I Became the Incompetent Villainess- Transmigration Story by Salty Vixen

The ink on the page was still wet, though the book had been printed a century before she woke up inside it.

Vivianne did not look at the man standing across the obsidian desk. To look at him was to invite the dissection of her own gaze. Instead, she kept her eyes fixed on the heavy signet ring on her thumb, turning it slowly, letting the cold gold bite into her skin. It was a habit she had adopted three days ago, the precise moment her soul had slammed into the ribs of the Grand Duchess Vivianne von Esterhazy.

“Your Grace,” Lord Commander Vane said. His voice was like stones scraping together at the bottom of a well. “The vanguard is awaiting your signature. The purge of the Eastern Marches cannot begin without the ducal seal.”

Vivianne’s stomach performed a slow, sickening roll. The Eastern Marches. A purge.

She had no idea where the Eastern Marches were. She did not know who lived there, why they were being purged, or what the political fallout would be. In her previous life, seventy-two hours ago, she had been a mid-level data analyst whose greatest daily crisis was a corrupted spreadsheet. Now, she was apparently an iron-fisted despot with the power to erase entire bloodlines.

“The vanguard can wait,” she said.

She used the voice she had discovered by accident on night one—a low, rhythmic drawl that sounded entirely bored, as if the lives of ten thousand people were merely dust on her sleeve. It was the only defense mechanism she had. If she showed an inch of hesitation, if she asked a single logical question like ‘Why are we killing these people?’, Vane would know. The entire court would know. And according to the three loose, crumpled pages hidden beneath her petticoats, the penalty for a demon occupying a noble corpse was a slow death by consecrated silver.

Vane didn’t move. He stood over six feet tall, encased in black plate armor that smelled faintly of old lard and vinegar. His eyes were small, pale, and entirely devoid of light. He was testing her. She could feel it in the heavy silence of the solar.

“The King’s informants are already moving,” Vane pressed, his hand resting on the pommel of his broadsword. “If we do not strike tonight, the leverage is lost.”

“Then let it be lost,” Vivianne said smoothly. She finally looked up, fixing him with the cold, unblinking stare she had practiced in the vanity mirror until her eyes watered. “Do you take me for a novice, Commander? If the King believes he has outmaneuvered us, he will grow careless. A careless king is a profitable king.”

It was complete nonsense. It was a string of vague, pseudo-intellectual phrases she had pulled from an old business management seminar.

But Vane blinked. His jaw tightened. He was looking for the trap. In the absence of information, the human mind always assumes the worst, and Vane assumed Vivianne was playing a game three moves ahead of him.

“As you command, Your Grace,” he murmured, bowing just low enough to be respectful, though his knuckles remained white against his sword. “I shall recall the riders.”

The moment the heavy oak doors clicked shut behind him, the mask shattered.

Vivianne collapsed forward, her forehead hitting the cool obsidian of the desk with a dull thud. Her breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. Her hands were shaking so violently that she could barely reach into the heavy folds of her velvet skirts.

With trembling fingers, she pulled out her only lifeline: three sheets of coarse, yellowish paper.

They were pages 114, 115, and 119 of a fantasy novel she had skimmed through exactly once on a flight to Chicago three years ago. She didn’t remember the title. She didn’t remember the author. But these pages had materialized under her pillow the second morning she woke up here.

She smoothed the paper against the desk, her eyes scanning the text in the dim candlelight, searching for any mention of the Eastern Marches.

…the slaughter at the Eastern Marches was the turning point for the tyrant Vivianne. By executing the provincial lords under the guise of tariff treason, she secured the northern grain supply but permanently alienated the Crown Prince, Julian. It was this specific cruelty that forced Julian to look toward the shadow networks of the capital, seeking an assassin with a heart black enough to match her own…

Vivianne froze.

She hadn’t just delayed a military maneuver. She had just accidentally altered the entire catalyst for the main plot. According to the book, she was supposed to kill those people to secure grain. If she didn’t, her army would starve by winter. If she did, the Prince would hire an assassin to cut her throat in her sleep.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” she whispered to the empty room.

The text on the page began to shift. Before her eyes, the printed ink dissolved into black liquid, swimming across the fibers of the paper like tiny iron filings drawn to a magnet. When the words reformed, page 114 read differently:

…By sparing the Eastern Marches, Vivianne von Esterhazy committed her first strategic blunder. Within forty-eight hours, the grain reserves of the northern silos were burned by royal agitators, leaving the ducal army with less than three weeks of rations. Suspicion within her own ranks skyrocketed, particularly from her chief enforcer, Lord Commander Vane, who began to wonder if the Grand Duchess had lost her mind—or her nerve…

Vivianne stared at the new text, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

The book wasn’t just a guide. It was an active ledger. Every time she bluffed, every time she guessed wrong, the world corrected itself by tightening the noose around her neck.

The imperial ballroom was a study in predatory elegance. Mirrors lined the walls from floor to ceiling, reflecting the glitter of diamond-encrusted doublets and the sharp, dangerous smiles of the high nobility.

Vivianne sat on the raised dais, a glass of dark plum wine resting between her fingers. She hadn’t taken a sip. In this court, an untasted drink was a basic survival strategy, but she held it anyway because it gave her something to do with her hands.

“She looks pale tonight,” a voice whispered from the crowd below the dais.

“They say she hasn’t left her study in three days,” another replied, the words muffled behind a silk fan. “Perhaps the King’s new tax levy has finally found her throat.”

Vivianne kept her expression entirely vacant. Internally, she was running through her mental index of the three pages she had memorized before entering the hall. Page 115: Prince Julian enters from the west gallery. He wears the colors of the sea-hawk. He will offer a toast that is actually a veiled threat regarding the iron mines.

Right on cue, the trumpets sounded.

The crowd parted like water before a prow, and Prince Julian stepped into the light.

He was exactly as the book described him—infuriatingly handsome, with silver-blonde hair that fell perfectly across a brow that had never known a day of hard labor. He wore a doublet of midnight blue and sea-green silk. His eyes, cold and sharp as chipped glass, locked onto Vivianne immediately.

He didn’t walk toward her; he hunted toward her. Every stride was deliberate.

“Grand Duchess,” Julian said, stopping at the base of her dais. He didn’t bow. As royalty, he didn’t have to, but the omission was a calculated insult to her house. “I notice your seat at the privy council was empty this morning. The lords missed your… stabilizing presence.”

Vivianne let a small, lazy smile touch the corner of her lips. She leaned back into the velvet cushions of her high-backed chair, tilting her head slightly.

“The council bores me, Your Highness,” she said, her voice carrying just enough to reach the surrounding nobles. “A dozen old men arguing over the price of mutton is hardly a fitting use of my morning. I prefer to let my results speak for themselves.”

Julian’s eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter. “Is that why your vanguard remains within their barracks? The entire capital expected your banners to be historical footnotes in the East by now. One wonders if the great Esterhazy wolf has grown fond of the kennel.”

A collective intake of breath rustled through the ballroom. It was a direct provocation.

Vivianne felt a bead of sweat trace a slow path down her spine, hidden beneath her heavy stays. She had to answer. If she said the wrong thing, if she revealed she didn’t know about the iron mines or the grain or the tax, Julian would press his advantage and destroy her house before midnight.

She needed a diversion. She needed to look like she knew something he didn’t.

She reached down, her fingers brushing against the small slit she had cut into the silk lining of her sleeve. Inside, hidden against her forearm, was page 115. She couldn’t read it here—not with a hundred eyes on her—but she remembered the final sentence of that page: ‘Julian’s secret alliance with the southern guilds was his greatest vulnerability, a thread he kept hidden even from his own shadow-catchers.’

She didn’t know what the southern guilds were. She didn’t know what the thread was. But she knew how to play a bluff.

“The wolf doesn’t stay in the kennel, Julian,” she said softly, dropping the formal title entirely. The sudden intimacy of her tone made him stiffen. “The wolf simply watches the southern gates. It’s remarkable what one can see when the wind blows from the south. The… guild trade has been very lively lately, hasn’t it?”

The reaction was instantaneous.

The color drained from Julian’s face so fast it looked as though he had been struck. His hand, which had been resting casually on his hip, twitched toward his belt. The arrogance vanished from his eyes, replaced by a raw, naked hostility that made Vivianne’s blood run cold.

She had hit a nerve. She had hit it so hard that she had transformed him from a political rival into a cornered predator.

“You,” Julian whispered, his voice dropping so low the court could no longer hear. “You think you’re very clever, don’t you?”

“I don’t think, Julian,” Vivianne replied, her heart thumping against her ribs like a war drum while she maintained her sweetest, most venomous expression. “I know.”

Julian stared at her for three long seconds. Then, without a word, he turned on his heel and strode out of the ballroom, his cape billowing behind him like a funeral shroud.

The silence in the hall was absolute. The nobles looked from the doorway back to Vivianne, their faces filled with a new, profound terror. She had just dismissed the Crown Prince of the realm like an errant schoolboy using nothing but a single word.

Vivianne raised her glass of wine, her hand perfectly steady through sheer, adrenaline-fueled willpower, and let the liquid touch her lips without swallowing.

Two weeks of rations, she thought frantically. I have two weeks to find out what a southern guild is before he realizes I’m an idiot and has me murdered.

The dungeon beneath the Esterhazy estate didn’t smell like blood; it smelled like wet lime and old turnips.

Vivianne held a small oil lamp ahead of her, the flickering light casting long, monstrous shadows against the damp stone walls. She had slipped away during the height of the feast, leaving her guards behind under the pretext of ‘private business.’

