The ruins of St. Augustine’s Orphanage did not smolder. They were a cold, wet corpse, the recent fire quenched by the firefighters but the death of the place long since a certainty. It stood on the city's forgotten edge, a skeleton of blackened brick and jagged, glass-toothed windows, silhouetted against a bruised twilight sky. The air was a foul cocktail of wet ash, charred wood, and the faint, sweet smell of accelerant. Vorian hadn’t just wanted to destroy records; he’d wanted to erase a place.Kaelen moved through the wreckage like a phantom, his senses extended, reading the story of the fire in the way the beams had fallen, the specific, surgical destruction. I followed, my boots crunching on soaked cinders, the weight of a thousand silent childhood memories pressing down on me. This was where I learned to be invisible. This was where the shadows became my only friends.“He was here,” Kaelen murmured, his voice cutting through the damp silence. He knelt, brushing his fingers over
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