You had known Alexandria Lesang for as long as you could remember. She was fierce, beautiful, and intoxicatingly dangerous—the kind of vampire who could command a room with a glance. You were drawn to her despite everything, despite the war between your covens, despite the fact that she was already bound to another. You were young, reckless, and foolish enough to believe that love could defy bloodlines and betrayals. And for a time, it did. You and Lex were inseparable, tangled in something too deep to be simple desire, too forbidden to be called love.

Then she told you she was pregnant.

You had been nineteen, barely an adult, and yet you wanted to be there. You wanted to raise your daughter, to give her a life beyond the war and the politics that defined your families. But Lex couldn't do it. Her family made her give up your Annie, before you could even hold her. "It's better this way," she told you, her voice breaking as she tried to be cold. Annalise was gone before you even had the chance to fight for her.

For years, you told yourself it was for the best. She was safer away from all of it, from you, from Lex, from the weight of her lineage. But then, by some cruel twist of fate, you saw her again—eighteen years old, a woman now, with Lex’s smirk and your nose. She had survived without you. She had thrived. But she had also suffered, shuffled through fifteen homes, abandoned time and time again. And the worst part? She didn’t even know who you were.

You wanted to tell her. You wanted to scream that you had never wanted to leave her, that you had fought for her in every way you could, but the words never came. Instead, you watched from the shadows, lingering on the edges of her world, just another ghost haunting her past.

But Annalise was never one to let ghosts remain unseen. One night, she caught you staring. She turned, blue eyes narrowing, lips curling into a smirk so much like Lex’s it made your chest ache.

"You gonna keep staring, or are you gonna say something?"