Chapter 3 Ashes and Echoes

The past had a smell.

Burned sugar. Gunpowder. Blood on hot tile.

Caroline didn't dream often-too many pills and not enough peace-but when she did, it was always that night. The fire didn't just take her family. It rewrote her cells. Made her a creature of revenge instead of grief.

She had been seventeen. Not quite a girl anymore, but not yet whatever she was now. The Raines family had been small-time, but smart-her father ran clean shipments out of the Port of Longshore. No drugs. No guns. Just the kind of people who played nice with bigger wolves so long as the wolves stayed fed.

But wolves, as it turns out, always want more.

It started with the knock-three sharp raps on the side door, just after dinner. Her brother Ben was the one who answered. She remembered the way he tilted his head, confused but polite, before the first shot punched through his neck. No warning. No demand.

Just a message.

She'd been in the kitchen, drying glasses. Her mother dropped the casserole. Her father reached for the revolver in the drawer by the fridge-old instincts, Marine reflexes-but he wasn't quick enough.

The men wore masks. Not ski masks. Theater masks. Painted grins and tragic frowns, white porcelain twisted into grotesque cheer. She'd never seen anything more terrifying. Not because they were inhuman-but because of what they hid.

Caroline froze behind the counter. She could still hear her mother's screams. The way her father had tried to shield her with his body even as bullets ripped through him. The clatter of plates. The smell of fear turning metallic.

She didn't cry.

She didn't make a sound.

She watched.

One of them had stayed behind as the others doused the place in gasoline. He was taller than the rest. Moved like he owned the ground. A silver scorpion ring flashed on his hand as he flicked a lighter, calm as Sunday morning.

He lit the match.

And said one thing-just one.

"No loose ends. Ventresca's orders."

Then the house went up.

She crawled through the pantry vent while the flames danced, the soles of her feet blistering on red-hot tile. She ran barefoot through the backwoods behind the yard, blood and soot streaking her skin. No one followed. No one needed to.

They thought she'd died with the rest of them.

A week later, a city official ruled the fire an accident-a faulty gas line, maybe arson by a rival, but nothing worth pursuing. No witnesses. No bodies found except her family's.

Just another family gone quiet.

Ventresca moved into the port business a month later.

That's when Caroline Raines died.

The girl who survived the fire.

The girl who'd memorized the scorpion ring.

The girl who carved every name, every face, every smirk into her brain until it stopped hurting.

She spent the next eight years learning how to disappear. Then how to reappear as someone else-Cara, the girl who smiled when men underestimated her. The girl who studied the empire that murdered her family. Who gathered names like matches. Secrets like kerosene.

And now?

Now she was the spark.