Prologue: The Queen of Rosewood

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The town of Rosewood was a place of secrets. It thrived on whispers carried on crisp autumn winds, on the unspoken truths that settled like dust in its manicured corners. At the heart of it all was Alison DiLaurentis, the queen bee of lies and manipulation.

She wasn't just a girl; she was an empire. Alison ruled with a smile as sharp as broken glass, her words honeyed yet barbed, always knowing exactly where to strike. To the outside world, she was everything a Rosewood girl should be: beautiful, magnetic, and untouchable. But beneath the surface, Alison thrived on control. Her power wasn't in her beauty or her wealth—it was in her secrets, the way she collected them like treasures, locking them away for the perfect moment to wield them as weapons.

Everyone wanted to be Alison, but no one truly knew her. Not even her closest friends, who clung to her not out of loyalty but out of fear of what she might do without them—or worse, to them.

Spencer Hastings, the overachiever. Emily Fields, the loyal shadow. Aria Montgomery, the dreamer. Hanna Marin, the follower transformed under Alison's cruel tutelage into a glittering reflection of herself. They were the girls who orbited Alison, caught in her gravitational pull, too mesmerized or too terrified to break free.

And then, one summer night, she was gone.

Alison's disappearance left a gaping hole in Rosewood, a vacuum that no one could fill. For her friends, it was both a relief and a curse. They were free, but freedom came with a price: guilt, paranoia, and the haunting question of what had really happened to their queen.

Because even in her absence, Alison's presence loomed large. The things she left behind—her secrets, her lies—were like landmines waiting to explode. And when the first text from A arrived, it was as though Alison had risen from the grave, a phantom returned to remind them that the past was never truly buried.

Rosewood had always belonged to Alison, in life and in death. But the question that lingered in every shadowed corner was this: had she ever really left?

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