The Ashen Verdict

When 17-year-old Leo Ashton ventures into the darknet forum “Abyss,” he accidentally witnesses the live-streamed execution of Maya Coleman, a former HR director who had filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Greystone State Community College. Her murder is staged as a suicide, and Leo becomes the target of the Erebos Circle, a transnational assassin network that silences whistleblowers for the college's shadowy benefactors. Navigating a legal system that protects the powerful, Leo discovers a forgotten realm of souls denied justice—the gray zone where law and morality collide. On the run, he must decide whether to expose a truth no one will believe or vanish like the countless victims before him.