We get to the room, Tobias leading us and Margot and I taking up the end, Margot leaning on me but moving as fast as she can, with the two children in the middle. Felix is crying full force and Daphne is stoic, sucking on her thumb like she used to do when she was younger. I punch in the code to unlatch the door, and like in the medical wing, the locks give a soft hiss as everything unfurls and the cool, padded sanctuary of the panic room opens itself to us.
It has to be this way. They’re here for revenge, like I am. No witnesses. No survivors.
We all have to die. It’s just that some of us are going to be reborn.
Margot settles Daphne on one of the seats and Felix stumbles into the spot next to her. Tobias stands in the doorway, not inside the room yet.
“What are all those sounds?” he asks me. I try to move through the doorway, to get one last look at Felix and Daphne, but he blocks me with his shoulders and puts a hand out to push against my chest.
“What happens when we close ourselves in here?” he goes on.
“I have to finish things,” I tell him. “None of you need to be a part of this. I started it. I’m going to end it.”
“You can’t go back by yourself.” Tobias moves through the doors. “I need to help you.”
Margot stands and comes up behind him. “The children will be safe here. We can both help you. We can still stop this—whatever this is.” She pauses, and then says more quietly, “We can still stop her.”
There’s a steely flint to Margot’s expression that passes across her face, and it’s like she wants me to know that she’s not talking about stopping Brenna from leaving the house or from going to the police. She’s talking about stopping her, forever.
Margot’s gaze shifts to wrap around the room, but there aren’t any windows to see the men working on burning us to the ground. She’ll have seen the cars and the gasoline as we ran through the halls. Both of them must know what’s about to happen, what I need to do.
“What do you need us to do?” Margot echoes my thoughts back to me.
I have to move quickly. I have to make sure they understand me but that they don’t follow me.
“I need you to stay here until it’s over, and then I need you to take the children far away from here. No one can know who they are.”
I look at Margot, then at Tobias. They seem uncertain at first by what I’m saying, both of them leaning out and Margot reaching as if to grab onto something hovering between us. She drops her hands an instant later, as what I’m saying registers. Tobias shakes his head, but I continue.
“Keep them safe. Start a new life. Leave Granfield behind them. Help them forget it ever existed. Don’t leave this room until they’re gone and this is all over. Give the children a new life.” I take a quick step back, drink in the image of Daphne and Felix behind them, and then push as hard as I can against Tobias. He falls backwards, unsteady on his feet.
“Keep them safe!” is the last thing I say to them as I swing the door closed, wait the moment for the locks to engage, and then punch in the twenty-digit override code to fasten the doors for twenty-four hours. Brenna insisted on having that installed, so the panic room could act as a prison cell if they ever needed it. “Granfield is so far away from town,” she’d argued. “It’d take a long time for help to come.”
I checked the air supply yesterday, before my final call on the laptop. They’ll be safe until tomorrow, when everyone is gone. They’ll be able to open the door, and walk out onto the foundation of the house and into new lives. Tobias will know how to get fake IDs and papers. Prison teaches you a lot of things.
We weren’t cellmates, but we knew each other from the grounds outside when the guards gave us outdoor time. Same block. It’s probably why he never liked me, because I knew he was a criminal, same as me.
I turn and take the hallway back to the stairs, across the house, and over to the west wing where Brenna’s locked in with Mark’s body. She might have tried to get out the window already, but I would have heard gunshots when the men outside opened fire to shoot her down.
“No witnesses,” that steely voice kept saying through the screen, accented in strange places that sounded like my mother but were entirely different at the same time. His voice was all weight and metal compared to my mother’s lightness.
I can smell the smoke now, burning through the holes in the stone they’ve made. There’s a rumbling in the bottom of the house, as though a giant is waking.
It’s the flames, coming like a train down a track, eating everything they can touch.
I’m ready, I think as I reach the door and open it with my key card. The fire will melt down the system. The police won’t be able to tell that I was the last one in here, or who was coming and going these last days and weeks. They’ll just know that the fire was hungry and took everything, and everyone, with it.
59
Tobias
I pound on the door, press all the release buttons, but nothing will budge.
The room feels like it’s closing around me. I can’t breathe.
“Put your head between your legs,” Margot advises, her hand pressed flat against my back. She lays it gently, and I feel the pain from her broken ribs course through her to me as she tries to calm me down, even as she’s dealing with being locked away by someone we thought was dead too.
The first scents of smoke start to filter through the vents.
What’s Darren planning to do?
I take breaths as deeply as I can manage, shallow and raking at first and then deeper as the seconds pass.
What about the horses? I think. What will they do to my horses?
“Isn’t there a separate air supply in here?” Felix asks.
“I can’t get us out.” I fight the urge to slam my hands against the keyboard.