She needed to read. She needed to read without the book changing because she looked at it.

She found a small, abandoned masonry alcove near the wine cellars and sat down on an overturned crate. She pulled the three pages from her sleeve, her fingers smudging the edges with oil from the lamp.

“Let’s see the damage,” she muttered.

She looked at page 115. The ink was already rewriting itself, the letters writhing across the page like insects.

…By threatening Prince Julian with her knowledge of the southern guilds, Vivianne von Esterhazy successfully derailed his immediate plans for her assassination. However, her display of omniscience has forced Julian to accelerate his timeline. Realizing that the Grand Duchess knows too much to be left alive, he has bypassed his traditional agents and contacted the ‘Red Weaver’—the most ruthless political assassin in the empire. The Weaver is already inside the Esterhazy estate, disguised as a member of the kitchen staff…

Vivianne’s breath hitched. Disguised as a member of the kitchen staff.

She had just ordered a bowl of beef broth to her chambers for midnight.

A soft rustle of silk sounded from the dark corridor behind her.

Vivianne didn’t move. She didn’t drop the papers. Instead, she slowly, deliberately folded them and slid them back into her sleeve, her mind racing through every survival instinct she possessed.

“It is dark down here for a Grand Duchess,” a smooth, unfamiliar voice said from the shadows.

A man stepped into the perimeter of her lamp’s light. He didn’t wear the livery of her house, nor did he wear noble garb. He wore the simple linen tunic of a scullery maid’s assistant, but his hands were entirely free of grease or burns. His fingers were long, thin, and wrapped in delicate gray silk threads that extended up into his sleeves.

The Red Weaver.

Vivianne didn’t stand up. She knew that if she showed fear, if she tried to run, those silver threads would be through her throat before she could clear the alcove. She had to play the only card she had left: the illusion of complete, terrifying control.

“You’re late,” Vivianne said.

The assassin stopped. His eyes, which had been perfectly blank, flickered with a sudden, sharp curiosity. “Am I?”

“I expected you during the third course,” Vivianne lied, her voice dripping with an arrogance she didn’t feel. She stood up slowly, brushing a speck of dust from her velvet skirts. “Julian is losing his efficiency. To send an artist of your caliber through the kitchen cellars… it’s insulting to us both, don’t you think?”

The Weaver didn’t attack. His gray threads remained taut, but his posture shifted by a fraction of an inch. “You knew I was coming.”

“I knew the moment Julian left the ballroom,” Vivianne said, taking a step toward him. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. Every nerve in her body was screaming at her to retreat, but she forced herself to look directly into his eyes. “The Prince thinks he plays chess, Weaver. He doesn’t realize that I own the board. Tell me… how much did he offer you for my head?”

“More than your estate can match,” the assassin murmured.

“Then he lied to you,” Vivianne said smoothly, stopping just three feet from him. She could smell the faint scent of copper and almonds on him—poison. “Julian’s northern silos will burn within forty-eight hours. His grain reserves are already gone. He cannot pay you with gold he doesn’t have, and he certainly cannot protect you from me once the winter snows set in.”

She was using the very information the book had used to threaten her. She was turning her own upcoming disaster into a weapon.

The Weaver stared at her, his head tilted like a bird evaluating a shiny piece of glass. He was trying to find the lie. He was trying to figure out how a woman who spent her days drinking plum wine in a palace knew the exact status of the royal grain reserves before the King’s own couriers had arrived.

“You are an extraordinary woman, Your Grace,” the Weaver said softly, the gray threads in his hands slowly loosening, disappearing back into the dark cloth of his sleeves. “Or an extraordinary liar.”

“In my position,” Vivianne said, her heart roaring in her ears as she walked right past him into the dark corridor, leaving him behind her in the shadows, “there is no difference between the two.”

She didn’t look back until she reached the safety of her guarded solar.

When she finally locked the door behind her, she pulled the pages from her sleeve once more. Her hands were wet with cold sweat. She laid page 119 on the table under the moonlight.

The ink was moving again.

…Against all historical precedent, the Grand Duchess managed to stall the Red Weaver through a display of cold psychological warfare. The assassin has agreed to delay his strike for forty-eight hours to verify her claims regarding the grain silos. If the silos do not burn, or if Vivianne fails to provide a better offer by the third night, the Weaver will collect his original bounty—beginning with her fingers…

Vivianne sank into her chair, a wild, hysterical laugh bubbling up in her throat.

“Forty-eight hours,” she whispered to the empty room, her eyes staring at the shifting letters on the paper. “I have forty-eight hours to figure out how to burn down an imperial silo without knowing where it is on a map.”

She turned the page over, looking at the blank white space on the back, waiting for the book to give her the answers. But the book remained silent, leaving the incompetent villainess alone in the dark with nothing but her own brilliant, terrifying lies.

The forty-eight-hour clock did not tick; it bled.

Vivianne spent the morning of the second day staring at the map she had stolen from the Lord Commander’s tactical room. It was written in a beautiful, sweeping script she could barely read, using geographical markers that made no sense to a twentieth-century mind. The Baron’s Spine. The Weeping Basin.

She still hadn’t found the silos. She didn’t need to. Her bluff with the Red Weaver had created a terrifying paradox: according to the book’s ledger, because she had told the assassin the silos would burn, Prince Julian’s own panic-stricken agents were currently moving to relocate the grain, making them highly vulnerable to an accidental arson. She had merely set the spark by lying.

But she didn’t have time to celebrate her corporate-style manipulation.

A velvet-lined summation arrived at noon, stamped with the sea-hawk crest.

“The Grand Duchess is requested to attend His Highness in the Glass Conservatory at twilight. To discuss the… southern winds.”

It wasn’t an invitation. It was a summons to a cage.

The Glass Conservatory sat at the highest point of the imperial palace, a massive dome of iron and green-tinted glass that housed rare, predatory flora from the southern colonies. At twilight, the light inside was thick and bruised, casting long, veiny shadows across the stone paths.

Vivianne walked slowly, the heavy train of her obsidian-colored gown brushing against the broad leaves of a bleeding-orchid bush. Her sleeve felt heavy. Beneath the silk, the loose pages were warm against her forearm.

Julian was waiting for her at the center of the dome, standing beside a stone fountain that trickled with dark, mineral-heavy water. He had discarded his heavy formal jacket. He wore only a white silk shirt, open at the throat, and dark breeches. He looked less like a prince and more like a high-born executioner.

“You took your time,” Julian said without turning around. He was dipping a long, silver needle into the fountain’s basin.

“A duchess does not run because a prince snaps his fingers, Julian,” Vivianne said, her low, bored drawl echoing softly off the glass ceiling.

Inside, her lungs were burning. She had sneaked a look at page 116 right before entering the conservatory. The text had been brief, terrifying, and incomplete: …Julian’s fury reached its apex in the glass house. He intended to break her facade using the ghost-lily extract, unaware that Vivianne had already…

The sentence had cut off there. The page was torn. She didn’t know what the original Vivianne had done. She had to wing it.

Julian turned around. The silver needle in his hand caught the last ray of dying sunlight. His expression wasn’t the arrogant smirk he had worn in the ballroom; it was a mask of cold, obsessive focus.

“I spent the night vetting my contacts in the southern guilds,” Julian said, taking a slow step toward her. The heels of his boots clicked sharply against the flagstones. “I found nothing. No leaks. No turned couriers. No intercepted ledgers.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Vivianne said, tilting her head, letting her eyes trail over his open collar with practiced, mocking indifference. “Did you think I would use a method so clumsy that a boy could trace it?”

Julian stopped just two feet from her. He was taller than her, his shadow completely swallowing her small frame in the dimming light. The scent of him—expensive cedarwood and the sharp, metallic tang of the fountain water—flooded her senses.

“You’re a liar, Vivianne,” he whispered.

He didn’t raise his hand, but the intensity of his gaze felt like a physical weight pressing against her throat. “The old Vivianne was a monster, yes. She was cruel, she was vain, and she was predictable. She would have burned the Marches just to see the smoke. But you… you stayed the vanguard. You threatened my guilds. And this morning, my informants tell me my northern grain silos are being surrounded by mysterious riders.”

Vivianne’s heart did a violent flip. The riders were probably the Weaver’s men checking her story.

“Perhaps I simply grew tired of being predictable,” she lied smoothly, her eyes locked onto his. “A wolf gets bored of the same deer, Julian.”

Suddenly, Julian’s hand shot out.

His fingers didn’t go for her throat. They wrapped around her wrist—not with the brutal force of an attacker, but with a terrifying, calculated pressure that pinned her arm down. His thumb pressed directly over her pulse point.

Vivianne gasped, her external mask cracking for a fraction of a second as the sheer heat of his skin shocked her system. Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, and beneath his thumb, her pulse was giving away every ounce of her terror.

Julian felt it. A dark, slow smile curled the corner of his lips, but his eyes remained entirely dead.

“Your heart is racing, Grand Duchess,” he murmured, pulling her a fraction of an inch closer. The silver needle in his other hand hovered just inches from the exposed skin of her neck. “You speak like a conqueror, but your blood moves like a rabbit’s. Which is the real lie? The brilliance… or the fear?”

The slow burn of the interaction wasn’t romantic; it was toxic, chemical, and intoxicatingly dangerous. He wasn’t touching her because he desired her; he was touching her because he wanted to dissect her. He was hyper-fixated on the riddle of her existence.

“Let go of me,” she whispered, her voice dropping its artificial drawl, becoming raw and sharp.

