**Prologue**
Mika Whitaker was 21, with cascading blonde hair and bright blue eyes that caught the moonlight like twin stars. Adopted at two, she remembered nothing of her biological parents. Raised alongside twins, Sunny and Sean, her childhood had been full of laughter and loyalty. But that chapter closed with the death of her adoptive father at 72, and her mother not long after at 58. Now, Mika lived alone in a modest apartment, her only family a loyal German Shepherd named Logan.
Just three blocks away lived a man who looked her age but was anything but. Alexander Phelps—Lex—was 437 years old. A vampire hiding in plain sight. He fed only on the forgotten: drifters, criminals, those whose absence wouldn't spark alarms. In centuries of existence, he had never loved. Until Mika.
She didn't know it yet, but she was his.
---