“Why can I smell smoke, if there are separate air supplies for this room?” Felix’s voice breaks through the tangle of my thoughts. He gets up from his seat and moves to the video monitor. He taps at some buttons, and the view of the empty space outside the panic room’s door appears. He taps some more, putting in different codes that seem longer than the ones Mark had me memorize, and different views appear, shifting from outside the door of the panic room to further inside the house, room to room. The rooms are empty, until Felix shifts to a camera outside the front door.
Black SUVs take up the screen, their bodies glinting like polished coffins in the sunlight. There are men with masks, running around with guns and gasoline tanks. The ones in the image we can see are loading back into the cars, but not driving away. Just waiting silently behind their tinted windows. A few stand outside, guns slung across their chests.
Smoke billows from the side of the screen.
They’re burning us down.
“They’re burning Granfield down,” Margot echoes my thoughts. She turns to look at Daphne. “But we’ll be safe here.”
“Why is there smoke? Something’s wrong!” Felix screams.
“I need to tell you something,” a voice booms from the speakers in the top corners of the panic room. “Children, I need you to know one more thing.”
“Mommy?” Daphne says.
They hear scraping across the speakers, and then Darren’s voice comes through, but he’s not speaking to them.
“It’s time, Brenna,” he says, quieter than Brenna’s voice was over the speaker.
The intercom. The intercom through the house is on.
Felix presses a button on the display. “Mom! Darren! You need to come help us! The air supply isn’t working. We’re going to suffocate. Please come and help us!”
“Stop it,” Daphne cries.
“But I checked,” Darren says, almost to himself it seems. His voice is weaker still than before.
“Help us!” Felix cries again.
There are more sounds in the intercom, something brushing up against the microphone, and then a loud crack, like a firework being let off against the speaker.
60
Brenna
It was almost too easy.
Distracting Darren as he arrived back in the room. I would have tried to sneak out the window, but I knew he was coming back and I couldn’t leave him as a loose end, any more than I could have Tobias, Margot, and the children.
My children.
Now he’s dead on the floor, shot through the back of his head when he turned round to go back and save everyone, like a hero. I tuck my gun into the waistband of my pants, but I leave the bulky shotgun on the ground near Darren’s body.
Now I need to escape.
The house is on fire. Darren’s guys, who were my guys, must have set it up.
The panic room’s air supply is turned off. I took care of that late last night. I had a sense that Darren was back—I thought I caught a glimpse of him, in the trees, when I set the greenhouse on fire and before I went back to the house to pretend like I didn’t know it was burning. And before that, Margot said she saw a man in the woods. If he was here, if Tobias hadn’t killed him and he hadn’t died from the virus, I wasn’t about to let him create a room that was perfectly safe from anything and anyone.
That wouldn’t work. Not at all.
I take one more look at Mark’s body, the smoke coming in like curtains from the floor and ceiling. Something jerks inside of me and I almost lean down to kiss his lips, one last time, but I don’t. They would be hard and cold set by now.
He’s not in there, anyway. It’s just a body.
I quickly unfurl the sheet from around his neck and fling it out the window. It’s held securely to the bedpost where I tied it earlier.
No one will survive this.
Except for me.
I have money—so much money. They won’t shoot me, because I can pay them more than they ever dreamed of.
Nothing is more important to a person than money.
I climb out the window, hoisting myself against the stone and propelling my body down. The flames haven’t burned through this portion of the house yet. When I reach the ground, I stand up straight, smooth my hair, and walk over to the man positioned at the lead car with the biggest gun.
“I’m Brenna Stone,” I tell him.
My name seems to register. Even though his mask obscures his face, something changes in the set of his shoulders.
“I’ll pay you double whatever Darren promised you if you let me walk away, right now. I can make you richer than your wildest dreams.”
There’s no time to run. No time to negotiate and talk my way out of this. No time to grab my gun and defend myself. The man, the leader, lifts his weapon and shoots me in the chest. I fall back, blood rising up my throat and leeching out of my body. All the power I’ve collected over my entire life, all the choices I’ve made to get me here and make me stronger, drip into the pristine white gravel below.
I want to hurl out a scream for the total waste of it, but blood catches in my throat.
The man who shot me takes off his mask. I don’t recognize him at first, although there’s something in the cut of his face that seems familiar, like an echo of a memory from long ago.
He leans down, and whispers into my ear.
“My brother died, trying to kidnap your husband,” he tells me. “Some things are worth more than being rich. And now, I’m going to watch you die, like you deserve.”
I have nothing to say. I couldn’t even if I wanted to persuade him otherwise. Blood fills my mouth.
One thought ricochets around my head: I don’t deserve this.
61
Felix
We’re going to die in this stupid claustrophobic room.
Smoke pours in and the metal joints at the top of the walls are getting hotter and turning from grey steel to a strange amber color from the heated air the fire is making. Even though the walls are fireproof, the ventilation needs to be switched over to the separate system in order to keep the smoke from getting in and igniting.
People don’t realize that there are particles in the smoke that catch fire.
