You Are Fatally Invited

by Ande Pliego

Writing is a kind of beautiful madness. It is slitting yourself open, bleeding your soul onto the page in that paradoxical mask of vulnerability perhaps only a writer can achieve. And writing fear requires the greatest vulnerability of all: a willingness to face your demons, and set them free.

Dramatic hair decisions were rarely without catalyst, and I couldn’t help but wonder what hers had been.

I deserved an award for the neutral face I kept. Cassandra padded over, her many-ringed fingers grabbing at the air. “Give me that, and no one gets hurt.” “Over my dead body,” Olivia laughed, hugging the book to her chest. “Don’t tempt her,” Fletcher advised. “Every one of us kills people for a living, remember?” “No murder is necessary,” I interjected with a smile.

Only three people on this earth knew, other than me. One of them sat across from me. Another one was dead. And the third—

“Sometimes the art of fiction isn’t in how intellectual it is, but how well it makes you actually forget the world around you. Sometimes, binge reading to escape reality can save a person’s life.”

If you can’t feel the emotion, then how do you translate it into words?”

You stole that from me. You’d completely ripped away my ability to write, as if you’d sliced me open and scooped out the creative spark from beneath my rib cage and left me cold and dark. You’d stolen every word I could ever have put on the page, and that hurt most of all.

“I remember when Ed—my favorite ex-husband—first read one of my books. Not one of my best decisions. Finally, he said to me, ‘Sweetie,’ he says, ‘it’s me, or the books.’ Sometimes I still think of him when I get my royalty check.”

Writing is a beautiful tool for confession, revealing one’s own darkest self.

Humans aren’t made to carry the weight of our sins. But the blank page—pricking your finger and letting the dark seep out onto the page, well.

One of the guests was dead. Not just dead—murdered. And not the one I wanted.

Someone on the island murdered Rodrigo, and it wasn’t me, which meant the murderer could be one of them.

Funny how you can want something so badly, but it’s only when you get it that you realize it wasn’t what you wanted at all.

“I think in everyone’s life,” I started slowly, “you get an event that cuts everything in two. Like an axe splitting wood. And there becomes a before and an after.”

“Imagine my surprise when I discovered two bodies on the floor of my study.”

what???!!! so it wasn't him who killed those two?

He may have thought he understood me, but what did he know, really? That I killed people? Fine. Plenty of people do that. But blackmail was just words on paper. I dealt in blood. And I never played by other people’s rules.

“Haven’t you ever read one of our books? A group of people are stalked, everyone separates, and dies? Oldest trope in the genre.”

“If I’m the most humane person in the room, we’re all screwed.”

You must let the beast free before you can hunt it down.

I’d thought the island couldn’t be more perfect for a writing retreat—or a murder. I just hadn’t realized I’d get both.

Hunting deer had nothing on hunting humans.

Was I really about to clobber a serial killer in the head with a bookend? This was ridiculous.

I inhaled hard, scooping up Olivia’s wire-wrapped bat. Fingers curling around the smooth, solid stem, the low light flicking off the jagged barbs. “Let’s play a game.”

“Alastor’s real name is Ana Aracely-Ortega.” My hands tightened around the heavy bat, the wire over the head grazing the checkerboard tile. “Ana Emilia Aracely-Ortega,” I said softly. Violet blinked. “Mila, for short.”

I actually would’ve liked to see the face of whatever fisherman found my drowned body, wheels and butt probably sticking up out of the water. It’d be a great headline.

“They’ve each done things they can’t fix,” she countered. “And even if they could, they never would, because of the type of people they are. They’ll never change.”

This bestselling author, this murderer who had masterminded a week of horror, had walked through literal fire to die with me, so I wouldn’t be alone. And now she was letting me go.

Vengeance is a poison you consume alongside your victim; the only antidote is reconciliation.

[Laughing] I think it really shows a lot, how you three have stayed close. Blake: You know what they say about people who bury bodies togeth— Aracely-Ortega: She’s kidding.

Don’t believe a word she says. There’s always more to the story.