Chapter 49 Beck
Beck
Beck was beginning to feel like he was in a soap opera.
Symphony’s dark eyes narrowed as she scanned the room. “This is problematic, isn’t it?” she said, her attention landing on her son. Her lip curled, but Beck couldn’t tell if the look was anger or disgust or merely annoyance at the complication. “Why are you here?”
Adi tried to speak, but no words came out.
“It was you?” said Sierra. “You killed my sister? But— You didn’t even know her!”
“Of course I knew her,” Symphony snapped. “I met her on set that first week of filming. I took her under my wing. Taught her how to make the camera love her. I mentored that bitch!”
Bewildered, Beck met Carter’s gaze.
But then—he realized. All those times Alicia had disappeared when Louis had been on set. She had been meeting with Symphony.
“She had potential. We could have done great things together,” Symphony growled.
“And then she stabbed me in the back. It was bad enough when Ranielle told me they’d decided to give the host gig to Alicia instead—that’s Hollywood for you, isn’t it?
Always passing over the talented, experienced actress for the flavor of the week.
But when I saw Alicia getting out of Louis’s car that night, I understood what was really going on.
She slept her way into my job! I was supposed to be host! Me!”
Fitzy faced her. “You said they were bringing you on as producer!”
“Details,” said Symphony, flicking a hand. “Ranielle promised the host position to me first, before Hitflix started getting hot and bothered over my little protégé. I knew that once Alicia was out of the picture, they’d see reason. I’m the star here. I deserve this.”
“Oh my god, that’s why she tried to steal my contract,” Adi said, so quietly, Beck suspected he was talking to himself. “She didn’t want to be producer. She’s been gunning for host since season four.”
Fitzy’s expression twisted with fury. “You told me that once you were co-producer, you’d make sure my job was safe.”
“Yes, well. I lied,” Symphony said, so flippant it was like she didn’t even realize Fitzy was holding a gun. “Besides, you were getting fired one way or another. That’s on Ranielle, not me.”
“I helped you!” said Fitzy. “I did everything you asked. Who had to get her frozen-ass carcass from the villas? Drive her halfway across town? Do you think it was easy loading her up on that cart, arranging her in that coffin—”
“I didn’t tell you to take her to the studio,” snapped Symphony. “I said to dispose of the body, not make a spectacle of it.”
“I had to send a message! No one screws me over and gets away with it. Not Ranielle, and sure as hell not you. You swore I’d keep my job if I took care of that catastrophic mess you made for us.”
“It wasn’t like I planned to kill her.” Her eyes flashed. “But she’d been plotting against me. When I realized how she’d betrayed me . . . Well. Things escalated quickly.” Her anger faded and she shrugged, like the difference between talking to Alicia and murdering her was no big deal.
Fitzy’s nostrils flared. The gun wavered, and for a moment it seemed he might shoot her, but then he swung it around toward Beck and the others. “If I’m screwed, I’m taking you with me. So how do you propose we deal with this?”
Beck pressed back against the wall, tugging Carter closer to him.
“You killed her,” whispered Sierra. Beck wondered if she had heard anything else of the conversation. “Over a . . . a job. A pathetic hosting job on a reality competition. That was worth her life?”
Symphony rounded on her. “This is my life! My career! Do you know what I had to endure to get my ex involved with this show? The hoops I had to jump through to get that offer from Ranielle?”
Beck could see Sierra’s fury burbling up, reaching the surface—
“She! Was! My! Sister!”
Sierra raised the wooden stake. Fitzy lifted the gun. But then Vera was screaming, a guttural warrior’s cry, as she shoved Sierra out of the way and grabbed the stake from her hand.
Vera rushed—not at Symphony but at Fitzy.
Surprised, he jerked the gun out of her reach and sidestepped. Vera crashed into the stone wall. If she was hurt, she showed no sign of it, immediately spinning around and stabbing the stake into the back of his shoulder.
He let out a roar of pain. The gun went off, the sound deafening in the small room. Carter screamed and ducked. Beck crouched beside her, his arms around her shoulders. Symphony was yelling and Fitzy was shouting and the gun fired again—
Someone yanked on his arm. Beck dared to look up.
“Come on!” Adi shouted, shoving him toward the wall.
No—not the wall. The door. The big wooden door. That was . . . open? Adi had figured out the code to the keypad while Fitzy and Symphony were talking.
