Chapter 2 THE ONE WHO WATCHED.

The ruins of the Kincaid property looked worse in daylight.

Beneath the bleached sky, what was left of my childhood home sagged like a corpse waiting for the last of its bones to be buried. Blackened timbers jutted from the ground like ribs. Ivy crept over stone and ash alike. Ten years of weather had softened the edges of the disaster, but nothing could hide the way the house had been devoured.

And somehow, Jerry Mandel looked like he belonged in the wreckage.

He stood with his back to me, his silhouette a dark outline against the scorched walls. When I'd last seen him, I was just a girl with smoke in her lungs and a sister she couldn't find. He was the boy who ran and never looked back.

Now, I wasn't sure what he was. Or what I was, for that matter.

"You have some nerve," I said.

He didn't turn around right away. "I could say the same."

When he did face me, the light caught the sharp lines of his face-older, harder than I remembered. His gray eyes scanned mine like they were searching for something familiar. Maybe something he'd lost.

"I didn't come here for you," I lied.

"Then why are you back, Seraphine?"

I didn't answer. Not yet. Letting him stew in the silence felt like the smallest possible revenge.

He took a breath. "I got a letter."

My heart skipped. "When?"

"Three nights ago. No address. No handwriting. Just a sentence."

I already knew the words before he said them.

"They know you saw. Watch your back."

He held it out like proof. The same off-white paper. The same weight of menace tucked into one single line.

"So we're not the only ones who remember," I said.

"No. But we might be the only ones still alive."

We walked the perimeter of the ruins together, an unspoken truce holding between us. I didn't ask why he'd come back. He didn't ask why I hadn't screamed at him for vanishing when I needed him most.

There'd be time for that later.

"Did you ever tell anyone what you saw?" I asked.

"I don't know what I saw," Jerry said, jaw tight. "It's fragments. Smoke, fire, someone running. Rowan was supposed to meet me. She never came."

"You ran," I said again.

He flinched. "I know."

"No, I don't think you do."

"I was seventeen, Seraphine. I didn't have a choice"

"There's always a choice." My voice cracked like glass. "You chose yourself."

We stopped beside what used to be the greenhouse-my secret sanctuary as a child. Surprisingly intact, its skeletal frame bent but not broken. I stepped inside, motioning for him to follow. The glass above was streaked with moss and soot, casting green shadows on the cracked tile floor.

"This is where Rowan first told me about the Ember Circle," I said.

Jerry raised an eyebrow. "I thought that was just a rumor. A campfire tale."

"So did I. Until I started finding evidence."

I pulled the photograph from my coat pocket, the one I'd discovered buried in Helena's files. My mother, smiling stiffly beside a man I didn't recognize. Both wearing a small pin shaped like a flame.

"Recognize him?"

Jerry studied it. "No. But that pin... I've seen it before."

"Where?"

"Around town. Old places. On signs, in graffiti. Like it's always just on the edge of things."

He was right. The symbol had haunted Ashthorne for years. Discreet, half-erased. A secret brand.

"I think my mother tried to leave the Circle," I said. "I think Rowan found out too much. And someone made sure she'd never tell anyone."

Jerry's face darkened. "And now they're watching us."

Back at Helena's, dusk painted the house in bruised light. The air tasted like metal. The weight of the conversation pressed against my ribs as we climbed the porch steps.

Aunt Helena stood in the doorway, arms folded, expression thunderous.

"You," she said to Jerry. "Are either stupid or suicidal."

"I've been called worse," he replied.

She looked at me. "You brought him here?"

"He already knows," I said. "They sent him a letter too."

Aunt Helena's eyes flicked to Jerry narrowing. Then she turned on her heel and walked inside.

Jerry gave me a sideways glance. "She always hate me that much?"

"Only since the fire."

We followed Aunt Helena to the kitchen, where the air smelled faintly of lavender and something sour. She set a heavy wooden box on the table. It landed with a thud that echoed like a heartbeat.

"This was your mother's," she said. "I never looked through it. Maybe I was scared. Maybe I didn't want to see what she'd become."

I opened the cover.

Inside were notebooks-worn, weathered, and scrawled full of secrets. Folders filled with yellowed newspaper clippings. A small recorder. Even an envelope labeled in my mother's handwriting, for when the fire comes.

Jerry leaned over my shoulder. "Holy shit."

"I've been trying to piece together what happened," I said. "This might help."

I took the first notebook, dated six months before Rowan died. The entries were written in careful cursive, but as the pages turned, the handwriting grew erratic.

They call themselves The Ember Circle. Old blood. Old rules. They speak of flame as if it were a god. I thought it was just a book club, a dinner party circle. But now I think it's a cult.

