The knife was mesmerizing.
Dude smiled at her. “Pretty, isn’t it?” He feinted a lunge forward.
Plum jerked away so hard she stumbled and fell back on her butt.
Dude just laughed.
“How . . .” Plum panted, climbing quickly to her feet. She had to keep him talking—she had to find out what had happened. “You went in the cottage . . .”
Dude tapped the tip of the knife against his chin, as if he was amused. “This old house has a secret passageway. A tunnel that leads from the butler’s pantry to the cottage.”
Plum remembered Marlowe knocking on the panels in their bedroom last night. Right instinct, wrong place.
Plum didn’t have to ask for more details, she could already picture it. An underground passage that opened inside the cottage. Maybe Warix had already been dead when Dude had come outside, warning them of the explosives.
Dude was nodding, as if he could see the trail of her thoughts. “I heard you talking,” he said. “I had just knocked out that idiot Warix, and I was coming for that other idiot, Jude. You told him it was me.” He pointed the knife tip at Plum. “Well done, by the way. Really A-plus thinking. I had to move fast, so I ran out, said I’d found explosives, and ran back inside to ‘save’ Warix.”
Goose bumps rose on Plum’s skin at the calmness with which he said it.
“I went into the secret passage and blew the place up.”
As if summoned by his words, Plum could almost feel a hot rush of air, the glare of the explosion. The remains of the cottage and the remains of the two people who had been inside.
“Brittlyn was the other body in the cottage,” Plum said. “The blood . . . the . . . pieces . . .” She gulped back a knot of nausea. “No wonder we couldn’t find her in the villa. You moved her body to the passageway, then to the cottage.”
It would have been easy: Dude waiting for the right moment of confusion, perhaps even while the rest of them discovered Sean was impaled. It would have been the work of a moment for Dude to drag Brittlyn the short distance from the dining room to the butler’s pantry and the secret passageway inside.
Dude nodded excitedly, as if glad to have someone to share his homicidal brilliance with. “Then later, I moved her down to the cottage for the fireworks, so to speak. I was the one Jude bumped into in the kitchen. I stabbed Jalen in the fridge. Wrong knife, but ah, well. I don’t need to paint you a picture.”
He swirled the knife in the air as if it were a paintbrush.
Plum had only one question left. If she was going to die, she wanted to know.