“Tell me what you want,” Julian countered, his breath brushing against her cheek. He was so close she could see the faint flecks of gold in his glass-sharp eyes. “You didn’t expose my guilds to the King. You didn’t use the information to destroy me. You’re holding it over my head like a leash. What is the price for your silence, Vivianne? Your house already has wealth. Your army already has steel. What are you hunting for?”

I’m hunting for a way to not get executed! her mind screamed.

But she couldn’t say that. She looked at the silver needle in his hand. She looked at the dark fountain behind him. She remembered the phrase from the torn page: …ghost-lily extract…

She forced her body to relax. She let her weight lean into his grip rather than pulling away. The sudden shift in her resistance made Julian’s eyes flicker with a sudden, tense wariness.

“What do I want, Julian?” she murmured, her voice dropping into a dangerous, intimate register. She raised her free hand, her fingers hovering just above his open collar, not touching his skin but close enough that he could feel the cold gold of her signet ring. “I want you to stop playing these petty games. If you want to kill me, use a blade, not a needle hidden in a garden. It’s unbefitting of a prince.”

She didn’t look at his face. She looked at the fountain.

With a sudden, violent wrench of her body, she didn’t try to escape his grip—she pulled him with her.

Her foot caught the edge of the stone basin. Julian, caught off guard by her sudden forward momentum, stumbled. They collided, a tangle of heavy silk and sharp wool, crashing against the stone lip of the fountain.

The silver needle flew from his fingers, clinking harmlessly into the dark water.

For a second, the world stopped.

Vivianne was pressed flat against the stone, her breath gasping, with Julian completely hovering over her. His hand was still locked around her wrist, pinning it against the wet stone, while his other hand had instinctively caught her waist to stop them both from tumbling into the deep water.

The position was intensely, suffocatingly intimate. She could feel the hard line of his chest against her ribs, the heavy, ragged rise and fall of his breathing. The silence in the conservatory was absolute, save for the slow drip of the water behind them.

Julian stared down at her. The mask of the political strategist had vanished from his face, replaced by something raw, volatile, and deeply unsettled. His gaze dropped to her lips, then snapped back to her eyes, searching the depths of her pupils for the answer to a question he didn’t know how to ask.

“You are insane,” he whispered, his fingers tightening against her waist until it bruised through the velvet.

“I am a Vivianne,” she replied softly, her lips just inches from his. “We do not lose.”

He stared at her for one more agonizing second, his thumb tracing a slow, subconscious line against her hip—a gesture of pure, unconscious possession that sent a shiver of genuine dread and electricity straight down her spine. The chemistry between them wasn’t built on trust; it was a mutual addiction to the high stakes of each other’s destruction.

Then, he released her. He stood up smoothly, stepping back into the shadows of the bleeding orchids, his expression instantly locking back into its cold, unreadable armor.

“The silos will burn tonight,” Julian said, his voice entirely flat. “I ordered my men to move the grain to the western keep, but the transport wagons were intercepted by an unknown faction. The friction caused a fire. Two hundred tons of imperial grain are currently ash.”

Vivianne stayed on the stone lip, her heart roaring in her ears. The book had come true again. Her lie to the Weaver had caused Julian to move the grain, which had caused the accident.

“I know,” Vivianne said, standing up slowly and smoothing her ruined gown, though her legs were shaking so hard she could barely stand. “I told you, Julian. I own the board.”

She turned and walked out of the glass dome without looking back.

The moment she cleared the palace gates and climbed into her private carriage, she collapsed against the leather cushions. Her whole body was trembling. She reached into her sleeve and pulled out page 116.

The ink was wet. The text was changing.

…By surviving the encounter in the conservatory, Vivianne von Esterhazy successfully cemented her status as an omniscient threat in the mind of Prince Julian. However, the physical proximity has triggered a dangerous mutation in his intentions. No longer content with a simple execution, Julian’s hostility has turned obsessive. He has rescinded his bounty with the Red Weaver, declaring that the Grand Duchess belongs to the Crown alone. Meanwhile, the original soul of Vivianne, dormant within the subconscious, has begun to scratch at the walls of the mind, furious that a stranger is playing with her prince…

Vivianne stared at the last sentence, the carriage rattling beneath her as the shadows of the capital lengthened.

“Oh, great,” she whispered, her fingers tracing the black ink. “The ex-girlfriend is waking up.”

The carriage did not return to the Esterhazy estate.

Halfway through the cobblestone streets of the lower district, the carriage driver—a silent man Vivianne hadn’t yet learned the name of—suddenly pulled the horses to a violent halt.

“Your Grace,” a voice murmured through the small wooden shutter behind her head. It wasn’t the driver. It was Lord Commander Vane’s scout. “The estate is compromised. Royal inquisitors have blocked the gates. They claim they are looking for a ‘heretical artifact’ in your private study.”

Vivianne’s lungs seized. The book.

She had left pages 114 and 119 in the false bottom of her jewelry case. If the inquisitors found those coarse, yellowish pages with ink that actively swam across the fibers like living ants, they wouldn’t just execute her body—they would burn her at the stake as a soul-thief.

“Turn the carriage,” Vivianne commanded, her voice dropping into that smooth, glacial drawl through sheer muscle memory. “We go to the secondary manor at the cliffs.”

“The roads are watched, Your Grace,” the scout whispered.

“Then make sure they do not see you,” she snapped.

As the carriage violently wheeled about, the sudden lateral force slammed Vivianne’s shoulder against the mahogany paneling. The impact wasn’t severe, but the moment her bone clicked against the wood, something inside her skull tore.

It didn’t feel like a thought. It felt like a physical puncture.

The smell of scorched hair. The sound of a child crying under a heavy linen sheet. A hand—smaller than hers, with soft, unblemished skin—clutching a silver hairpin so hard the point drew blood from her palm.

“You will not cry,” a woman’s voice whispered in the dark of her memory. The voice was heavy with the scent of cheap gin and expensive rosewater. “The Esterhazy do not weep for dead mothers. We make the King weep instead. Look at the fire, Vivianne. Look at what happens to people who are weak.”

Vivianne gasped, her hands flying to her temples. Her eyes rolled back, the leather interior of the carriage dissolving into a smear of black and gold.

The memory didn’t belong to her. It was too sharp, too cold, injected with a level of raw, venomous hatred that a data analyst from the Midwest couldn’t comprehend. It was the original Vivianne von Esterhazy. The soul wasn’t dead; it was a coiled spring at the base of her brain, compressed by the trauma of the transmigration, and it was finally beginning to unwind.

“Get out,” a voice hissed inside her own throat.

Vivianne clapped her hand over her mouth. Her own lips had moved, but the vocal cords had vibrated with a different pitch—higher, sharper, laced with a terrifying aristocratic cruelty.

“You are ruining it,” the voice inside her mind screamed, the thoughts scraping against her consciousness like fingernails on stone. “You didn’t burn the Marches. You let Vane look at you with doubt. And Julian… you let him touch my waist with those filthy, royal hands. He is mine to destroy, not yours to play with!”

“Shut up,” Vivianne whispered aloud, her body shivering violently in the dark carriage. “I’m the one keeping us alive. If I didn’t lie to him, we’d be a corpse in the garden right now.”

“You are a coward,” the original soul spat back, a sudden surge of adrenaline flooding Vivianne’s system that didn’t belong to her. Vivianne’s left hand suddenly rose without her permission, her fingers clawing into her own velvet skirt, tearing the expensive lace with a strength she shouldn’t possess. “Give me the wheel. Give me my fingers back. I will show that silver-haired bastard what an Esterhazy does to a prince who threatens her.”

“No,” Vivianne growled, fighting her own left arm, grabbing her wrist with her right hand and forcing it down onto the seat.

The internal battle was exhausting. It felt like trying to hold down a rabid dog while driving a car through a crowded intersection. She was losing her grip on her own motor functions.

The carriage squealed to a stop again.

“Your Grace,” the driver called out, his voice tight with panic. “The bridge is blocked. It’s the Prince’s personal guard.”

Vivianne looked out the small silk curtain.

The stone bridge over the river was illuminated by dozens of torches. Standing at the center of the span, his white shirt now covered by a dark, fur-lined riding cloak, was Prince Julian. He was mounted on a massive black charger, his silver hair glittering like frost under the torchlight. He hadn’t gone back to his palace. He had anticipated her flight route.

“Let me out,” the original Vivianne screamed in her skull, the pressure behind her eyes growing so intense that Vivianne felt a warm drop of blood trickle from her left nostril. “Let me kill him!”

“Stay down,” Vivianne muttered through gritted teeth.

She wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her sleeve, took a deep, shuddering breath, and forced her face into the cold, arrogant mask of the Grand Duchess. She opened the carriage door herself, stepping down into the damp night air before her driver could even drop the steps.

The wind off the river was freezing, blowing her dark hair across her face. She walked toward the line of armored guards, her heels clicking rhythmically against the stone of the bridge.

Julian watched her approach, his horse shifting restlessly beneath him. He didn’t look angry; he looked intensely, dangerously alive. The destruction of his grain silos hadn’t broken his spirit; it had validated his obsession. He finally had an enemy worthy of his bloodline.

“You’re a long way from your study, Grand Duchess,” Julian said, guiding his horse forward until the beast’s chest was only inches from her. He looked down at her from the saddle, his eyes scanning her face, pausing briefly on the faint, dark stain of blood near her nose. “My inquisitors are currently turning your estate upside down. They tell me they are looking for treasonous literature. Do you know anything about that?”

