down my spine. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered two bodies on the floor of my study.”
Omg
The staff had been the most logical option for being Alastor, and I’d nearly taken Mila out half a dozen times, but that was tricky: if she really wasn’t our host, she was still our best hope of figuring a way off the island.
Thankfully no one’d decided to get a drink at 2:13 in the morning, otherwise they might’ve stumbled into a scene out of Carrie. It’d taken forever to scrub the blood from under my fingernails.
I was a method writer.
It just so happened my first book was about a serial killer.
“What about this task sounds particularly difficult to you?” I inquired.
Literally Jajajajaj
“Wait, what?” Violet said, recoiling. “You can’t seriously be talking about drugging her. What if she’s innocent?”
Por fin someone sane
He passed a hand along the back of his neck. “How else are we supposed to make sure she’s not involved? Lock her in a closet?”
Fucking asshole.
“Just have her stay in my room with me,” she insisted. “That way we still follow the rules, and I keep an eye on her. If the other option is to drug her and lock her up, I guarantee she’ll agree.”
But Cassandra—quite a few people, actually—might have been more than a little disgruntled when I published my memoir, nearly a decade ago. The memoir I’d spotted on the bookshelf in the dining room today, next to the Julius Caesar bust. And again in the library, so artfully leaning against the gramophone on the desk.
You need to throw up. Fletcher drugged you.
It was time to haunt the house.
It’s always fascinated me how humans crave to read about fear from the comfort of their fireside armchairs, perhaps accompanied by a steaming cup of chamomile or a robust red wine.
The purpose of art is to evoke emotion—and what are the horror and thriller genres for, if not to incite feeling?
Confessions of a Frankly Disgusted Therapist
Dr. Timothy Foley
There was a moment of silence as we absorbed this unfortunate yet somehow unsurprising truth about Carter.
Jajjajjajaajajaj
I still should have known better than to come here with one of my former patients. I’d never been more fortunate than I was on that day, when famed novelist Cassandra Hutchinson walked into my office.
Our host might as well have painted redrum across our doors.
It was almost as if Alastor had planned for the others to discover my duplicity.
What were the odds that Alastor was about to unleash a torrent of red-dyed water on us, like something out of Carrie?
“And I thought my room was”—Violet went still—“bad.”
Final Girl (n.): historically a female, the last one standing when the credits roll.
Welp. I definitely wasn’t counting on that.
I had to keep it together, for them. How ironic. The tables really had turned.
I know que eres tu Alastor
On the white duvet, neatly parallel to his bare foot, a long, narrow syringe glinted. The hair-thin needle exposed.
You have to go, she’d said, when I’d gotten Alastor’s invitation and nearly popped an eyeball from shock.
Something pulled open inside me like a wound, spilling black onto all my insides. It felt a lot like relief.
“But if Final Girls is the last game,” Violet said, gaze narrowed on the doorway, “is Mila a player or not? Is she a victim here, too?” “No,” I lied. “I don’t think she is.”
Ana
Milas real name
And it held me meeting Rodrigo, and everything that followed after.
Rodrigo said that one of his clients was at the house... And it all pointed at Violet
No one wanted to believe publishing’s newest darling was a thief and a liar, and that was all that mattered.
Rodrigo, who might’ve known the worst truth about me: that my book wasn’t mine.
Ana Aracely-Ortega.
Tonight’s game might be called Final Girls, but only one is ever left when the credits roll.
None of the light fixtures in my room had leaked, like they had in Ashton’s room, but the flooding did make an appearance in the drywall of my bathroom.
At least I’d had the forethought to write a second prescription.
The only one of you guaranteed to avoid the oleander lookalike is the one who has used oleander as a poison before.
Sometimes, people surprise you.
In fact, there have been a few times when I’ve seen a murder on the news and thought, “Didn’t I brainstorm a murder like that with someone?”
It was time for a violent end to his games.
