I cautiously walked inside the dining room. Leon, Alex and Blake made it before me. After less than a minute, Naomi came inside with Lucia right behind her.

“Alright, that is everyone it seems, therefore you may begin.” Lucia started talking. “I will stand here and merely listen to the conversation, exactly like last time. You will only be interrupted if you interrupt others, which is fair if you ask me.”

I looked around the room and noticed how many of us were absent.

“I informed Evelyn and Dante not to come. It would be a risk, Lucia has mentioned a punishment for assuming the wrong person as the killer.” Naomi noticed my confusion.

“Then why the hell did I come?” Leon asked in a pissed off tone. “I didn’t do any investigating, I just stared at Petra’s ass!”

“Leave.”

“Fucking finally!” He stood up, but in the same moment, Lucia appeared behind him, practically teleporting across the room.

“Where do you think you’re going?” She put her hand on his arm. “I greatly apologize if I forgot to bring this rule up last time, but if you enter the discussion, you may not leave. Also, if everyone agrees on the wrong answer, you will have to take the punishment too, so sit down boy.”

It looked like a switch was flipped in Leon’s brain, because his expression and body language quickly became more serious and he sat back down without making a rude comment.

“Alright, let’s begin.” Alex seemed prepared.

“No need for that.” Leon looked at him with malice in his eyes. “Maya killed herself and Alex is the traitor.”

Making such a statement this early… He’s not suddenly being serious, is he?.

“What the hell are you on about?” Alex was angry. “There literally isn’t anything pointing towards me being the traitor! Saying that Maya killed herself too? Are you insane? Her body was heavily wounded, it was obvious that the killer tortured her to death.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Yes, why else would she be wounded?”

“The traitor could’ve done that after finding her body, most likely with the intention of making us guess incorrectly here. That’s where you come in, my dumbass friend!”

“You literally have nothing to back up the bullshit that you just made up. Where did she kill herself? When, why? How would you manage to figure all that out?”

“I’m a snoopy little fucker, that’s how! Now, you can either confess already and cut this shit out so that we can leave, or you can let me do it. Understood?”

“I’m innocent, I don’t have to accept either of those two options because there’s no evidence pointing to me.”

“Then I’ll explain this shit to everyone, pissface. It started when he and-”

“Stop! We’ve all gotten tired of your lies long ago, Leon! Go back to your dumb games once this is over, but right now we’re in a situation too serious for your bullshit. Lives are on the line, how do you not get that?”

“Do not interrupt others, first warning.” Lucia said from the corner of the room.

“No no, I’m glad that he interrupted me. Just don’t let yourself slip up again on that rule, I need to have my super serious over dramatic monologue sometime soon and by soon, I mean now, so hear me out for once in your worthless lives.” Leon coughed and stretched for a bit. Is he actually planning to say something helpful? I have my doubts, but I won’t say anything. “The reason I’m glad he interrupted me is because it will now allow me to change the topic more smoothly. I already gave my completely serious claim on who the traitor and the killer here are. I stopped joking around the second Lucia said that I cannot avoid punishment nor leave the room, because that’s stripping me of a thing that I must have. Freedom. The complete control over every move that I make and something that I will without a doubt lose if I let you idiots keep playing around. I might look like a failed abortion to most of you, but y’know, crazy genius stereotypes and all that are somewhat rooted in reality.”

“Cut to the chase,” Naomi was already tired of his speech.

“Wait for one second, are you blind to the fact that I am trying to regain my freedom here? That means that I am taking this very seriously, so listen to my words and think about every single one of them. Anyway, back to the topic. Think about life for a second, disconnected from this poorly built mansion. What is the meaning of life, what could possibly be worth all this suffering? Personally, the only feeling I consider worth living for is happiness, feeling satisfied with how things are, something some will feel without being free, but only in limited amounts, which is never enough, because that just allows negative emotions to cancel the happiness out. Every lie I told and every joke I made, they were all said because I felt happy messing around with you guys. Now though, my freedom is directly threatened, which it wouldn’t be if the traitor wasn’t here, so I am stepping down from merely following my desires just to get rid of this pest. So I will ask you again Alex, do you want to confess or should I take things into my own hands and end this myself?”