Before Vivianne could answer, her left leg took a sudden, violent step forward on its own.

Her left hand shot upward, her fingers targeting the horse’s bridle with a terrifying, aggressive precision. The original soul was trying to force a physical confrontation—trying to make the guards draw their steel so she could initiate a bloodbath.

Vivianne’s mind screamed in panic. She couldn’t let the soul take over.

Using every ounce of her willpower, she converted the aggressive gesture into something completely different. Instead of grabbing the horse, she allowed her body to stumble forward, pretending her heel had caught on the uneven cobblestones of the bridge.

She fell straight toward the horse’s flank—and toward Julian.

Julian’s instincts reacted before his intellect could. He lunged down from the saddle, his powerful arms catching her by the shoulders before she hit the stones. The momentum pulled him half out of his stirrups, his face burying into the crook of her neck as he stabilized them both.

The scent of him—sharp, cold, and electric—flooded her mind again, momentarily drowning out the screaming voice of the original soul.

“Careful, Your Highness,” Vivianne whispered directly into his ear, her voice a low, ragged purr that vibrated against his skin. Her right hand came up, her fingers locking onto the fur of his cloak, holding him close so the guards couldn’t see her face twisting in pain. “If you wanted to hold me again, you didn’t need to block a public bridge to do it.”

Julian stiffened. His grip on her shoulders tightened until it was nearly painful. He could feel her heart racing again, but this time, he also felt the violent tremor running through her entire body—the physical toll of her internal war.

“What is happening to you?” he murmured against her ear, his voice dropping low enough that the guards behind him couldn’t hear. The suspicion in his tone was mutating into something dark, protective, and deeply twisted. “You’re bleeding, Vivianne. You’re shaking. This isn’t a game anymore. What are you hiding from me?”

“Everything, Julian,” she whispered back, her eyes shutting tightly as the voice in her head gave one final, furious screech before receding back into the dark corners of her mind. “I am hiding absolutely everything.”

He didn’t sleep. He didn’t read. He simply watched her, his glass-sharp eyes tracking the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, the twitch of her fingers, and the small, dark smudge of dried blood beneath her nose. He looked like an alchemist waiting for a volatile compound to explode.

When the iron gates of Blackwater closed behind them, Vivianne realized her situation had degraded from a political crisis to an absolute psychological trap. Blackwater wasn’t a palace; it was a coastal fortress carved out of obsidian rock, surrounded on three sides by a churning, icy sea. There were no courtiers here. No gossiping ladies. No distractions.

There was only Julian, a handful of silent servants who answered only to him, and her.

“Your rooms are in the East Tower,” Julian said, his boots clicking on the damp flagstones of the courtyard as he escorted her inside. He didn’t touch her, but he walked close enough that his shadow completely blanketed her from the moonlight. “Directly adjacent to mine. For your safety, of course. The capital is… unstable right now.”

“You call it safety, Julian. I call it an arrest,” Vivianne said, her low, lazy drawl perfectly intact despite the frantic beating of her heart.

“If I wanted you arrested, Grand Duchess, you would be in the salt cells beneath the waves,” Julian murmured, stopping at the threshold of her new chambers. He leaned in slightly, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. “I am keeping you close because you are a riddle, and I have a pathological hatred of unsolved puzzles. Rest. We dine together at eight.”

The heavy oak door shut, and the lock clicked from the outside.

Vivianne didn’t waste a second. She collapsed against the door, her hands flying to the slit in her velvet sleeve. She pulled out page 116. Her breath hitched. The ink was a chaotic, boiling soup of black letters, frantically rewriting the narrative based on her forced confinement.

…Trapped within Blackwater Keep, the imposter Vivianne faces an impossible dilemma. Prince Julian has placed his personal hounds at her door and guards every exit. To survive, she must hide the shifting pages within a domestic space where privacy does not exist. Meanwhile, Julian has ordered his servants to systematically catalog her belongings. If she cannot find a secure hiding place before the midnight inspection, her secret will be laid bare…

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Vivianne hissed, her eyes scanning the room.

The chamber was large, cold, and minimalist. A massive four-poster bed with dark silk curtains, a stone fireplace, a washing basin, and a heavy mahogany wardrobe. There were no hidden compartments. No loose floorboards. Every surface was immaculate and exposed.

“Give it to me,” the original Vivianne’s voice hissed from the back of her mind, less like a roar this time and more like a poisonous snake whispering in the dark. “Let me take control. I know where the secret passage in this room is. I built it with the architect before I had him drowned. Give me my hands.”

“No,” Vivianne muttered back, grinding her teeth. “If I let you out, you’ll try to cut his throat, and we’ll both end up executed. I’ll find my own way.”

“You are a fool. He is going to dissect you piece by piece.”

Vivianne ignored the phantom ache in her skull. She ran to the heavy silk curtains of the bed. Using the small, sharp silver pin from her hair, she quickly ripped open a tiny seam in the heavy, weighted hem of the velvet drapes. She shoved page 116 deep into the lining, smoothing the fabric down until it looked entirely undisturbed.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was all she had.

Dinner was served in a small, suffocatingly intimate solar. A fire crackled in the hearth, casting a warm, amber glow over a table set for two. There were no guards inside the room—only Julian, who had changed into a loose black velvet tunic that made his silver hair stand out like moonlight against a dark sky.

Vivianne sat across from him, her posture rigid beneath her gown. She watched him pour two glasses of dark, heavy wine.

“You haven’t touched your food,” Julian observed, slicing a piece of venison with precise, surgical movements.

“I find captivity ruins my appetite,” Vivianne replied, lifting her chin. She picked up her fork, forcing her hand to remain perfectly steady. She had to eat. If she showed weakness, if she faked an illness, he would call a physician, and a physician would notice her bizarre, non-aristocratic pulse and the psychological strain tearing her apart.

Julian leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. He didn’t eat either. He just studied her. “You are an extraordinary actress, Vivianne. Or perhaps a lunatic. Yesterday you claimed you owned the board. Tonight, you look like a prisoner waiting for the executioner’s axe.”

“I am merely analyzing my opponent,” she lied smoothly, taking a small bite of the meat. “You think you have trapped me here, Julian. But perhaps I wanted to be here. Perhaps removing myself from the capital forces your inquisitors to overplay their hand.”

Julian’s eyes narrowed. The slow burn of their dynamic was shifting; the physical threat of the ballroom was gone, replaced by a suffocating domestic tension. They were two predators locked in a small cage, breathing the same air, sharing the same space, constantly testing the boundaries of each other’s masks.

He stood up slowly. He walked around the table, his movements fluid and silent, until he stopped directly behind her chair.

Vivianne’s skin pricked with goosebumps. She could feel the heat radiating from his body, the faint scent of cedarwood and sea salt enveloping her. He leaned down, his lips brushing against the shell of her ear as he spoke.

“Do you know what my servants found when they inspected your carriage, Grand Duchess?” he whispered.

Vivianne’s stomach bottomed out. She tightly gripped her napkin beneath the table, her knuckles turning white. “I cannot possibly keep track of what my staff leaves in my transport.”

“They found a scrap of paper,” Julian murmured. His hand came around her shoulder, his long fingers resting lightly against the collarbone of her gown. He dropped a tiny, torn fragment of yellowish parchment onto the table right beside her plate. “It was wedged into the seat cushions. The ink was completely illegible—just a smear of black grease. But the texture… this isn’t imperial paper, Vivianne. It doesn’t come from our mills. It doesn’t come from the southern guilds.”

He slid his hand up her neck, his thumb resting gently against the side of her jaw, tilting her head up so she was forced to look back at him. His touch was warm, possessive, and terrifyingly intimate.

“Who are you working with?” he demanded softly, his eyes boring into hers. “What is this script you keep reading in the dark? You’re playing a game that doesn’t belong to this world, and I want the rules.”

Vivianne looked up into his eyes, her lips parted. The proximity was overwhelming. She could see the faint pulse throbbing in his throat, the intense, obsessive hunger in his gaze. He didn’t want to kill her—not anymore. He wanted to possess her secrets. He wanted to unravel her until there was nothing left.

“Kill him,” the voice in her head hissed, the original Vivianne clawing at the barrier. “Grab the steak knife on the table. Ram it into his throat while he’s close. DO IT.”

Vivianne fought the urge. She forced her body to lean back into his touch, her jaw relaxing against his thumb. She let out a soft, mocking laugh that vibrated against his fingers.

“If I told you the rules, Julian,” she whispered, her eyes dropping to his lips before locking back onto his gaze, “the game would be over. And we both know you’d die of boredom without me.”

Julian stared at her, his grip on her jaw tightening for a fraction of a second, his breath catching in his throat. The tension between them was a wire stretched so tight it was vibrating. For a terrifying moment, she thought he was going to lean down and kiss her—not out of affection, but as a violent act of dominance to break her composure.

Instead, a sharp knock shattered the silence of the room.

Julian snapped back, his hand dropping from her neck as he straightened up, his face instantly locking back into a mask of cold royalty. “Enter.”

The heavy door opened, and Lord Commander Vane stepped into the solar, his black armor covered in sea spray. He didn’t look at Vivianne; he looked directly at the Prince.

“Your Highness,” Vane said, his voice grim. “The inquisitors have finished turning the Esterhazy estate. They found nothing in her study. But… a messenger arrived from the capital. The King’s personal guard has just arrested the head of the Southern Merchant Guild. They claim they found a ciphered ledger detailing a secret alliance with… the Crown Prince.”

