Everly had originally thought that subduing a vicious killer like Hilda would be extrely difficult.
Unexpectedly, after Everly and Old John approached, Hilda actually dropped the knife on her own, stood up from Fatima, raised her hands, and turned to face them in a posture of surrender and confession.
“No need to check the surveillance footage. I confess—Samuel was killed by ,” she said, her face spattered with blood, yet her tone as gentle as ever.
“…”
Everly ignored her. Remaining extrely cautious, she and Old John moved in from either side, twisting the woman’s arms tightly to fully restrain her. Then they pulled the drawstring from a down jacket hood and bound her hands securely before taking her aside for strict supervision.
At this mont, under Lucas’s direction, the others had split into two groups and were attempting to rescue the two students lying on the ground. But Hilda’s attacks had been ruthless—she had severed their throats and tracheas. With no proper dical supplies, there was no way to save them.
Before long, news of Daniel and Fatima’s deaths ca one after the other.
“What do we do next?”
Everyone looked at the two newly added corpses on the ground, then at the killer who had already confessed and been subdued, and finally at Everly, who stood beside the culprit without a trace of emotion. For a mont, they were all at a loss.
“Why are you all looking at ? First, find a place to put the bodies. Leaving them in the hallway is terrifying.”
She sounded quite exasperated. Perhaps because Everly had decisively produced the surveillance footage, the group’s leader had shifted from Lucas to her.
“W-where should we put them?”
“Just put them in the professor’s room. There’s already one body there anyway—two more won’t make a difference.”
After thinking it over briefly, everyone felt that Everly’s suggestion made sense.
They got the professor’s room keycard from Ella, opened the tightly locked door, and—suppressing their fear—each took hold of an arm or a leg, carrying the two new bodies inside. They laid them down side by side on the floor of the professor’s room.
To prevent the bodies from decomposing too quickly, the room’s windows had been kept open the entire ti. The mont they stepped inside, a biting chill hit them—like walking into an ice cellar.
After arranging the three bodies, everyone hurriedly shut the door and returned to Everly’s side, looking at her with dazed, confused expressions.
“Let’s go downstairs. It’s freezing here.”
“Oh, right.”
“Yeah, it’s really cold.”
So the group timidly followed behind Everly again, heading back to the ground-floor hall.
The fireplace in the hall was still burning, its warmth slowly spreading over them. Their frozen thoughts gradually began to function again, and one by one, they turned shocked and accusatory gazes toward the bound Hilda.
“Why…”
Among them, the one most devastated was Hilda’s boyfriend, Jones. His expression was blank, his hands clutching his head—he still hadn’t recovered from the blow that “his girlfriend was a murderer who had killed three people.”
“Why… hehe, because they deserved to die.”
At this mont, the calst person was actually Hilda, the one who had been captured.
As if her long-cherished wish had finally been fulfilled, leaving her without a trace of regret, she lifted her chin and leaned back against the sofa. In a voice both gentle and cold, she began to tell a sorrowful story.
“My full na is Hilda Flast, but very few people know that this surna ca after my mother remarried and I took my stepfather’s na. Before that, I had another surna—Brupes.”
“Brupes? Could it be that you and Hannah…” Ella gasped from the side.
“Yes, that’s right. Hannah and I are sisters.”
At the ntion of her younger sister, a tender yet sorrowful smile appeared on Hilda’s face. The smile contrasted sharply with the dried blood spattered across her face, creating a strange duality—an almost sacred gentleness intertwined with sothing deeply sinister.
Before their parents divorced, Hilda and her younger sister Hannah had been very close. Even after both parents remarried, the two remained in contact for a long ti. However, due to the great distance between them, they rarely had the chance to et in person.
It was precisely because of the deep, unbreakable bond between sisters that, after Hilda received the tragic news of her younger sister Hannah’s s**cide, she beca determined to uncover the truth and avenge her.
There were three people responsible for Hannah’s death: Professor Samuel, her boyfriend Daniel, and her best friend Fatima.
The whole story was painfully cliché.
Hannah was an exceptionally gifted student in botany.
From a young age, she had been fascinated by Ariocarpus fissuratus (commonly known as the living rock cactus), a beautiful cushion-shaped plant. Due to its low natural reproduction rate and the lack of effective artificial propagation thods, it has long been considered endangered.
Hannah hoped to build on existing techniques and develop a more efficient thod of propagation that would cause less harm to the plant. For that reason, she chose Professor Samuel—an expert in cushion plants—as her graduate advisor.
What she didn’t know was that this well-known and highly respected academic was, in reality, a morally corrupt predator.
Hannah, who had no powerful family background, was assaulted by the professor. He threatened her with explicit videos to force her into submission, but she refused and insisted on reporting him to the police.
At that mont, her boyfriend Daniel stopped her.
Holding her by the waist and gently kissing her cheek, he told her that everything was already over, urging her to endure it for the sake of their future.
At the ti, Daniel was working under Samuel on an important research project. If Hannah’s case caused the project to be suspended, Daniel’s career would also be affected.
Hannah loved Daniel deeply. For his sake, she endured it. But from that point on, her ntal state began to deteriorate, and she showed signs of depression. Only her beloved work on cultivating Ariocarpus fissuratus could bring her a small asure of comfort.
