Chapter 10: When The Mansion Went Completely Dark
The secure laptop sat open on the office desk, its screen divided between the Transition folder and a row of enlarged photographs. Passport copies filled one pane. Bank transfers occupied another. The photographs showed people, rooms, and moments I could not yet place with certainty, but together they had stopped looking accidental. The silver flash drive remained in the laptop port, its handwritten 11:47 label catching the chandelier light whenever I moved.
Maria stood near the office door, one hand pressed against the torn pocket of her apron. Vanessa remained across from her in the ivory rehearsal gown, composed except for the tension held around her mouth. The two security men had taken positions near the hall. Neither spoke. Their silence had become another object in the room, as present as Maria’s confiscated phone and the phone in my own pocket.
I leaned closer to the screen. A transfer record opened beneath a passport copy. The names did not yet give me the context I needed, but the repetition did. Identity records. Money. Images. The sequence was deliberate.
Then the chandelier flickered.
The laptop brightness dipped, recovered, and dipped again. The photographs stuttered across the screen. I reached for the drive, but before my fingers touched its metal casing, every light in the office went out.
The mansion disappeared.
There was no emergency glow from the hallway, no small lamp left burning near the desk, no pale spill from the courtyard. The laptop screen vanished too, taking the only visible copy of the Transition folder with it. Total darkness filled the office so completely that for a moment I could not tell whether my eyes were open.
The absence of sound came next. The laptop fan stopped. The air system went quiet. Somewhere beyond the walls, the wedding decorations and the black SUV remained, but I could no longer see any of them. The power failure had erased the room’s boundaries.
I kept my hand on the desk until I found the drive. Its metal shell was warm from the laptop. I pulled it free and closed my fingers around it.
Maria was the first person I needed to locate. The last clear image I had of her was near the door, close enough to the hall that the darkness could separate her from me in a single step. I moved away from the desk slowly, keeping one hand extended. My knee struck a chair. It scraped across the floor with a sharp noise that seemed too loud for the sealed office.
No one answered.
I stopped. Vanessa, the security men, Maria, and both phones had become uncertain at once. The office had held all of them in a visible arrangement. Now I had only the memory of where they had stood, and memory was not custody.
I pressed the flash drive into the inside pocket of my jacket and held it there. The laptop could not be trusted to remain powered, and the evidence could not remain exposed on a desk. I kept my other hand against the wall and followed it toward the doorway.
A shape shifted somewhere ahead.
I did not know whether it was Maria, Vanessa, or one of the men. I took one step forward, then another. The darkness gave me no face, no hands, no phone screen—nothing that could identify the person waiting in the hall.
May you like
Behind me, the secure laptop held the last open view of Transition, its contents hidden now but not gone. Ahead, someone moved again.
I reached the office threshold and continued into the dark mansion.
