CHAPTER ONE: THE WRONG BODY
The first thing Yeon noticed was the corset.
It was not the high vaulted ceiling above her, ribbed with gold filigree. Not the marble floor beneath her silk slippers, cold even through the leather. Not the dozen candles burning in a chandelier the size of a small country, or the sharp smell of something floral and aristocratic that she did not have a name for.
It was the corset. Because the corset was trying to kill her.
Breathe, she told herself. You are Yeon Cassin. You are twenty-six years old. You wrote this corset. You gave it twelve hooks in the back because you thought it sounded dramatic. You are a menace.
She breathed. The corset permitted it, marginally.
She was standing in a dressing room she recognized from her own chapter notes. Pale blue walls. Vanity table with a mirror framed in carved silver vines. A window overlooking the east garden where — she checked the light automatically — the sun was roughly two hours past midday.
She had died at approximately 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. She'd been eating noodles and rereading Chapter 89 to fix a pacing issue. She remembered the noodles going cold. She remembered nothing after.
She looked in the mirror.
Lady Isaveth Crane looked back.
Dark hair, meticulously pinned. A face that Yeon had described in her character notes as "the specific kind of beautiful that makes people uncomfortable, like a very sharp knife displayed in a glass case." High cheekbones. Eyes the color of winter — a pale, particular grey that read as either silver or storm depending on the light.
Three silver-black scar marks across the collarbone, visible at the neckline of her gown.
Yeon had written those scars into Isaveth's character sheet at 1 a.m. to make her look more sinister. She had not, at the time, thought about what broken covenant oaths felt like from the inside.
She pressed her fingers to the nearest scar. It burned, faintly, like old grief.
Right, she thought. Okay. I am inside my own novel. I am the villain. I am going to be executed in approximately three hundred and eleven chapters. That's fine. That's completely fine. I have information. I have time. I have—
A knock at the door.
"My lady." Her head maid's voice — Idris, forty-two, fiercely loyal to the original Isaveth in a way that was going to be a problem. "The Crown Prince has arrived early. He is requesting an audience. Immediately."
Yeon's stomach dropped.
Dorian Ashvane. Crown Prince. Male Lead #1. The man she had written as the cold, calculating apex of the five — the one who would, in Chapter 90, publicly strip Isaveth of her family's Great Seal in front of the full court. The one who tested everyone, trusted no one, and had already filed Isaveth under irredeemable in his personal ledger of human beings.
He was also the one most likely to notice something was different about her.
She had approximately forty-five seconds before Idris opened that door.
What would Isaveth do?
Yeon straightened her spine against the prison of the corset. She let her face settle into the expression she'd written a hundred times and never had to wear: beautiful. Unreadable. Utterly unbothered by the inconvenience of the most powerful man in the empire showing up uninvited.
"Tell His Highness," she said, in a voice that came out steadier than she deserved, "that I will receive him in the blue sitting room. In ten minutes."
A pause. Isaveth, apparently, would have said immediately.
"...Yes, my lady."
Yeon exhaled.
Ten minutes to remember everything I know about Dorian Ashvane. Ten minutes to become a woman I wrote to be hated.
She looked at her reflection one more time.
Chapter one, she thought grimly. Let's not die in chapter one.