I think Darren’s dead. Or maybe it’s Mom. I don’t know. Margot and Tobias keep jabbering away, offering suggestions of what to type into the keypad to get us out of here or to get the air working. I can’t listen to them though, and their words melt together like they’re being heated by the fire.
We’re all coughing, and Margot shouts out instructions that seem to be about covering up our faces with our shirts and crouching down lower in the room. The floor feels cool to the touch, and I press my head against it and wait for all of this to be over.
Daphne just stares into space. She hasn’t said a word since Mom called out from the speakers and we heard that crack of the bullet or whatever it was.
I can’t fool myself. I know it was a gunshot. I’m sure Daphne does too.
The metal grate presses its indents into my cheek and I push harder and harder until it scrapes the inside of my mouth against my teeth. Margot keeps saying things in her calm nurse voice and Tobias has wrapped a blanket around the four of us.
“It’s going to be okay,” Margot whispers. “We’re going to be okay.”
Tobias pulls Daphne and me under his chest, like somehow he’s going to shield us from the smoke and the heat that’s about to kill us.
I thought Darren was helping us, but I think he locked us in here to hurt us. Maybe he switched off the air? And then he locked us in.
Or maybe he thought we’d be the safest here, and there’s been an accident. The air just won’t work. Or somebody turned it off.
Mom’s face, back in Dad’s room with his body lying on the floor—I didn’t want to look, I wasn’t going to look, but then I did and I can’t picture Dad at all except for that bluish face and his twisted mouth staring back at me from the floor—telling us all how she was willing to sacrifice Daphne and me and everyone else at Granfield so her stupid company could survive.
Daphne reaches out and squeezes my hand. This time I squeeze back. Her words cut through the pounding drums inside my head.
“People don’t see me,” she whispers in my ear. “They don’t notice that I’m there.”
Before Tobias can stop her, Daphne squirms out from under his hold and from the blanket. I have a deep scream that rises inside my body and pours out as she disappears outside the blanket’s edges.
“No!” I cry out to her. I can’t lose her too.
But a second later, while I try to fight against Tobias to let me go, there’s a change in the room that shifts the entire smoking world around us.
High-pitched beeps and then a loud shudder, followed by whirring fans kicking on.
Daphne reappears under the blanket, her face flushed but shining. She’s actually smiling.
“I fixed it,” she tells us.
“Come here, let me look at you.” Margot reaches out to her.
“You don’t need to be under there anymore. We’re going to be okay,” Daphne explains.
A deep stab of something worse than dying forms in the pit of my stomach.
I pull myself out from under the blanket, and sure enough the air is clear and the walls are turning back to their cool steel selves.
“I remembered the override code to switch the air on. I saw Mom do it.” Daphne shrugs, like us almost burning alive and everything else that’s happened to us these last two days have been no big deal, now that she’s fixed everything.
“She didn’t think I’d remember.” Daphne sits down in the same place where she sat the night our mother had us stay in here when Darren was sick.
She turns her face to me, where I’m still crouched on the floor of the room, and pats the seat next to her.
Margot and Tobias do a quick assessment of the room and the controls, careful not to really touch anything, and then they sit down across from Daphne.
I stay on the floor, waiting. I’m certain—more certain than I’ve ever been of anything—of what’s coming next.
“You saved us, Daphne.” Margot looks around at all of us, crowded together and s
urviving. “You did it.”
I climb up, but I don’t sit next to my sister.
I saved her—I saved Margot first, from the terrible thing Daphne did to her. But no one will remember that now.
All they’ll remember is Daphne, rescuing us.
So I just stare out through the video monitor, waiting for it to be over.
62
Margot
The next several hours pass by in a blur. We wait and we talk sometimes, at least Tobias and Daphne and I do—Felix stands in a corner, staring at the screens—and then sometimes we sit quietly.
There are sounds that make it into the room. Crashes and rumbles as Granfield Manor burns around us, but we are secure and safe.
The hours tick by and I sense a shift in Tobias. He’s getting ready for the next part.
We don’t talk about it, but I know we’re in agreement with what will happen after we leave this place. Daphne and Felix are our responsibilities now. So we need to do what’s right, and what’s right is to not leave the children to fend for themselves.
What’s right is to not let Darren risk everything for us, after we risked nothing for him.
I don’t know what part Brenna played in Teresa’s death, but I’m certain she was part of it in some way, and that Mark isn’t to blame.
My body aches and my throat burns, from everything that’s happened to me here at Granfield Manor and from everything that brought me here in the first place. The guilt for coming to Granfield to hurt Mark is a heavy chain around my neck. Maybe I’ll grow stronger as I get used to it, and it’ll become like another part of my body. But I already know it won’t ever go away.
Like the shame I have for sleeping with Brenna, for not protecting Darren when he was ill, for not recognizing the signs that Brenna was poisoning Mark’s body like she was poisoning her children’s minds. Life can’t just be a sum of a person’s mistakes, can it? Of the harms we’ve caused others?
Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists Page 21