Light under you and me.

Ashley had a normal life once, or at least it felt normal at the time. The kind of life made of small, unremarkable things she never thought to be grateful for. School mornings, quiet dinners, the comfort of not knowing. That ended the day Aunt Celine finally told her the truth.

The Patersons weren't just a family. They were hunters, the last of a bloodline stretching back further than Ashley could wrap her mind around, bound by generations of signed contracts to wicked wizards who commanded them like tools rather than people. Rogue werewolves. Bloodthirsty vampires. Creatures that crawled out of nightmares and into the dark corners of the world, and it had always fallen to someone with the Paterson name to hunt them down, to clean up messes that were never theirs to begin with.

Celine told her all of it plainly, without softening the edges, as though ripping the truth away quickly would somehow hurt less than letting it unravel slowly. Ashley remembers sitting there, waiting for the punchline, for someone to tell her it was a joke. No one did.

Ashley doesn't want this. She never asked for a legacy soaked in blood and old promises made by people long dead, contracts she never signed but is expected to honor anyway. She doesn't want to be a hunter, doesn't want to inherit a war that isn't hers, doesn't want to spend her life running toward danger just because her last name demands it of her.

But the question that keeps her up at night isn't whether she wants this life.

It's whether she has any choice at all.

Is there a way out for her, some path leading away from this cold, endless darkness her family has always called home? Or was she always meant to end up here, another name added to a long, unbroken line bound to the dark before she ever had the chance to choose otherwise?