Julian froze. The color didn’t leave his face this time; instead, a terrifying, murderous calm settled over his features. He slowly turned his head to look at Vivianne, who was still sitting calmly at the table, her heart screaming in pure, unadulterated panic.

The book had changed the timeline again. Her bluff about the southern guilds hadn’t just panicked Julian; it had triggered a butterfly effect that had exposed his treason to his father, the King.

“It seems,” Julian said, his voice dropping to a deadly, quiet register as he stared at her, “that your ‘prophecies’ are moving faster than I anticipated, Grand Duchess.”

He walked toward the door, stopping beside Vane. He didn’t look back as he gave his final order.

“Lock her in. Double the guard. If she so much as breathes loudly, let me know.”

The door slammed shut, and the heavy iron bolt slid into place with a deafening thud.

Vivianne was alone again. She ran straight to the bed, her fingers frantically tearing open the velvet seam of the curtain to pull out page 116.

She held it up to the dim candlelight. The ink was frantic, letters crashing into each other like a panicked crowd escaping a fire. When the words finally stabilized, her blood ran entirely cold.

…By accidentally exposing Prince Julian’s treason to the King, the imposter Vivianne has accelerated the execution of the main plot by three months. Civil war is now inevitable. Realizing he has been backed into a corner, Julian will launch a bloody coup of Blackwater Keep before sunrise. His first act of consolidation will be to eliminate the Grand Duchess to secure her army for himself. He will enter her chambers through the secret passage behind the hearth at exactly three in the morning, holding a silver dagger…

Vivianne stared at the paper, then slowly looked over at the dark, cold stone fireplace across the room.

It was midnight. She had exactly three hours to figure out how to survive a prince who no longer wanted her secrets—but wanted her head.

The minutes dissolved like salt in water.

One o’clock. Two o’clock.

Vivianne sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor, the changing ledger of page 116 laid flat before her. The ink didn’t soften. It remained a jagged, uncompromising sentence of death:

…Julian will enter through the hearth at three in the morning…

She looked at her hands. They were trembling. In her past life, she had never held anything more dangerous than a ceramic box cutter. She didn’t know how to parry a blade. She didn’t know how to step inside a man’s guard to break his wrist. If Julian came through that fireplace with a silver dagger, her modern intellect would only help her calculate the exact velocity of her own demise.

“He is going to bleed you dry,” the voice whispered.

This time, the original Vivianne didn’t scream. The presence at the base of her skull felt heavy, cold, and smooth—like an old coin dredged from the bottom of a swamp.

“He will pin you to that mattress, press the silver to your throat, and take your duchy before your heart stops beating. You cannot bluff a man who has already chosen war.”

“And what do you suggest?” Vivianne whispered aloud, her eyes fixed on the dark, yawning cavern of the stone hearth. “If I give you control, you’ll just plunge us into a bloodbath.”

A phantom sensation of laughter rippled through Vivianne’s chest—a dry, rattling sound that didn’t belong to her.

“I do not ask for total control. You have a strangely… efficient mind, stranger. Your lies are artistic. But you have the reflexes of a slug. Let us make an accord. A temporary co-pilot arrangement. I will give you my muscles, my years of rapier training, and the muscle memory of an Esterhazy executioner. I will let you move my limbs.”

Vivianne’s eyes narrowed. “And what is the price? Monsters like you don’t rent out their bodies for free.”

“The price is simple,” the original soul purred, its presence pressing tightly against Vivianne’s optic nerves until her vision flashed with a brief, crimson tint. “The next time you are in his presence, when the opportunity arises… you will let me choose one action. Just one. A single moment where I hold the wheel without your interference.”

“A single action? Like cutting his throat?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps something far more agonizing. Do we have a deal, data analyst? The clock is striking three.”

A deep, resonant chime echoed from the courtyard bell tower. Three heavy thuds.

Inside the stone hearth, a faint, metallic click cut through the silence of the room. The soot-stained back wall of the fireplace began to grind backward, pivoting on a central iron axle.

Vivianne didn’t have time to negotiate. Her survival instinct overrode every rule of logic.

“Deal,” she hissed into the dark. “Take the left side.”

The sensation was instantaneous and terrifying. It felt as though a gallon of liquid ice had been injected directly into her carotid artery. Her spine snapped straight with a violent, electric crack. The trembling in her fingers vanished, replaced by a terrifying, absolute stillness. Her peripheral vision expanded, the low-light shadows of the room suddenly sharpening into perfect, crystalline focus.

She was still behind the eyes, but her limbs no longer felt heavy. They felt like coiled steel.

A tall figure stepped out from the soot of the hearth.

Julian wore no cloak now. He was dressed in a dark, form-fitting leather brigandine that dampened the sound of his movements. In his right hand, he held a long, slender stiletto dagger, its silver blade blackened with oil to prevent it from catching the moonlight.

His eyes scanned the bed first, finding the pillows empty. His gaze snapped toward the floor just as Vivianne rose to her feet in a single, fluid, unhumanly graceful motion.

Julian stopped. His brow twitched by a fraction of a millimeter. He had expected to find her sleeping, or perhaps cowering in a corner. He had not expected her to be standing in the center of the room, her posture perfectly balanced, her arms hanging loosely at her sides like a duelist waiting for the signal.

“You don’t look surprised, Vivianne,” Julian said, his voice a low, lethal murmur that barely carried across the stone floor. He took a slow, diagonal step toward her, keeping the dagger low, close to his hip. “Did your secret papers tell you I was coming?”

“The architecture of Blackwater is remarkably uncreative, Julian,” Vivianne said.

The voice that came from her throat was a perfect blend of both souls—it had the data analyst’s cold, logical rhythm, but it carried the razor-sharp, aristocratic venom of the true Grand Duchess. “A hidden door behind the master hearth? My grandmother used that same passage to smuggle her lovers out of the castle forty years ago.”

Julian let out a short, breathy laugh, but his eyes remained entirely dead. “A pity the passage will be used for a shroud tonight. The King’s guards are moving on my northern strongholds. By dawn, the empire will be in flames. I cannot leave an unpredictable variable behind my lines, Vivianne. I need your army, and your army will only obey a dead duchess’s final, forged mandate.”

He lunged.

He didn’t swing wildly like a thug. He moved with the terrifying speed of an imperial prince trained by the finest swordmasters in the realm. The stiletto shot forward, a straight, blinding thrust aimed directly at the soft flesh beneath her breastbone.

In her past life, Vivianne would have frozen.

But the split-blood accord was alive. Her left leg dropped back instantly, her torso pivoting precisely three inches to the right. The silver blade sliced through the empty air, close enough to whisper against the silk of her bodice.

Before Julian could recover his balance, Vivianne’s right hand shot forward like a striking viper. Her fingers didn’t claw; they locked onto Julian’s right wrist, her thumb driving deep into the soft nerve cluster between his bones.

Julian gasped, his fingers reflexively opening. The silver dagger clattered onto the stone floor.

But he was a predator, too. Instead of pulling away from her grip, he used the momentum to slam his entire body weight forward, pinning her against the heavy mahogany wardrobe. The impact rattled the wood behind her head, her breath leaving her lungs in a sharp puff.

Julian’s left hand came up, his powerful fingers locking around her throat, forcing her head back against the wardrobe. His face was inches from hers, his silver hair wild, his chest heaving against her ribs.

“Where did you learn to move like that?” he hissed, his grip on her neck tightening just enough to restrict her breath, though his eyes were wide with a sudden, chaotic flash of genuine shock. “The old Vivianne fought with a rapier. You… you didn’t even look at my hand. You knew the nerve strike before I even finished the thrust.”

Vivianne couldn’t speak through the pressure on her throat, but she didn’t need to.

The original soul inside her head was ecstatic, feeding her body a surge of dark, malicious joy. Vivianne’s left hand rose, her fingers wrapping around the back of Julian’s neck, her nails digging into his skin through his hair, pulling him down closer until their lips were almost touching.

The physical chemistry between them was toxic, a volatile mixture of mutual strangulation and intoxicating proximity. He was trying to crush her life out; she was holding him to her like a lover.

“Kill me then, Julian,” she choked out, her eyes burning into his with a terrifying, unblinking intensity. “But if you take my life… who is going to tell you how the story ends?”

Julian froze. His fingers remained locked around her throat, the skin of her neck turning white beneath his pressure, but he didn’t squeeze. He stared at her, his breathing ragged, his gaze dropping to her lips before snapping back to her pupils. He was looking for the data analyst. He was looking for the demon. He was looking for anything that would explain the terrifying riddle of the woman in his arms.

“You’re a monster,” he whispered, his voice trembling with a dark, obsessive fascination that was rapidly mutating from hatred into a sick form of devotion. “A beautiful, treasonous monster.”

“Now,” the voice in her head screamed, the original Vivianne thrashing against the bars of her mind. “The accord! He is open! Let me take the action! Let me drive my fingers into his eyes!”

Vivianne felt her left arm twitch. The original soul was pulling at the wheel, ready to claim her price right there in the dark, with the prince completely vulnerable.

The original soul never got to claim her price.

Before the twitch in Vivianne’s left arm could turn into a physical strike, a deafening roar shattered the midnight air. The stone floor beneath their feet buckled violently, pitching them both sideways. The heavy mahogany wardrobe tore free from its wall mounts, slamming facedown onto the stones with a splintering crash that filled the room with a choke of splinters and old dust.

Outside, the courtyard erupted into a chorus of frantic screaming, the rhythmic clang-clang-clang of the alarm bell cutting through the chaos.

