I should have listened when my sister, Lily, shoved that folded piece of paper into my hand at the terminal, her eyes screaming a warning I was too terrified to acknowledge. I was halfway to the departure gate, already committed to a life I thought I wanted, when the note burned against my palm like live coal: RUN. DO NOT GET ON THE PLANE. LOOK FOR THE BLACK SQUARE. I ignored her, convincing myself she was just having another episode, and boarded the cabin. But as I took my seat and looked out the window, I saw it—a small, ominous black square marked on the tarmac below—and realized that the mistake I had just made would cost me everything I had ever loved.

Terrified, I slipped back out of the cabin and walked through the echoing halls of JFK Airport, moving with a hollow, mechanical rhythm to blend into the chaos of the crowd. I stopped under the shadow of a massive concrete pillar and finally unfolded the paper properly to examine Lily’s crude, distorted sketch of our family home. One window was violently crossed out with a jagged, angry ‘X’, and right next to the entrance was that same black square, looking like a permanent, filthy stain on the paper. Lily had always been the sensitive one who saw cracks in the world that no one else dared to notice, and though we hadn’t spoken in three years since the incident at the lake house, she had appeared out of the ether to hand me a map to my own destruction.

I forced myself to walk back toward the gate, my feet heavy as I tried to choose between my ticket to a fresh start in London and the terrifying imagery of Lily’s note. But as I approached the security checkpoint, my breath hitched when I noticed a man in a dark suit standing near the ropes, his eyes scanning the crowd with a predator’s precision. He wasn’t checking IDs; he was waiting. My skin crawled as I realized he was standing right next to a small, maintenance-access door, and painted on the wall, barely visible in the dim light, was a small, perfectly rendered black square that confirmed every word of Lily’s warning was real.

Turning on my heel, I ignored the confused looks from the passengers behind me and pushed through the revolving doors, vanishing into the humid New York night. I pulled the note out one last time and looked at the black square, realizing it wasn’t just a warning, but a key to the bizarre family legacy I had spent my entire adult life trying to outrun. Watching the plane I was supposed to be on taxi out toward the runway, I knew the ordinary safety I had been chasing was a complete lie. I wasn’t running away anymore—I was hunting—and I would find Lily so that together, we could face whatever awaited us in the darkness and burn the pattern to the ground.