Live From Blackglass (Chapter 2)

Written by Taylor Lee

Genre: Mystery, Murder, and Suspense

Audience: Young Adult to Adult (12+)

Chapter 2: Murder at Midnight

The drawing room was walled in dark walnut paneling and lit by bright white light shining around the room. The resort was fancy, but there were traces of older times in different rooms.

The clock on the mantelpiece read eleven forty-two.

Bram Calder sat in a wingback chair near the bay window, his weathered hands resting flat on his knees. Twenty-six years in the Philadelphia homicide division had given him an instinct for tension; he could smell the sweat turning sour under expensive cologne. He knew that he wasn’t on the job, but it was instinct, and he couldn’t help but notice something off.

"Nobody moves," Bram Calder said. His voice was a rasp, low and gravelly. "If we stay together in this room, all ten of us, until sunrise, no one dies. Rake can sit up there in his velvet coat until he rots. If nobody pulls the trigger, there is no game."

"Naive," Oren Vask muttered. “This is a game, come on, he is going to die anyway, and there is no punishment. I say we all ten go up there and kill him and all keep the resort.”

The Russian chess prodigy was twenty-six, gaunt, with dark circles under his pale blue eyes. He was sitting at a mahogany card table, spinning an ivory pawn between his long fingers.

"You assume the killer wants to prevent the game," Oren Vask said without looking up. "The killer was promised the resort. If they don't kill Rake, they get nothing. If they kill him and fool us, they win millions of dollars. The game is already in motion. We are merely the pieces."

"I'm leaving," Mira Fenn said.

She stood near the double doors, clutching her smartphone. She was twenty-three, a lifestyle streamer with two million followers, but her screen showed zero bars, no satellite sync, and a looping error icon: NETWORK CONTROLLED BY BROADCAST MASTER.

"I didn't sign up for a snuff film," Mira Fenn said, her voice rising toward hysteria. "I signed up for an influencer survival challenge! Dorian Kells’s producer told me it was a scripted escape room!"

"Then walk to the gate," Arden said coldly from the sofa. She had her legal tablet open, cross-referencing downloaded PDFs of their contracts. "Walk down that cliff road in the dark. It’s two miles. If the gate is locked, you freeze. If it’s open, you forfeit twelve million dollars."

"Money doesn't matter if we're dead!" Micah snapped. He was pacing between the hearth and the drinks cabinet. "Did you see the butler’s eyes? He wasn’t joking about the poison. I’ve seen aconite poisoning in the ER. It paralyzes the diaphragm while you’re fully conscious. You suffocate in your own skin."

Elara Voss looked up from her notebook. She had been studying Julian Kest, who was leaning against the mantle, examining a silver cigar cutter with detached interest.

"You're very quiet, Reed," Elara said.

Julian smiled thinly. "I've spent my life in rooms with people who want to rob me, Ms. Vesey. The loud ones are never the threat. It’s the quiet ones who brought the knife."

"Or the undertaker," Nessa Osei said, pointing her chin toward the corner.

Calder Moss sat on an ottoman near the grandfather clock. He was fifty-one, a small-town funeral director from Vermont with round wire-rimmed glasses and soft, doughy hands. He had not spoken since they entered the room; he had merely been folding a paper napkin into intricate, sharp-edged triangles.

"Death is very quiet," Calder Moss said mildly. "People think it makes a great noise. It doesn't. It sounds like a shoe slipping on wet tile. A sigh. Then the heat leaves."

The grandfather clock struck midnight.

One.

Two.

Three.

On the fourth chime, every light in Blackglass Resort went out.

The hum of the central heating died. The hearth fire flared green for a second, then hissed into black embers under a sudden downdraft.

In the pitch black, someone inhaled sharply.

"Nobody move!" Bram Calder shouted, his chair scraping violently against the hardwood. "Stay where you are!"

A thud. The sound of movement from all directions.

A latch clicked in the hallway.

Devra Lin, the cybersecurity engineer, dropped to her knees and pulled a handheld network analyzer from her pocket. The blue LCD screen illuminated her sharp features. "The power didn't blow," she whispered, her fingers flying over the keypad. "The breaker was triggered by an automated logic switch. From inside the building."

"Where's Julian?" Elara yelled.

"Right here, darling," Julian’s voice came from the opposite side of the room, ten feet away from where he had been standing.

From somewhere deep within the north wing, high up, where the conservatory jutted out over the cliff face, came a sharp, wet crack. Like dry wood snapping under a boot.

Then, silence.

The emergency lights flickered on three minutes later.

The room smelled of burned sugar and sea mist.

Bram Calder was already at the door, his hand on the brass knob. "Upstairs. Now."

They moved as a pack, climbing the grand spiral staircase. Shadows stretched across the portraits of Rake’s ancestors, men with severe jaws and women with dead eyes.

The door to the conservatory stood ajar.

Bram Calder pushed it open with the flat of his palm.

The room was vast, glass-domed, filled with overgrown ferns and black orchids that swayed in the draft of a broken pane. In the center of the flagstone floor sat a high-backed iron wheelchair.

Orson Rake was sitting in it.

His head was tilted back at an unnatural angle. Protruding from his throat, directly beneath the left carotid artery, was a slender, five-inch silver needle, an antique bone-marrow extraction needle from a Victorian medical kit.

His blood had pooled into the emerald velvet of his lapels, black as oil in the amber light.

Standing beside the body, holding a folded white linen towel in his left hand, was Eamon Vey.

The butler did not look startled. He looked down at the dead man, then looked up at the ten contestants gathered in the doorway.

"Mr. Rake has concluded his tenure," Eamon said evenly. "The time of death is twelve seventeen. One of you will walk away with this resort and 12 million dollars. Remember, if you are wrong about who did this, one person must drink from a cup and will either die or live and go home with 1 million dollars. If you choose to not take a drink, you forfeit the money. The competition has officially begun. Goodnight."

End of Chapter 2

Chapter 3 will be published soon

©2026 TaylorLeeMedia LLC and its affiliates. All rights reserved.

This short story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real events is purely coincidental.