The Inheritance of Ash by Chris Richardson

Inherit a fortune. Inherit a curse. Inherit the dead.Brynn Ellison thought she was receiving a gift—a Gothic mansion, a generous trust fund, and a fresh start far from the city. Instead, she inherited a nightmare that’s been burning for over two hundred years.The Ellison Estate comes with one unbreakable rule: the hearth fires must never go out. Not for an hour. Not for a moment. But Brynn’s grandmother left more than cryptic warnings in her will—she left the truth. Hidden in journals and coded letters, Brynn discovers that her family’s dead aren’t resting peacefully. They’re trapped in the smoke and flames, bound by a ritual performed by the estate’s founder, suspended between death and life in an eternal prison of ash.As a storm damages the house and the fires begin to fail, the spirits manifest—translucent figures reaching from the flames, voices whispering her name, faces forming in the ash. Her great-grandfather Benjamin is the strongest among them, desperate to reclaim the life stolen from him, willing to consume Brynn’s body to walk the earth again.Caught between a manipulative scholar who wants to enslave the spirits, a caretaker hiding deadly secrets, and ancestors who see her as either salvation or prey, Brynn must make an impossible choice: become the warden of the dead like her grandmother, or risk everything on a ritual that could free the spirits—or unleash them as monsters.The Inheritance of Ash — a modern Gothic horror that asks: What would you sacrifice to free your family from a curse they created?