“You’re fucking insane!” Alex bared his teeth. “You aren’t and you never were more free than any of us and neither are you now some good guy. You know that I’m not the traitor, because you’re most likely the traitor putting on some complicated act to throw us off!”

“I wish to hear why Leon thinks Alex is the traitor.” Naomi seemed intrigued.

“Let us go back in time to around two or three days after we changed rooms.” Leon continued talking, constantly changing the way he spoke. “That’s when I started paying more attention to Maya and Alex. For some weird reason, she really seemed to like him, bad taste if you ask me.”

“Hey!”

“Shut up, Alex. Lucia doesn’t seem like she’ll like it if you continue interrupting me, plus I need to finish this as soon as I can because it’s honestly tiring. Now, back to what I was talking about. Alex and Maya started getting closer and closer to each other. When I noticed that Alex actually liked spending time with her and gave her affection, I knew that there were only two possibilities. Either Alex is really touch starved or he’s the traitor, planning to take advantage of our dear deceased druggie. Through observation, I realized that he planned to convince her to commit suicide. I didn’t care then, but now since my freedom is endangered, I have to reveal everything.”

“I think Leon is telling the truth, at least somewhat.” I said after connecting things in my head. Maya mumbling weird things to herself, her relationship with Alex, the rope under the closet, I guess Leon noticed those things too. “I just have to know one thing, Leon. When did you find out that there was a hidden room on the third floor?”

“Finally putting two and two together?” He chuckled. “Of course, both him and I found out about the room early. Haha, for a bit he thought that only Maya was near, it was hilarious!”

“Elaborate.” Naomi urged Leon to continue for the first, and probably last time ever.

“God, I overestimated what your tiny brain can do. Maya and Alex found the room before you guys and Alex took advantage of that by making Maya keep it a secret, but both of them are blind as fuck, so they didn’t notice that I was spying on them from one of the rooms! Easy to comprehend, right?”

“And what occurred afterwards?” Naomi asked.

“I guess I really have to spell it out. Fine, but I’m never putting this much effort into something again! After they found the room, Alex thought that it would make an amazing hiding spot, so he began working on his murder plan.”

“I didn’t do anything of the sort, stop lying!” Alex interrupted him again.

Lucia came behind Alex without her footsteps making any sound and started slowly and gently scratching his head.

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“What did I say?” She whispered, but was still loud enough for me to hear her. “Do not interrupt others while they speak, wait for your turn. I will not warn you anymore.” She moved her hand away from Alex’s head and grabbed the chair he was sitting on. She pulled it fast enough to make Alex fall off, which made her chuckle.

“What was I talking about?” Leon yawned. “Oh yeah, Alex’s dogshit plan. Basically, he realized that since there are only four suspects for the traitor, Maya getting killed by him would out him as the traitor almost immediately, so he got the idea to make her commit suicide. Maya was a drug addict, that’s obvious, she was more insane than me, meaning he could convince her pretty easily and it would also make sense to someone if they were to see her hanging from the ceiling.”

“But we found her inside a closet! You’re trying to screw us over again, aren’t you?” I was still suspicious of Leon.

“I’ll screw you once this is over. At this moment in time though, I’m solving this by myself because none of you are competent enough to do it. The reason we didn’t find the body hanging from the ceiling, the library ceiling more specifically is because I had my part of the fun.”

“And what exactly was your part of the fun?” Blake asked, who up until now just spent time listening in.

“Well, when she killed herself, around like two or three in the morning, I thought that it would be funny to burst into Alex’s room and essentially let him know that I saw everything. You should’ve seen the look on his face, it was hilarious! At the time I thought that I wouldn’t be involved in this shitty discussion, so I offered him a deal.”