Julian’s hand snapped away from her throat. He recovered his footing with the fluid grace of a soldier, his silver hair dusted with white plaster from the ceiling. His gaze flew to the window, where the dark Atlantic night had been replaced by a brilliant, towering pillar of orange fire.

“The arsenal,” Julian muttered, his voice dead and cold. “The King’s vanguard didn’t wait for dawn. They’re already inside the walls.”

The Weaver, a realization flashed through the data analyst’s mind. It wasn’t the King’s men. Her previous bluff to the assassin had told him that Julian’s coin was worthless and his coup was compromised. The Red Weaver hadn’t waited around to be verified; he had struck first to burn the fortress down around them.

Julian didn’t look at her. He lunged downward, his fingers sweeping across the stone floor until they found the black-oiled handle of his stiletto dagger. He straightened up, his eyes locking onto hers through the billowing smoke.

“The East Tower is a bottleneck,” Julian said, his voice entirely flat as he grabbed her wrist—not with the suffocating pressure of an interrogator, but with the brutal, pragmatic grip of a captain dragging a hostage. “If the gates fall, my own guards will turn your head over to the King to buy their pardons. You’re coming with me.”

“Through the hearth?” Vivianne gasped, her voice raspy from his previous grip on her neck.

“Through the hearth.”

He dragged her toward the dark, soot-stained opening. The original soul inside her head was throwing a violent, screaming tantrum, furious that her dark bargain had been interrupted by a military strike.

“Kill him now! The blade is in his hand! He is going to lock you in a deeper box!”

Vivianne ignored the mental static, using her right hand to frantically tear the velvet bed curtain as she passed it. Her fingers caught the ripped hem. She tore page 116 free from the lining, cramming the rough, warm parchment into the front of her bodice just as Julian hauled her into the pitch-black throat of the fireplace.

The passage inside the walls was narrow, damp, and smelled of centuries of dead bats and cold soot. They moved in absolute darkness, Julian leading the way by the sound of his boots scraping against the steep, descending stone steps.

Vivianne’s velvet train bunched around her ankles, a constant tripping hazard, but the split-blood accord was still humming in her veins. The original soul’s martial reflexes kept her upright, her feet finding the center of each treacherous step with an eerie, mechanical precision.

Above them, the fortress groaned. Every few minutes, another muffled explosion vibrated through the stone walls, sending showers of fine dust down into their hair.

“Julian,” she called out to the dark shape ahead of her. “Where does this lead?”

“The sea caves beneath the cliffs,” his voice echoed back, tight and strained. “There is a skiff hidden in the lower grotto. If we clear the harbor before the royal blockade closes the mouth of the bay, we can reach the western garrisons by nightfall.”

“We?” Vivianne scoffed, her voice carrying that sharp, aristocratic edge. “You mean your army, Julian. My banners will not march for a prince who keeps their duchess in chains.”

Suddenly, Julian stopped.

Vivianne slammed into his back, her nose burying into the cold leather of his brigandine. Before she could step back, Julian spun around in the narrow corridor. He didn’t have room to pin her, so he simply pressed his forearm flat against her chest, locking her against the damp stone wall of the tunnel.

The darkness was total, but she could hear his ragged, uneven breathing just inches from her face.

“Listen to me, Vivianne,” he whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying blend of adrenaline and dark, unresolved obsession. “The world we left at the top of those stairs is gone. My father knows about the guilds. Your enforcers know you stayed the purge. If the King takes you, you are a traitor. If your own lords find you, you are a lunatic who lost her nerve. You have no army left to command unless I give it back to you.”

He leaned closer, his forehead resting against hers for a fraction of a second in the dark—a gesture so raw and desperate it made her heart stop.

“You told me you own the board,” he murmured, his breath hot against her cold cheek. “Prove it. Tell me what happens next. Tell me how we survive the night, or I swear to the gods, I will drop us both into the sea and end this riddle once and for all.”

Vivianne felt the paper against her breastbone growing intensely hot. It was burning through her chemise, a sharp, localized heat that meant the ink was rewriting the narrative at a frantic pace. She needed to read it. She needed a single spark of light to see what the book required of her.

“I can save us, Julian,” she whispered back, her fingers locking onto his leather sleeve, her thumb finding the pulse point on his wrist and pressing it in a mirror of his earlier gesture. “But I need light. I cannot see the board in the dark.”

Julian didn’t answer immediately. The heavy silence of the tunnel was broken only by the distant, rhythmic thoom-thoom of the burning fortress collapsing above them.

Then, his forearm lifted from her chest.

“If this is another trick, Grand Duchess,” he murmured into the pitch-black air, “it will be your last.”

A sharp, metallic clink echoed in the narrow space. A second later, a brilliant spark erupted in the dark, raining tiny orange fireflies down toward the stone steps. Julian held a small, flat piece of flint and a steel striker, his face illuminated for a fraction of a second in the violent, ghostly flare.

Vivianne didn’t waste a heartbeat. Her hand dove into the front of her bodice, her fingers pulling out the coarse, yellowed parchment of page 116. The paper was vibrating, nearly scalding against her skin.

“Strike it again,” she commanded, her voice dropping its lazy drawl, becoming raw and sharp. “And hold it close.”

Julian struck the steel. A steady, sizzling spark caught the edge of a tiny piece of charred linen he held in his palm, casting a fragile, amber glow over the paper. He leaned over her shoulder, his chest pressing against her back, his silver hair brushing her cheek as his eyes locked onto the page.

Vivianne’s heart stopped.

The ink was a frantic, writhing nest of black letters. Right before their eyes, the words settled into a terrifying blueprint. Julian was looking directly at it. He couldn’t read the script—to his eyes, the magical ink likely appeared as a blurred, ciphered mess—but he could see the structure.

Vivianne scanned the text frantically, her data-analyst brain translating the cold reality of the plot while her mouth prepared to execute the ultimate lie.

…The skiff in the lower grotto is a trap. Prince Julian’s primary lieutenant, Captain Thorne, has already surrendered the sea caves to the King’s vanguard in exchange for a ducal pardon. The first person to step onto the grotto floor will be impaled by three crossbow bolts fired from the eastern ledge. To survive, Julian must leave the skiff behind and scale the wet iron chains of the old sea-elevator, which leads directly to the sheer cliffs where the Red Weaver’s transport horses are tied…

“Well?” Julian’s whisper was a hot breath against her ear, his thumb brushing the steel to keep the tiny ember alive. “What does your ‘board’ say, Vivianne? Who has compromised us?”

Vivianne swallowed the lump of terror in her throat. She looked at the text, took a deep breath, and began to read out loud, changing the words on the fly to weave a completely different narrative.

“It says… the King’s shadow-catchers have intercepted your cipher,” she lied smoothly, her voice echoing softly off the damp stone walls. “They didn’t strike the fortress by accident, Julian. Your lieutenant, Captain Thorne… he has turned his coat. He has already surrendered the lower grotto to the royal vanguard.”

Behind her, she felt Julian’s entire body go rigidly still. The tiny ember in his hand wavered. “Thorne? Thorne has been with my house since the Western campaigns. He wouldn’t.”

“He would, and he has,” Vivianne snapped, her aristocratic venom returning to mask her panic. She pretended to trace a line of text on the paper with her finger. “The text is absolute. It says three crossbowmen are currently stationed on the eastern ledge of the sea cave. The moment we step onto the grotto floor to reach your skiff, they will drop us both.”

Julian’s breath hit her neck in a sharp, ragged puff. He was a master strategist, and he was looking for the flaw in her logic. “If the grotto is a kill zone, we are dead. There is no other exit from the sea caves. The water is a boiling reef.”

“There is the old sea-elevator,” Vivianne read, her eyes scanning the changing page, her heart hammering against her ribs as she translated the book’s escape route into her own manufactured prophecy. “The iron chains are still intact. We scale the chains to the upper cliffs. The… the Southern Guilds have left transport horses tied at the ridge. We take the ridge, and we bypass the blockade entirely.”

She had cleverly woven her previous lie about the guilds into the new truth of the book, making her overall narrative sound like one seamless, omniscient master plan.

Julian stared down at the paper, then snapped his gaze to the profile of her face. The amber light of the dying spark caught the intense, calculated focus in his glass-sharp eyes. He was looking at a woman who had just single-handedly dismantled his entire military inner circle using a scrap of paper in a dark tunnel.

“The sea-elevator chains are rusted through,” Julian whispered, his face so close his lips nearly brushed her cheek. “Scaling them in the dark is suicide.”

“Staying here is an execution, Julian,” she countered softly, turning her head just enough to look directly into his eyes. “Choose your death.”

The spark died. The darkness swallowed them whole again.

For three agonizing seconds, neither of them moved. Vivianne could hear the heavy, frantic beating of his heart against her back, mirroring her own. The slow burn of their proximity was suffocating; he was a prince who had just lost his kingdom, and she was an imposter holding his only lifeline.

Suddenly, Julian let out a low, dark chuckle—a sound laced with a dangerous, obsessive surrender.

“You really are a magnificent monster, Vivianne,” he murmured in the dark.

His hand came down, his fingers wrapping around her waist with a tight, possessive grip that pulled her firmly against his side. He didn’t threaten her with the stiletto this time. He simply held her close as he began to guide her down the remaining steps.

“Lead the way, Grand Duchess,” Julian whispered into the black air. “Let us go see if your horses are waiting.”

The air at the bottom of the tunnel turned thick with the smell of brine and burnt salt.

