Chapter 17
The lights snapped back on, like the condo had finally decided to stop pretending.
For half a heartbeat, everything was stagnant—smoke hanging in the air, dust drifting through the harsh overhead glow, the coffee table scorched and crowded with the wooden slab and its little burned offerings.
Flashlight beams swept in fast and nervous, carving white tunnels through the haze. They caught on blood, on glass, on the slick shine of a hardwood floor that was never meant to be wet. Each beam lingered too long, as if even the officers’ eyes were struggling to accept what they were seeing.
Heads snapped in every direction, taking in bodies, shattered furniture, and the impossible geometry of what remained of Chad. Silence settled first. Shock always arrived before language.
“Freeze!” an officer shouted, his voice cracking with adrenaline. His gun was up, his arms locked. “Hands where I can see them!”
Liv obeyed instantly, flinging her hands into the air so fast her shoulders jerked.
Her compliance was pure reflex. Zach’s hands followed, slower, palms open like he was trying to prove he still had them.
Erica lifted hers a beat later, fingers stiff and her mind still insisting this was a scene she was watching, not one she was in.
Beckie stared at the officers, blinking. Then she raised one hand lazily, like she was volunteering. “Hi,” she said. “So—”
“both hands!” an officer barked, stepping closer, boots crunching on glass.
Beckie sighed and raised the other. “Okay. Aggressive much.” She added, “This isn’t what it looks like.” Because apparently she couldn’t let silence exist.
An older officer with a red face and thinning gray hair stepped forward. His eyes swung across the room, across the streaks and pools, across the spattered walls, across the rug Erica had scrubbed until her wrists burned. His gaze landed on the severed arm on the floor, then the torso nearby.
“It looks like a goddamn massacre!” he shouted.
Beckie glanced at the remains. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe it is what it looks like.”
“Shut your mouth!” someone yelled from behind the raised guns.
Another officer moved deeper into the room, boots grinding a broken bulb into powder. His flashlight landed on Chad’s severed limb, then the ragged stump of his shoulder. His mouth worked once, like his body rejected the sight on principle. Then he turned sharply, vomiting onto the entryway tile.
No one reacted, not even Beckie. It was barely in the top five worst bodily fluids in the condo at this point.
“Jesus Christ,” the officer croaked, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Jesus—”
“There’s more,” another officer called. His tone was apologetic.
He’d moved to the far side of the living room, where the couch had been dragged slightly out of place, blankets thrown over shapes with all the care of someone hiding a mess under a rug.
He grabbed the first blanket and peeled it back.
Elias’s face appeared pale and slack. The back of his head was dark with dried blood.
The officer flinched like the body had moved.
He yanked the second blanket. Derek lay beneath it, eyes half open.
The circle of blood in the center of his forehead was so neat it looked staged—the kind of wound that should only exist in movies.
“Two more bodies over here!” he called.
“What the fuck is going on here?” someone shouted, and this time it wasn’t even an accusation. It was a genuine request for a reality that made sense.
Liv’s sob broke loose. “I didn’t mean to—” she started. “I didn’t—”
Zach jerked his head toward her. “Liv,” he hissed, barely moving his lips. “Stop. Stop talking.”
Liv cried anyway, because grief didn’t care about strategy and shock didn’t care about police procedure.
Erica tried to breathe through her nose and immediately regretted it. The air was a collage of smells: iron, smoke, citrus cleaner turned sour, and the faint medicinal sting of adrenaline. Her living room—her carefully curated, intentional living room—had been converted into a crime scene.
The condo looked like it had been chewed up and spit out. A lamp lay shattered, its shade torn open. Books were strewn across the floor like someone had grabbed the shelves and shaken them. A chair lay overturned.
Beyond the swinging door, the dining room was still visible. The table was still set in eerie, untouched perfection. The candles were burned down to nothing, and the plates were abandoned. A birthday dinner frozen mid-celebration.
And at the center of it all, on the coffee table, sat the wooden slab—its scorched circle of objects arranged like evidence that didn’t belong in a police report.
One officer’s gaze landed on it and lingered, before snapping away as if looking at it might be contagious.
“Who lives here?” the red-faced officer demanded.
“I do,” Erica said.
The officer stared. “You do,” he repeated. “What the hell were you all doing here tonight?”
Erica opened her mouth.