“Don’t tell me,” Blake came to a sudden realization, “you did all that to Maya’s lifeless body just for shits and giggles?”

“Bingo!”

“You sick bastard!”

“Didn’t you hear my super cool as shit speech earlier? Why are you surprised that I did it? I don’t trap myself with some stupid morals, I let myself do what I want and that’s how it should be done! End of that.”

“I think I know what happened.” Alex spoke up.

“Duh, you were literally involved in all of it. I told everyone the whole story!”

“No, I think I know what happened if we exclude all your lies!”

“Oh, that bullshit again… Well, I guess I’ll hear you out.”

“You did find Maya first and she did hang herself, though she either did it on her own accord, or you made her do it. I trust your speech about freedom or whatever, but other than that, everything you said is a lie. I didn’t do anything suspicious, you never came into my room and you did all those things to Maya’s corpse without telling anyone.”

“Just excluding yourself from everything? You really never liked her, that’s for sure.”

“Why are you trying to convince everyone that I’m the traitor? Is it just one of your sick jokes or do you genuinely have something against me?”

“If you mean all those things you gave me permission to do to Maya, I don’t hate you for that. I only wanted to see how desperate you would get and boy, you sure were desperate!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Still playing dumb? Then I’ll tell everyone. “Attention!” Leon loudly clapped. “When I came into Alex’s room last night I made a promise. I told Alex that if he let me do the things I requested to Maya’s body, that I would keep my mouth shut, though he didn’t realize that I did that to mess with him and that I didn’t need his permission for anything. Sadly for him, promises mean nothing to me, so I’ll also say what I was allowed to do. Of course, I moved the body into the closet, that’s how it ended up there. Then, I took a couple of tools from the storage room that I used to do my work, you know, create art out of that worthless bitch’s body. He also gave me permission to fuck her, but she was too ugly for me to finish.”

“What the fuck?” I yelled out.

There’s no way he just said that. No, he has to be lying, there’s no way he did it. Even a maniac like him, he has to be lying!

“First warning for you, Petra. No interrupting.” Lucia calmly warned me.

“She’s right!” Blake said, also in disbelief. “What the hell did you just say?”

“I have to admit, she wasn’t that ugly, I can’t even complain much about that! Truth be told, I couldn’t ejaculate because it was a feeling too novel for me, close to nothing I’ve experienced before. The beauty of that experience surpassed anything sexual or even romantic! Can you even imagine sex with no romance or sexual attraction, just the sweet chill of death, and yet more intimate than any feeling a human can have? It felt like fucking a human-sized doll that was so realistic you could feel it tickling your soul.”

Blake stood up and grabbed Leon, who was still sitting, by the wrist.

“Sit back down,” Lucia warned Blake in a terrifyingly serious voice and without any resistance, he let go of Leon and sat back down.

Leon, who is he? There are so many sides to him and I cannot figure out one of them. He’s a threat to everyone here, that’s for sure. A fucking necrophile, possibly a murderer, manipulator, spy, I could attach so many adjectives to him. I think he knows who the killer and the traitor are, I’m just not sure if he’s telling the truth, I can never be sure of that with him. I just know that I should keep my guard up at all times. Traitor or not, I genuinely don’t know what to do about him.

“Anyway,” Leon began speaking again, “is everyone convinced?”

“I’ll say it again,” Alex replied, “there’s a possibility that it was suicide because you openly admitted to causing every injury that was on her body, although I’m not the traitor, nor have I done anything to make her commit suicide.”

“I do have something that could indicate it being suicide!” I remembered an important detail. “When I was investigating, I found a rope hidden under the closet.”

“Bullseye! Finally, I was waiting for you to bring that up, for a second I thought you were just stupid! I purposely watched you investigate to see if you would find it, although I still spent most of my time just staring at your enormous ass.”