Julian kept his hand locked onto Vivianne’s wrist, pulling her flat against the damp limestone wall as the stairs finally leveled out into the lower grotto. Ahead of them, the narrow tunnel opened up into a massive, yawning cavern where the dark Atlantic tide crashed violently against the jagged rocks below.

A single, iron-caged lantern hung from the bow of the small wooden skiff floating in the black water. The light was weak, casting sickly, dancing shadows across the grotto floor.

“Stay,” Julian breathed into her ear, his grip tightening until her bones clicked.

Vivianne didn’t argue. She leaned back into his shoulder, her lungs burning from the soot-heavy air, her eyes scanning the shadows. Her bodice still felt warm where page 116 sat pressed against her skin.

Across the cavern, standing right on the slick stone edge beside the skiff, was Captain Thorne. He was a massive man encased in the silver-and-blue plate armor of the prince’s elite guard. He wasn’t looking toward the tunnel; he was staring up at the eastern ledge, his hand resting casually on the pommel of his longsword.

The silence of the cave was absolute, save for the rhythmic, deafening roar of the tide.

Then, Thorne raised his left hand. He didn’t wave. He simply extended two fingers toward the darkness of the high eastern gallery.

A sharp, metallic clack-clack echoed off the cavern roof.

It was the unmistakable sound of a heavy military windlass drawing back a steel crossbow string. From the deep shadows of the eastern ledge, three small, red-feathered bolts caught the faint lantern light, their steel tips aimed directly at the exact path Vivianne and Julian would have taken to reach the boat.

Julian’s entire body went rigid.

“The eastern ledge,” Julian whispered, his voice so quiet it was nearly swallowed by the sound of the waves. It didn’t sound like a prince’s voice anymore; it sounded like an executioner’s ledger. “Three shooters. Exactly as your paper scribbled.”

He slowly turned his head to look down at her in the dim, reflected light of the grotto. The shock on his face had mutated into something terrifyingly profound. The suspicion was gone, replaced by a raw, naked reverence that made Vivianne’s blood run cold. He didn’t think she was a spy anymore. He didn’t think she was working with the guilds or the King.

He thought she was an oracle. He thought she possessed the literal eyes of a god.

“How?” Julian murmured, his face inches from hers, his silver hair brushing against her forehead as he stared into her pupils. “How could you possibly know the layout of his betrayal before Thorne even conceived it?”

Vivianne let a slow, lazy smile touch her lips, though internally her data-analyst mind was screaming at her to keep the bluff alive. She reached up with her free hand, her fingers lightly tracing the hard line of his jaw, letting the cold gold of her signet ring bite into his skin.

“I told you, Julian,” she whispered back, her voice carrying that lethal, dual-souled drawl. “I own the board. You are merely a piece I chose to move. Now… do we take the sea-elevator, or would you like to stay and ask Thorne if he prefers gold or silver for your head?”

Julian’s breath hitched. For a fraction of a second, his gaze dropped to her lips, a chaotic flare of intense, toxic attraction blinding his tactical focus. He was completely, hopelessly ensnared by the riddle of her omniscience.

“We take the elevator,” Julian said, his fingers sliding down from her wrist to lock tightly with hers, pulling her back into the pitch-black secondary tunnel toward the iron chains. “And when this night is over, Grand Duchess… you are going to tell me exactly what my future holds.”

The secondary tunnel did not open to the sky; it terminated at a jagged, vertical fissure in the cliffside where the salt spray hissed through the black stone like an angry spirit.

Looking down, there was only the boiling, white foam of the Atlantic smashing against the sharp reef a hundred feet below. Looking up, a pair of massive, links-thick iron chains hung down from an invisible gallows on the cliff’s edge. They were the skeletal remains of the old sea-elevator. The wooden platform had rotted away decades ago. The iron pulleys at the top were seized with red rust.

There was no cage. There was no floor. There was only the vertical drop and the iron.

“The pulley is dead,” Julian said, his voice flat against the roar of the wind. He stepped to the edge of the chasm, testing the nearest chain with his booted foot. The massive iron links groaned, clanging dully against the rock. “We climb. Link by link.”

“In this dress?” Vivianne asked, her low drawl sounding absurd against the backdrop of an impending military collapse.

Julian turned his head. The icy sea wind caught his silver hair, whipping it across his face. Without a word, he stepped close to her. His hands went to the hem of her obsidian-colored velvet gown. Before she could protest, his fingers wrapped around the heavy fabric and tore. He ripped the long, cumbersome train straight up to her knees, exposing the white silk of her stockings and the practical riding boots she had worn to the feast.

“Better?” he asked, his eyes tracking up the line of her legs before locking back onto her gaze.

“Ruined,” she retorted, though her heart did a violent, erratic hop that had nothing to do with the original soul.

“I will buy you ten more when I take back the capital,” Julian murmured, his voice dropping into that quiet, obsessive register. “Hold onto my back. We climb the same chain. If you lose your grip, I will catch you. If I lose mine, we feed the sharks together.”

He didn’t wait for her consent. Julian lunged out over the chasm, his gloved hands locking onto the massive, frozen links of the left chain. The iron shrieked under his weight.

Vivianne took a deep breath, fighting the sudden, paralyzing vertigo of a modern data analyst who had never climbed anything higher than a corporate stairwell. She stepped out, her hands wrapping around the iron link directly above his.

The metal was brutally cold, coated in a slick, frozen glaze of sea spray that threatened to numb her fingers within seconds. The split-blood accord inside her head hummed back to life, the original Vivianne’s muscle memory locking her forearms into place, but the physical strain was entirely real.

For the first twenty feet, the climb was a mechanical nightmare.

Every time Julian hauled his body up a link, his shoulders pressed directly against her thighs. His breath came in heavy, ragged gasps that she could feel through the leather of his brigandine. They were moving as a single, multi-limbed creature, their bodies forced into an agonizingly intimate rhythm. When his foot slipped on a patch of black ice, his hits slammed back against her torso, pinning her flat against the iron chain over the empty air.

Vivianne gasped, her fingers slipping by a millimeter.

Instantly, Julian’s left arm shot backward. He didn’t grab the chain; he wrapped his powerful, leather-clad forearm around her waist, locking her pelvis hard against his spine, bracing his boots against a narrow ridge in the stone wall to anchor them both.

The position was suffocating. The roar of the sea below was deafening, the freezing wind clawing at their hair, but the space between their bodies was burning hot. Vivianne was pressed entirely against his back, her chest heaving against his shoulders, her lips inches from the cold skin of his neck.

“Don’t look down,” Julian hissed through his teeth, his forearm tightening around her waist until she could barely draw breath. He was trembling from the sheer exertion of holding both their weights over the abyss. “Look at me. Look at my hair. Keep your eyes on me, Vivianne.”

“I am… looking,” she gasped out, her fingers white as they clawed back onto the frozen iron.

She wasn’t looking at a prince anymore. She was looking at a man who was entirely, terrifyingly hyper-fixated on her survival. The dark, worshipful dependency she had triggered in him by proving her “omniscience” had mutated. He wasn’t just keeping his oracle alive; he was holding onto her as if she were the only solid object in a world that had completely dissolved into ash.

“He is weak now,” the voice of the original soul whispered in her skull, the presence scratching frantically at her temples. “His left hand is off the iron. One push. One sharp drop of your heel into his kidney, and he falls into the reef. The accord, stranger! Let me take my one action!”

The paper against Vivianne’s breastbone flared with a sudden, blistering heat. It was scorching her skin through her chemise, a sharp, localized burn that meant the ledger was waiting for the kill. The choice was vibrating in her blood.

Julian felt her stiffen against him. He shifted his head slightly, his glass-sharp eyes catching hers in the dark chasm. Even hanging over a hundred-foot drop, his gaze was dark, heavy, and laced with a toxic, inescapable gravity.

“If you are going to betray me, Grand Duchess,” Julian whispered, his lips brushing the stray strands of her hair whipped by the wind, “do it now. Because if we clear the top of this cliff… I am never letting you go.”

The snow at the top of the cliff was fresh, a cold white sheet that swallowed the sound of their ragged breathing.

Julian tumbled over the rocky ledge first, his leather brigandine scraping against the frozen dirt as he hauled Vivianne up behind him. The moment her boots touched solid ground, her knees completely buckled. The sheer physical toll of the hundred-foot climb—combined with the psychic weight of fighting the original soul—left her entirely drained.

She collapsed into the snow, her chest heaving, the torn fragments of her obsidian velvet gown sprawling around her like broken wings.

Julian didn’t stand up either. He rolled onto his back beside her, staring up at the dark, bruised sky where the distant orange glow of Blackwater Keep was still painting the clouds. His face was pale, his silver hair damp with sea spray and melting snow. For a long minute, the only sound was the howling of the wind off the Atlantic and the deep, heavy rhythm of their lungs.

Then, Julian shifted. He rose onto one elbow, his glass-sharp eyes immediately locking back onto her face with that same dark, unblinking intensity. He didn’t look like a prince who had just lost his fortress; he looked like a man who had just found his religion.

“The paper,” he murmured, his voice low and gravelly from the cold. “Pull it out, Vivianne. Let us see what the board requires of us now.”

Vivianne’s hand was already moving. The front of her bodice felt like it was actively on fire; the parchment was scorching her skin, a localized heat so intense she could smell the faint scent of singed silk. With trembling fingers, she reached inside her chemise and pulled out page 116.

The transformation was horrific.