After countless attempts, Hannah finally succeeded in improving the existing grafting thod, potentially raising the quality of artificial propagation for the plant to a new level. She shared this breakthrough with her boyfriend Daniel—only for him to turn around and reveal it to Samuel.
That man of vile character blatantly stole his student’s research results. And in order to completely eliminate Hannah—this “ticking ti bomb” who refused to obey him—he ford a deal with Daniel and Fatima, using co-authorship on a paper as leverage.
Through continuous belittling and emotional cold violence, Daniel drove Hannah into severe depression, leaving her ntal state on the verge of collapse. Fatima, her best friend and roommate, at a crucial mont placed a bottle of sleeping pills on her desk.
Just like that, a life quietly disappeared…
“Since then, I’ve been investigating this matter. I finally identified the three culprits not long ago, and found out they had booked rooms at this hotel, planning to co here during the Christmas holiday for field research.”
Hilda decided to take this opportunity, while they were out, to kill all three of them.
But the hotel was small, with very few rooms. By the ti Hilda called to make a reservation, all the available rooms had already been booked.
“So that’s why you suddenly agreed to date …” The red-haired man, Jones, said after hearing this. He froze for a mont, then a faint, defeated smile appeared on his face.
Yes. In the past, no matter how much he pursued Hilda, she always remained distant and indifferent toward him. Until one day, he happened to share his ski trip plan in the mountains with a colleague at the next table. Hilda overheard it, beca interested, joined their conversation, and not long after that, beca his girlfriend.
“I’m sorry, Jones. I used you for revenge… In this matter, you were the most innocent one.”
Jones gave a bitter smile. “Then… did you ever love ?”
His question was t with silence.
……
After that, Hilda gave a detailed account of how she carried out the murders.
This included how she deliberately locked the keycard inside the room, figured out the front desk’s universal card storage location, dr*gged Jones—who was sharing her room—stole the universal card and a boning knife from the kitchen, snuck into Samuel’s bedroom late at night, and used ether and a muscle relaxant bought on the black market to immobilize Samuel before dismbering him alive. Afterwards, she returned to the kitchen, set fire to her bloodstained clothes to destroy evidence…
“No wonder there were no signs of struggle on Samuel’s body. So you used a muscle relaxant on him… And opening the windows was to disperse the sll of ether?” Lucas pressed.
“Not only that. I also wanted to confuse the estimated ti of death. Removing the internal organs was part of that too—because books say that removing organs can affect the body’s temperature readings after death,” Hilda answered honestly.
It seed that ever since she had successfully avenged her sister, she no longer cared about anything. Nothing seed to matter to her anymore.
Afterwards, Everly brought over a computer and played footage from the second-floor corridor surveillance cara, confirming that everything Hilda had said was true—the entire case had indeed been committed solely by her.
At this point, the serial murder case at the snow mountain hotel was finally solved.
Although everyone sympathized with Hilda and felt that the people she killed had it coming, they also did not want to beco her next victims. After so discussion, they decided to confine her in a storage room without windows that could be locked from the outside. She would still be provided with three als a day, but would not be allowed to leave.
Hilda accepted this without objection and cooperatively walked into the storage room on her own.
As everything ca to a close, Lucas walked up to Everly with a complicated expression and asked aningfully, “You anticipated this would happen, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about? I’m not a prophet,” Everly replied without looking up, her fingers tapping away as she focused on playing Temple Run, casually brushing him off.
“…”
Not getting the answer he wanted, Lucas clearly wasn’t satisfied.
He opened his mouth, about to continue arguing with Everly, when suddenly a “knock, knock” sound ca from outside.
Everyone in the hall instinctively turned toward the tightly shut entrance of the lodge.
“Was that just the wind?”
“Probably… the rescue team said they wouldn’t arrive for a week…”
Before he could finish speaking, another “knock, knock” echoed again—clear and crisp, reverberating through the suddenly silent room.
“Soone’s really knocking… maybe the rescue team ca early!” Minnie, the receptionist girl, jumped up from the sofa and hurried toward the door.
“Wait.”
Everly reacted quickly and grabbed her arm.
“What is it?”
“There’s sothing wrong,” Lucas said, his expression tightening as he also sensed the unease. “The road up the mountain is completely blocked by snow. It’s only been one day, and the rescue team is short-staffed—they wouldn’t have had ti to clear it. And with this weather, heavy wind and snow, helicopters can’t approach either. Whether by land or air, there’s no way they could get here this fast…”
He didn’t say the rest out loud, but everyone already understood.
If it wasn’t the rescue team… then who could be knocking on the door of this isolated, snowbound hotel?
That thought made everyone shrink back slightly, fear slowly creeping onto their faces.
In the deathly quiet room, as if unwilling to be ignored, the knocking sounded again.
“Knock, knock…”
—————— —————— —————— —————— —————— ——————
Author’s Note:
Actually, in the original film (without Everly), after the second death, the red-haired man realizes sothing is wrong with his girlfriend. He helps her fabricate an alibi and destroy key evidence, which is why the detective’s reaction is so dramatic~
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