Rowan's been asking questions. She's getting too close.

If anything happens to me-watch the man with the scar behind his ear.

Jerry's voice broke the quiet. "Your mom was in over her head."

"She was trying to get us out."

I pulled out a hand-drawn map-tunnels beneath the town, linking old buildings, even the cemetery.

"She mapped this," I whispered. "Underground."

"Secret meetings. Just like a cult."

Aunt Helena nodded grimly. "This town has rot in its bones, Seraphine. Your mother saw it. Rowan touched it."

"And I'm going to burn it out," I said.

Jerry looked at me. Like he finally understood this wasn't a quest for answers.

It was a war.

The house was quiet after midnight.

Jerry had claimed the worn-out couch in the parlor, one arm draped over his eyes as if to shut out everything. Aunt Helena's bedroom door was closed, a sliver of yellow light visible beneath it, and I could still hear her soft movements-the quiet creak of drawers, the faint clink of glass. She never slept well when old ghosts stirred.

I sat alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of my mother's notebooks, pages marked with post-it flags, strings of scribbled symbols, and underlined dates. My head ached from the effort to piece it all together.

But something inside me refused to stop.

My fingers traced the edge of a note written in a different handwriting.

My sister.

"If you're reading this, it means I didn't make it. I hope you never find this. I hope you stayed gone."

"But if you did... be careful. They always watch the ones who return."

The words carved something cold into the center of my chest.

I pressed my palms against my temples and leaned back in the chair. It groaned beneath me. The quiet of the house was too still, like the kind of silence that falls just before something breaks.

Then I heard it.

A soft tap.

I froze. One tap. Then another. From the far side of the kitchen.

The back window.

I stood slowly. The hairs on my arms lifted, my instincts sharpening like blades. I stepped toward the curtain, parted it just a sliver.

No one.

I leaned closer.

Tap.

This time I saw it.

A hand. Small. Pale. With something clenched in its fingers.

I yanked open the door and rushed out, barefoot on the cold wooden steps, heart pounding

But the figure was already gone. A glimpse of motion-white dress, long hair, feet moving fast into the woods beyond the fence. Too small to be a grown woman. Too graceful to be a man.

My blood chilled.

It looked like Rowan.

I ran.

The night air bit into my skin as I sprinted across the backyard. The world was damp and quiet, the ground soft from recent rain. I pushed through the fence gate and into the trees, calling my sister's name even though I knew it couldn't be her.

It couldn't be.

Could it?

The figure darted between trees like smoke on the wind. I chased it down an old path we used to play along, one that hadn't been cleared in years. Branches clawed at my arms and face, and still I kept running.

Then suddenly...

Silence.

I stopped, chest heaving.

The girl was gone.

But in her place, hanging from the low branch of an elm tree, was a folded piece of paper tied with red twine.

I approached slowly.

Untied it.

Inside, in a neat, looping hand, was a single phrase:

She watched. She watched. She watched.

I stared at it.

The same phrase I'd found written in my mother's notes. The same haunting repetition. And at the bottom of the page, a symbol I hadn't seen before-two flames, crossed like swords.

I turned in a circle. No one. Just the woods, whispering things I couldn't hear.

I walked back home with the note pressed to my chest like armor.

By dawn, Aunt Helena was already awake, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other. She looked at me when I entered,-still in my clothes, mud streaked up my legs, scratches on my arms and said nothing.

"You look like you saw a ghost," she said finally.

"Maybe I did."

She raised an eyebrow.

I showed her the note.

Aunt Helena's face changed. The cigarette paused midway to her mouth. She took it between her fingers and exhaled, slow and steady.

"Where did you get this?"

"In the woods. After I saw her."

"Who?"

I hesitated. "Rowan."

Aunt helena went still. Her eyes searched mine. "No one ever really leaves Ashthorne," she said. "Even the dead."

Jerry and I sat on the front porch later that morning, a spread of notes and papers between us.

"She watched. She watched. She watched," he repeated, reading aloud.

"What does it mean?" I asked.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "It could be code. A chant. Or maybe it's a warning."

"Or a name," I said slowly. He blinked. A name?

"I don't know. I just... something about the repetition. What if it's not a phrase? What if it's describing someone? Someone who watched them?"

"A witness."

"Or a traitor," I added.

We were both silent for a long time.

Then Jerry leaned forward. "I think I know someone who might be able to help."

I looked up. "Who?"

Father Callum. At the old church. He's not part of the Circle-I'm sure of it. He's been here forever, and he used to counsel people... confidentially. If anyone heard confessions about this cult, it would've been him.