“It was supposed to be a birthday dinner,” she heard herself say.
The calmness of her voice didn’t match her trembling arms or the faint twitch in her fingers. The sentence sounded eerie—how true it was, how useless it sounded in a room that had stopped obeying basic rules.
“I didn’t plan for any of this,” she added.
The red-faced officer studied her, trying to decide whether she was lying or insane.
“Whose birthday?” another officer asked, as if the answer might reorganize the room.
“Mine,” Erica said, and hated herself for it. The word felt petty against the blood.
The officer didn’t soften. If anything, his expression hardened, because now there was a date to stamp on this, something to fit in a report, even though nothing in front of him fit.
“Everybody keep your hands up,” he barked, scanning them again. “Don’t look at my weapon. Don’t move toward anything. Don’t—”
His eyes caught on Chad’s gun, protruding from what remained of his head near the entryway stand.
“Weapon on the floor!” he called. “I need someone to secure it. Slowly. Slow!”
A younger officer approached the gun like it might bite. Everyone watched. No one blinked. He crouched and scooped it out of Chad with a gloved hand and placed it into an evidence bag.
Another officer spoke into his radio, his tone strained and professional in a way that felt like a coping mechanism.
“Dispatch, we need all units to respond to . . . uh . . . Wicker Tower Condominiums, unit nine-oh-seven.” He glanced around like he expected the walls to contradict him. “Repeat, unit nine-oh-seven. Multiple victims. Send EMS and the medical examiner.”
A crackle answered him.
From the hallway, voices rose—neighbors held back behind a line of uniforms. Someone whispered Erica’s name like they were sharing gossip through a peephole.
Someone else muttered, “I told you that unit was weird.”
Erica had the irrational urge to correct them. Her unit wasn’t weird. It was well lit and tastefully decorated and had never once been the subject of a complaint until tonight.
“Get the medical examiner down here,” the red-faced officer snapped. “Now!”
He looked at the cluster of cops who were still scanning the condo, trying to make sense of what happened.
“And get these four down to the station,” he ordered.
“Should we cuff them?” a younger officer asked, eyeing Liv like she might bolt.
The older officer laughed without humor. “We’ve got two bodies—” He corrected himself, eyes flicking again to Chad’s torso and then away. “We’ve got multiple bodies, and one of them looks like it was torn apart limb by limb. So yes, you should fucking cuff them.”
Metal cuffs snapped open. Liv flinched at the sound like it was another gunshot.
Erica swallowed hard. “We can explain,” she said, because she needed to believe that was true, but deep down she knew it wasn’t.
The officer leaned closer. “I’ve been to a lot of birthday dinners,” he said. “Never one that ended with three dead people, one of them in pieces. So I’m very interested in how you plan to explain this.”
Beckie blinked. “Sounds like you don’t get out much.”
The officer stared at her. “Cuff her ankles too.”
Beckie’s mouth fell open. “Seriously? Ankles? This is—”
“Ma’am,” an officer cut in, stepping behind Erica. “Hands behind your back.”
Her arms trembled as she lowered them. Her wrists disappeared into the cold bite of the cuffs. They felt too real, like the universe was reasserting itself with procedure and protocol and consequences. It grounded her more than anything had all night.
Liv kept whispering, “I didn’t mean to,” over and over, her words soft as breath.
As they were moved one by one, Erica’s gaze drifted past the officers and the wreckage, to the coffee table, to the wooden slab, to the scorched circle where their objects lay. The flames were gone and so was the pressure.
The air felt normal again. It was stale with blood and smoke, but it was empty in the way rooms were supposed to be. There was no hum beneath it, no watching, and no sense of something waiting to speak. The absence felt like victory.
It worked, she thought, and the calmness of the realization frightened her. Whatever they’d opened had been closed again. Her sister had helped her do that.
Now there were only the consequences that belonged to the living. The cuffs tightened around her wrists as she was guided toward the door, trailing behind Zach.
At the threshold, Erica hesitated. She always hesitated at thresholds now. Doorways felt like questions.
“Move,” an officer snapped, and she did.
She stepped over splintered wood, over a smear of blood, and over the line where her condo ended and the hallway began.
Behind her, her home stood silent and ordinary again—a ruined room waiting to be processed, photographed, and cleaned.
For the first time in years, Erica didn’t have a plan.
Whatever came next could come. And she would handle it when it did.