Chapter 12 #2
Vicky grabbed Brenda by the hair and snatched her backward so hard the woman stumbled into the wall. Brenda swung — wild and reflexive — but Vicky dodged the arm and drove her elbow into her ribs.
"It’s my turn bitch." Vicky's voice was low. Steady. "I dare you."
Brenda snarled and lunged. They hit the floor together. Sky pulled it together and stumped Brenda across the face with the heel of her foot. Hard enough to wipe that silly ass smile off Brenda’s face.
Footsteps thundered down the hall. Tyreek leaned in the doorway, one arm pressed tight against his side. "What the fuck—"
Teresa was already inside.
She got on her knees to get on Brenda’s level, grabbed her hair and wrenched her off Vicky. Brenda rolled away from her grip and stood. Sky shoved her hard into the shelving unit. Equipment rattled and fell. Teresa didn't stop. She grabbed her again by the collar and drove her into the wall.
"That's for CC, bitch." Teresa said.
Brenda swung. Teresa caught her wrist, twisted, and brought her knee into Brenda's stomach. Brenda doubled over with a grunt.
Tyreek stayed in the doorway, jaw tight, watching every exit. "Somebody better end this before I have to."
The bathroom door swung open.
Darius came through first, Celeste right behind him. Both of them read the room in half a second.
Celeste's gaze swept past the fight — past Brenda on her knees, past Teresa standing over her, past Vicky pulling Sky close — and landed on the door in the far wall. The one left slightly open. The one that hadn't been there before.
Not a closet. Not a maintenance panel.
A door. Leading directly into the connecting suite.
She didn't need anyone to explain it. The whole night snapped into focus — CC's room, Brenda's room, the hallway no one had seen her use because she never needed it.
She had walked through her own private entrance and committed murder ten feet from a sleeping bachelorette party.
No alibi needed. No witnesses. No evidence.
Just a door.
"Pull them off," Celeste said.
Darius stepped between Vicky and Brenda, easing Vicky back. Celeste moved in front of Teresa, both hands up.
"I got her. Stand down."
Teresa breathed hard through her nose but stepped back.
Brenda rose and straightened slowly. Her robe was torn. Blood from her lip had run down her chin. She looked around the room — at all of them — and smiled.
Not a smirk. Not a nervous reflex. A real smile. Wide and unhurried, like she was watching something she'd already seen the end of.
"All of you." She laughed softly. "In my house."
"It's over," Celeste said.
"You think so?" Brenda tilted her head. "Baby, this house was built by me. Every room. Every door." Her eyes drifted to the control board behind her. "Every button."
"Don't—"
Brenda leaned in and her hand swept across the control panel.
The explosion hit like the house had been punched from underneath. The floor lurched. The walls shook. A deep boom rolled through the foundation and everything that wasn't bolted down jumped. Dust rained from the ceiling. One of the emergency lights blew out.
Then silence — two full seconds — before the groaning started. The kind of sound a building makes when something load-bearing has given way.
Blackwater Manor was coming apart.
A tongue of flame licked up from the wall behind the control board, small at first, then hungry. The wiring was old. The explosion had torn something loose beneath the floor, and now the house was feeding it.
Brenda didn't move. She stood in its glow, watching the flame grow, and she smiled. Not the cold, calculated smile from before. This one was different. Looser. Like she'd finally let something go.
"If I can't have my way," she said, "this bitch gonna burn down with all of us in it."
The smoke came first.
It rolled through the vents and crawled under doors and found every room in Blackwater Manor before anyone knew what was happening.
Then the screaming started.
Guests poured into the hallways in robes and bare feet, coughing, clutching each other, voices tumbling over voices in the dark. The emergency lights pulsed red and useless. Somewhere a woman called a name over and over. Somewhere a door slammed against a wall.
The front doors didn't open.
Someone hit them with a chair. Then another. The frame shuddered but the locks held, and for one long terrible second it seemed like the mansion was going to keep every secret it had ever made — including the people inside it.
A window shattered. Then another one followed.
Cold air rushed in and the smoke churned and people coughed and pushed and the fire kept spreading, moving from the control room down through the walls toward the older dry wood at the heart of the house.
Then sirens. Faint at first, then closer, then right outside.
The front doors buckled inward as firefighters forced their way through, ax heads catching what the crowd couldn't break. They moved fast and low, cutting through smoke and chaos, voices calling out in the dark.
One by one, Blackwater Manor gave up its guests.
Everyone got out.
Outside, the rain had stopped.
The sky had shifted somewhere between black and gray — that in-between hour when night runs out of room and morning hasn't fully committed. Wet grass soaked through shoes. Guests stood in clusters on the lawn, wrapped in whatever they'd grabbed, some holding each other and some just staring.
Behind them, Blackwater Manor burned.
Flames pushed through the upper windows and lit the sky orange. Old wood popped. Glass broke. The sound of the fire filled the air the way the storm had hours before — total, everywhere, impossible to ignore.
A firefighter came out the front doors carrying CC’s lifeless body over his shoulder and wrapped in a blood-stained blanket.
The last firefighter emerged through the front doors carrying a woman over his shoulder.
Brenda was alive. He laid her on the wet grass and she didn't fight it. Didn't run. Didn't speak. She just lay there while the paramedic checked her over as flames climbed higher behind her and handcuffs clicked around her wrists.
She turned her head and watched. That was all she did — watched her kingdom burn. Every room. Every camera. Every secret passage, surveillance monitor, and locked door. Everything she'd built, everything she'd protected, everything she'd killed for. All of it, burning.
Celeste stood with a detective from Palm PD, walking him through it from the beginning. The body in the suite. The hidden passage. The surveillance room. The photographs. Reggie. Teresa's shot. The connecting door. Every piece of it laid out clean and clear in the gray morning light.
Across the lawn, Tyreek sat on the back bumper of an ambulance while a paramedic re-dressed his wound. A different detective stood nearby with a notepad, and when he was done, he closed it and shook Tyreek's hand.
Just like that, he was cleared.
Teresa stood a few feet away, arms crossed, watching the fire. Not shaking. Not crying. Just watching. Something in her had settled during the night — calcified into something harder and quieter than it had been before. She kept her eyes on Tyreek the whole time.
Sky hadn't let go of Vicky's hand since they walked out of the mansion. She wasn't sure she was going to.
Darius found Celeste when she was done with the detective. He didn't say anything. He just stood beside her, shoulder to shoulder. She turned to him and kissed him on the lips. He didn’t resist. Didn’t move. She pulled back with a smile.
“What was that for? he asked
“For finding me in the storm and never leaving my side.”
Both of them watched the last of Blackwater Manor surrender to the fire.
Morning light broke slow and gray over the smoking remains that touched the wet grass and the broken windows and the ash drifting down like snow. It touched the faces of people who had walked into a bachelorette party and walked out of something else entirely.
Everyone who entered Blackwater Manor that night survived but one.
None of them left the same.
The End of the book but not the journey…