The Circle Returns

The sky above Kingstown was a slate gray canvas, weeping rain over the city. The storm hadn’t let up since the day Ethan Carter walked free — or vanished, depending on who you asked. The streets pulsed with cold and rumor. Something unspoken had returned. Something that had waited in the shadows for ten long years.

Jason Reed never saw it coming.

They found him at dawn — sprawled like a broken doll behind the old performing arts building of the university, his limbs stiff and spread in a ritualistic pose. His eyes, once sharp and full of smug confidence, now stared blankly at the sky. Around his body, six flickering candles sat half-melted into the concrete, placed at precise points around a crude blood-drawn circle.

Inside that circle, a message screamed in silence.

"Et tu, Judas?"

It wasn’t just a murder.

It was a calling card.

A judgment.

“Victim’s name is Jason Reed,” Officer Marris said, scanning her tablet. “Thirty, marketing director. Former Kingstown student.”

Detective Marcus Hale’s expression hardened. “What year?”

“Ten years ago. Graduated the same year as—”

“Ethan Carter,” Hale finished for her, his voice dropping like gravel.

Marris looked up. “You remember the case?”

“Everyone remembers that case,” Hale said. “The ritual killing of Benjamin Walker. The one with the salt circle, the blood symbols, the candle staging. The kid who got ten years.”

“Carter was released last month. No forwarding address. No contacts. Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Hale's brow furrowed. “Someone always leaves a trace.”

“Not him,” she said. “It’s like he disappeared the moment he stepped out.”

Hale knelt back down beside the body, staring at the flickering candles around Jason’s corpse. Everything about the scene was hauntingly familiar. Too familiar.

But it was too perfect. Too clean.

“Maybe it’s not Ethan,” Marris offered quietly.

“Maybe,” Hale muttered, standing up. “Or maybe someone wants us to think it is.”

He turned slowly, eyes narrowing at the empty shadows between the buildings.

There was no evidence Ethan had been there. No fingerprints. No CCTV. No sightings.

And yet…

Somewhere, a silence was watching them.

Across town, Madison Lane sat frozen on her couch, the news blaring through her phone speaker.

“Breaking update: Local businessman Jason Reed was found dead early this morning on the campus of Kingstown University. Sources confirm a ritualistic crime scene and note connections to the infamous Carter case from ten years ago—”

Madison turned the phone face-down, breath caught in her chest.

She hadn’t seen Ethan in years — not since the day they watched him taken away. She had told herself it was over. That prison had changed him. That time had buried the truth.

But the truth had claws. And it was digging itself out of the past.

Meanwhile, in a motel on the edge of the city, a figure sat in darkness.

The only light came from a flickering candle and the soft hiss of a cassette recorder spinning to life.

“Day 1. One down.”

The voice was calm. Male. Cold.

“The blood has returned to the circle. The betrayers will fall. Justice is balance.”

He clicked the recorder off and leaned forward, revealing a faded photograph taped to the wall: five young faces smiling in front of the college dorms.

A red “X” now slashed over Jason’s.

Four more remained.

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