“That’s enough information.” I sighed.

“Ok, ok, no need to attack me, that was a compliment. Either way, she used that rope and I hid it there after taking druggie’s body to that room.”

“Then I say that it was suicide.” I’m not sure if I’m right, but I don’t have a better answer myself, so I’m completely cornered.

“Boss bitch, sick dude? What do you say?”

“Yeah, suicide.” Blake made his choice. “I’m not sure, I don’t know many details, but it just seems most likely.”

“Boss bitch?”

Naomi was lost in thought. She probably thinks it was suicide too, but the other probable answer was that Leon killed her and made up this act. I doubt that Alex could've done it.

“Whatever I say other than suicide will not be able to win as the majority vote, thus it is suicide.”

“So, everyone is saying suicide.” Lucia came closer to the table.

We all looked at each other and nodded. It’s settled, now we just have to see if we were right. Come on, please be true! I don’t want it to end here!

“Correct.” Lucia slowly clapped. “Now I just have to punish the killer and you’ll be free to leave.” Punish the killer? How, it was a suicide? Did she not hear us correctly?

Lucia swiftly disappeared, leaving us alone and confused. Cautiously, we stood up and walked towards the door leading to the main hall, only to be stopped by the sound of Lucia opening the other door, now dragging Maya’s corpse, which somehow did not have a single injury, across the room.

“Where are you going? You do not wish to skip the main show, trust me.” Lucia laughed menacingly.

She pulled Maya’s body up and grabbed her head with one hand. Out of nowhere, Maya sprung back to life in mere moments, making most of us scream. She didn’t just do that, there’s no way!

“W-What’s going on? D-Did it not work? N-No! Why always me?” Maya was just as upset and confused as the rest of us.

“Oh, it worked, it worked a bit too well my dear Maya.”

“L-Lucia! Wait, m-most of you are here, what’s going on?”

Naomi took a step closer to Maya, but Lucia quickly stopped her.

“Ah, w-why are the lights out? Someone please help me!”

The lights aren’t out, what is she talking about? Wait, the same thing happened when she killed Adam. He thought that the lights were out. Everything is just happening all over again!

Lucia pulled out a paintbrush out of the pocket of her suit, which managed to confuse me even further. Then, without a warning, she stabbed her own hand with one of her nails. Blood poured out, way more than what would be expected from a normal human being.

Consequently, she dipped the brush in her blood and then used that to draw a stick figure on the wall.

“Let us begin,” Lucia said with a hint of excitement in her voice.

She drew a line across the stick figure’s right arm. Immediately afterwards, Maya’s right arm was cut in half, making her scream in agony.

“Too loud,” Lucia touched the stick figure’s mouth with her brush, cutting off the tip of Maya’s tongue. Maya tried to cover her mouth with both of her hands, but due to the amount of blood and her missing half an arm, she looked like a panicked dying animal.

I can’t look at this! No, there’s no way that this is happening right in front of me!

Lucia drew yet another line, this time around the ankle of the stick figure. Maya fell as she struggled to breathe between her screams.

“You are honestly tiring, I almost pity you.” Lucia looked at Maya who was rolling across the dining room floor. “I cannot make this anymore spectacular.”

Lucia turned back toward the stick figure and drew a line across its neck, in turn swiftly decapitating Maya.

Blood splattered across the room, but it was finally over.

Is she done? She brought Maya back to life just to kill her again. Such cruelty, I can’t even begin to imagine her thoughts! I need to go, I need to calm down, I need to do whatever must be done to get this out of my head. I can’t go on for much longer! She’s going to kill us all!

I rushed back towards my room, only hoping to relax a bit even though I knew that I couldn’t. I wanted to continue the discussion on who the traitor is, to see if Leon’s accusations had any concrete evidence to back them, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t even stand without shaking. I fell multiple times on the way to my room, but in the end I made it, trying to stop my thoughts from killing me.