The ink was no longer black. It had mutated into a deep, wet crimson, the letters bubbling and writhing across the fibers like fresh blood on fresh snow. It was rewriting the narrative with a violent, frantic velocity. Julian leaned over her shoulder, his chest pressing against her back to shield the page from the wind, his breath hot against her freezing ear. He couldn’t read the shifting, magical script, but he could feel the heat radiating from the page.

Vivianne scanned the blood-red text, her data-analyst brain desperately processing the new reality of the plot. Her heart completely stopped.

…By swearing never to release the imposter, Prince Julian has permanently shattered the original timeline. His calculated political ambition has dissolved into a toxic, fatal obsession with the Grand Duchess. Because of this mutation, the Red Weaver has realized that executing Julian is no longer enough to claim the King’s bounty. The assassin has changed his target. He has realized that to break the Prince, he must first slaughter the Oracle. The Weaver is currently waiting in the treeline by the transport horses, his silver threads prepared to sever Vivianne’s throat the moment she steps into the clearing…

Vivianne’s lungs seized. The book hadn’t just changed the plot; it had put a target directly on her back. She was no longer a side character hiding behind a villainess’s mask. She was the main obstacle.

“He is going to watch you die,” the original Vivianne’s voice hissed from the dark corners of her mind, a jagged, malicious laugh scraping against her consciousness. “The Weaver will take your head, and my prince will burn the rest of the world to ash in your memory. Let me out, stranger. Let me take the wheel before the silver cuts our throat.”

“Shut up,” Vivianne whispered through gritted teeth, her fingers clutching the edges of the burning paper.

“What does it say?” Julian demanded, his grip tightening on her shoulder, his eyes boring into hers. He had heard her whisper, his suspicion instantly flaring. “Why is the ink red, Vivianne? What did I change when I held you on that chain?”

Vivianne looked from the bleeding text up to the silver-haired prince. She couldn’t tell him the truth. She couldn’t tell him that his obsession with her was the very thing that was going to get her killed. She had to weave the ultimate counter-bluff to turn his obsession into her shield.

“The board has shifted, Julian,” she said, her voice dropping into that smooth, lethal, dual-souled drawl despite the panic hammering in her chest. She folded the burning page and shoved it back into her bodice. “Your vow has rippled through the shadow networks. The Red Weaver… he knows we survived the grotto. He didn’t retreat.”

Julian’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “Where is he?”

“He is waiting in the treeline by the transport horses,” Vivianne lied smoothly, turning her face just enough so her lips were inches from his. “He thinks we are weak from the climb. He thinks we are running blindly into his trap. He is waiting to ambush us the moment we enter the clearing.”

The reaction was instantaneous.

The submissive, worshipful reverence in Julian’s expression didn’t vanish—it weaponized. A terrifying, murderous calm settled over his features. He slowly rose to his feet, pulling Vivianne up with him, his hand locking onto her waist with a brutal, possessive grip that felt entirely inescapable.

“He thinks he can take what belongs to the Crown,” Julian whispered, his voice a low, vibrating growl that sent a shiver of genuine dread and electricity straight down her spine. He reached down, his fingers lightly checking the oiled hilt of his stiletto dagger. “Let him wait. We are not going to run from the Weaver, Grand Duchess. We are going to hunt him.”

He looked toward the dark line of trees just a hundred yards away, his face locking into the mask of a ruthless commander who had just found a reason to fight.

“Tell me exactly where he stands,” Julian murmured, his eyes flashing with a dark, obsessive hunger as he looked back down at her. “Tell me his movements, my oracle. And I will leave his blood on the snow before the sun rises.”

The treeline did not offer shelter; it offered shadows that breathed.

Julian kept his hand anchored to the small of Vivianne’s back, pressing her forward into the low-hanging branches of the pine trees. The snow underfoot was deep and soft, completely muffling the sound of their boots. The only indicator of their presence was the faint, white plumes of their breath rising into the freezing night air.

Fifty yards ahead, through a break in the dark pines, Vivianne could see the black silhouettes of three transport horses tied to a low iron rail. They stood perfectly still, their coats dusted with frost.

“He’s here,” Julian whispered, his lips brushing against her ear. He had his stiletto dagger held low, the blade hidden against the inside of his forearm. “Where is the first strike, Vivianne?”

Vivianne reached into her bodice, her fingers momentarily brushing the scalding, blood-red parchment of page 116. She didn’t need to pull it out. The text was already burned into her mind’s eye, the letters glowing like hot coals behind her eyelids.

“The snow between the two split pines,” she murmured, her voice a barely audible thread. “He has strung the silver threads across the path at ankle height. If you step through, the tension will trip a set of counter-weighted spikes in the branches above.”

Julian’s gaze snapped to the split pines. In the dim moonlight, the space between the trees looked entirely empty. But as he tilted his head, a single, razor-thin glint of silver caught the light—a wire no thicker than a strand of hair, suspended just inches above the snow.

A cold, lethal smile touched the corner of Julian’s mouth. “A primitive toy for an imperial assassin.”

“Let me take it,” the voice of the original Vivianne suddenly roared, slamming into the base of the data analyst’s skull like a physical blow. The internal pressure was blinding, making Vivianne’s left eye twitch violently. “The Weaver is a tool of the Southern Guilds! I know the phrase to turn him against the Crown! Give me my tongue, stranger, or I will paralyze our lungs!”

Vivianne stumbled, her hand flying to her temple as her vision blurred into a terrifying smear of crimson and black. Her left leg locked up entirely, dragging in the snow.

Julian caught her instantly. He pulled her flat against his chest, his powerful arms wrapping around her waist to keep her from collapsing into the drifts. “Vivianne? What is it? Is he moving?”

“The… the shadow,” she choked out, her teeth chattering as she fought her own nervous system. She forced her right hand to grip Julian’s leather brigandine, using his physical warmth to anchor her consciousness. “The Weaver isn’t behind the horses. He is above them. In the canopy of the great oak to the left.”

Julian didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask how she knew. He simply accepted her words as absolute, divine truth.

Leaving her braced against a pine trunk, Julian melted into the shadows. He didn’t take the path. He looped wide to the right, stepping over the hidden tripwires with the effortless grace of a hunting cat, his dark cloak blending perfectly with the bark of the trees.

Vivianne leaned against the frozen bark, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as the internal war reached its peak.

“You are a parasite!” the original soul screamed, her phantom fingers clawing at the boundaries of Vivianne’s mind. “You are playing a game you don’t understand! If Julian kills the Weaver, we lose our only lever against the King!”

“I am the one… keeping us alive,” Vivianne hissed aloud into the wind, her knuckles turning white as she squeezed her own hands. “If you take over, you’ll just make us a target. Stay. Down.”

With a final, agonizing wrench of her own willpower, Vivianne slammed the mental barrier shut. The screaming voice receded into a dull, furious thrum at the back of her brain.

A sharp, metallic ping cut through the quiet of the woods.

Up in the canopy of the great oak, a dark shape suddenly dropped from the branches, descending toward the snow on a web of glittering silver threads. The Red Weaver had realized his trap was bypassed. But before his boots could touch the ground, Julian exploded from the underbrush.

The collision was brutal. Julian didn’t use the dagger to kill—not yet. He tackled the assassin mid-air, the two men crashing into the deep snow in a tangle of limbs and dark wool.

The Weaver was fast, his long fingers whipping a loop of gray silk toward Julian’s throat. But Julian had the advantage of absolute surprise. He slammed his forearm across the assassin’s windpipe, pinning him to the frozen earth, while the black-oiled tip of his stiletto hovered a mere millimeter from the Weaver’s left eye.

“Move,” Julian whispered, his voice dripping with a terrifying, calm malice, “and I will see what color your brains are against the snow.”

The Weaver froze. His breath came in short, sharp gasps, his gray-gloved hands slowly relaxing as the silver threads coiled harmlessly in the drifts. He didn’t look at Julian. Instead, his dark eyes rolled past the prince’s shoulder, locking directly onto Vivianne as she walked slowly out of the shadows.

“The Oracle,” the Weaver rasped, a blood-flecked smile stretching across his pale lips. “Julian… you think you’ve caught a prize. You don’t realize she’s the one writing the obituary for us all.”

Julian didn’t look back at her. His gaze remained locked on the assassin, his fingers tightening on the hilt of his dagger. “Give me a reason not to open your throat right here, Weaver.”

Vivianne stopped at the edge of the clearing, her torn velvet gown trailing in the bloody snow. She looked at the two men, then reached into her bodice, her fingers sliding across the parchment of page 116.

The crimson ink was shifting again, the letters forming a cold, clinical conclusion.

…By capturing the Red Weaver alive, the Incompetent Villainess secures her first true pawn. If Julian executes the assassin, the Southern Guilds will launch a full retaliatory strike against the western garrisons, destroying the Prince’s last hope of a coup. To survive the winter, the beast must be brought to heel…

“Don’t kill him, Julian,” Vivianne said, her low, lazy drawl returning with absolute, terrifying control.

Julian stiffened. He slowly turned his head, looking up at her from the snow. The moonlight caught the wild, obsessive hunger in his eyes—he was waiting for her command, completely dependent on the next line of her prophecy.

“He is more useful to us with his throat intact,” she murmured, stepping closer until her shadow fell over both of them. “The Southern Guilds still think he is hunting you. Let us give them a different story to read.”

Julian stared at her for one more agonizing second, his breath hitching as his gaze tracked the cold, brilliant mask of her face. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, he pulled the dagger back from the assassin’s eye.

“As my oracle commands,” Julian whispered.

Book 2 will come out soon!

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