“Go!” Adi cried, pushing Beck and Carter through. “Hurry! Sierra!”
Beck stumbled through to the other side and barely had time to register his surroundings—more stone walls and vaulted ceilings and an entire wall of books—before he spun back around to see Adi with his hand on Sierra’s wrist, yanking her through the doorway.
“Vera!” Carter screamed.
Vera was on the ground. There was blood. A lot of blood.
Fitzy was distracted by the wound in his shoulder, but when he saw the others were escaping he swung the gun, aiming for them— right as the door slammed shut.
Beck stood panting, hands on his knees as he struggled to drag in stilted breaths. He braced himself for another gunshot, but it didn’t come. Instead, Fitzy started pounding at the door, trying to force it open.
“H-how?” Carter gasped. “How did you open it?”
“The place names on the holy water coincided with the numbers on the map,” said Adi, breathlessly falling against the wall.
“But you didn’t have the atlas,” said Carter. Sweat matted her curls to her temples, and her eyes had a dazed, horrified look in them. Beck suspected they all had that look.
“I know where Jordan is,” said Adi. “And Lourdes. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. Holy shit, that was my mother.”
“Vera . . .” said Carter. “We left her there. She could be . . .”
“I’m calling the cops.” Sierra whipped out her phone. She covered her opposite ear as she turned away from the sounds of Fitzy repeatedly ramming something into the door.
“They won’t get here in time,” said Adi.
“In time to save Vera?” asked Carter weakly. “Or . . .”
She didn’t have to finish.
Adi looked alarmingly ill. “She was in one of her moods the night Alicia died. I remember her throwing shit around, screaming at me. She’d come home late. Late—because she’d been out committing murder.”
Beck squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Every thump on the door made him flinch. How long could it hold?
“We have to play the game,” he whispered.
Realization dawned on Carter’s face. “Every room ends with an escape.”
“Yeah,” said Adi with a humorless laugh. “Where Fitzy and my mother are on the other side.”
“Not this time,” said Carter. “They’re trapped in the first room, at least for now.”
“Right,” said Beck. “We need to stay a step ahead of them. Solve the puzzles, get out. Once we’re in the studio, and they’re still locked in here .
. .” He swallowed hard, knowing that he was grasping at tenuous hope.
They were stuck with a murderer and a maniac with a gun.
But the police would be on their way. They just had to play through the game. That was it. They could do that.
“What are we waiting for?” said Adi. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Beck forced himself to focus. To ignore the pounding on the door, each thump like a splinter in his tongue, and take in the space around him.
It was glorious, actually. The stuff of escape room dreams. They were in what appeared to be the dining hall of a Gothic castle, with hand-sawn wooden beams, enormous iron chandeliers, a wall of dusty books complete with a rolling library ladder, and a series of medieval tapestries on one wall.
A table in the center was set for several guests, with fine china and silverware.
Carter made her way to the other side of the massive hall, where a gate stood blocking their exit, held in place by a rope-and-pulley system fastened with an iron padlock in need of a key. “This isn’t the last room. Look.”
Beck joined her. Beyond the gate was a cemetery, boxed in by more towering stone walls.
In the corner stood a marble mausoleum. Grayish-blue lighting gave the effect that the cemetery was cast in silver moonlight, and the limbs of a scraggly tree held animatronic bats, blinking at them with red eyes.
Vera had outdone herself.
But thinking of Vera made Beck think of her body crumpled on the ground, and the blood and—
He spun around, trying to focus on the task before them. His eyes fell on a large fireplace. “A sword!” he cried, rushing to grab it off hooks above the mantel. Not sharp, but the blade was heavy enough that it could do damage.
“Good idea,” said Adi. “We should arm ourselves.”
“I thought we were trying to solve the puzzles?” said Carter, who had started inspecting a locked curio cabinet with leaded glass doors.
“Arm ourselves while solving puzzles,” he clarified.
Carter took in a shuddering breath. “Okay. We need a key for the gate, and this cabinet has a four-letter alphabet code. There are goblets and wine casks inside.”
“There are spaces for the goblets on these place settings, once we can access them,” said Beck, approaching the table with its long black cloth and high-backed chairs. “And there’s a box here. Locked.” He inspected the place settings, checking each platter.