I Reincarnated As The Villain In My Worst Book

Chapter Three: The Perfect Heroine

…

*I was beginning to worry you wouldn't be yourself again.*

I turned the sentence over so many times that morning it stopped sounding like words and started sounding like a puzzle I was too tired to solve.

There were two ways to read it. The first was harmless: Seraphina had been acting strangely lately — for whatever original, pre-Eliana reason — and Elara had simply noticed, the way a kind person notices when a friend seems off. Nothing sinister. Nothing that required a second look.

The second way to read it required a woman I hadn't even met yet to have already been paying very close attention to changes in a person she supposedly had no reason to watch that closely.

I filed it away. Not because I believed the second reading. Because I couldn't yet prove I didn't.

---

I got the rest out of Mira, the same way I'd gotten everything else — sideways, over the sound of a hairbrush, in a tone that suggested idle curiosity rather than desperate reconnaissance.

"Lady Rosewyn seems very fond of me," I said, which was either true or an excellent lie, and I genuinely didn't know which yet.

Mira's mouth did something complicated in the mirror. "She's very gracious, my lady. More than most would be, given—" She stopped herself.

"Given?"

"Given how you've treated her." A pause, careful. "You've never cared for her. Everyone knows that. And she's never once said an unkind word back. The whole court thinks very highly of her for it."

Of course they did. That was the entire design. I'd built Elara to be un-hateable, and apparently three years later she was still doing her job perfectly.

"She's remarkably patient, then," I said.

"She always seems to know," Mira said, half to herself, tugging a knot loose. "Whatever mood you're going to be in. Whatever you're about to do. It's like she can tell before you've decided yourself."

The brush kept moving. Mira didn't seem to think she'd said anything worth pausing over.

I did.

---

The summons came before lunch — a folded note, Elara's handwriting looping and pretty in a way that made me irrationally certain she'd practiced it. *Would you join me in the rose garden this afternoon? I've missed our talks.*

I read it twice and felt something cold settle low in my stomach, because I knew this garden. Not the flowers in it — I'd never described the flowers, past-me hadn't cared about flowers — but the *event.* Somewhere in this story, in a rose garden very much like this one, Elara's mother's necklace was going to vanish, and it was going to turn up in Seraphina's things, and nobody was going to believe a single word Seraphina said in her own defense.

I just didn't know when.

Not today, maybe. Maybe not this week. But it was coming, the way weather comes — visible from a distance, impossible to stop by staring at it hard enough.

I went anyway. What else was I supposed to do — decline an invitation from the one woman in this kingdom everyone would notice me being rude to?

---

Elara was already there when I arrived, sitting exactly the way I'd have described her if I still wrote like that — soft light, soft dress, hands folded like she'd been arranged by someone with excellent taste.

And around her neck: a necklace. Pearls, an old-fashioned setting, the kind of thing that gets called *sentimental* in a way that means *worth more than it looks.*

Still there. Still around her neck. Whatever was going to happen to it hadn't happened yet.

I filed that away too, and hated how long my list was getting.

"Seraphina." Elara rose, taking both my hands like we did this often, which — for all I knew — we did. "I'm so glad you came."

"Of course," I said, and let her lead me to the bench, thinking: *watch her. Say very little. Watch everything.*

---

Cassian arrived without being announced, the way people do when they're used to rooms rearranging themselves around their presence rather than the other way around.

I'd built him out of a checklist, once — tall, dark hair too long to be fashionable and too well-kept to be careless, eyes the grey of a sky that hasn't decided on weather yet. On paper he'd been an aesthetic. In person he was something closer to a held breath.

He didn't smile at me. He looked at me the way you look at a door you're fairly sure is locked but haven't tested yet.

"Lady Valemont." A nod, precisely as warm as etiquette required and not one degree warmer. "I wasn't aware you and Lady Rosewyn still kept up your afternoon talks."

Elara laughed, easy. "We never stopped."

Cassian's eyes didn't move to her. They stayed on me.

"No," he said. "I don't suppose you did."

---

He sat. He made conversation that wasn't conversation — it had the shape of small talk and the weight of something else entirely, and I understood, somewhere around the second exchange, exactly what he was doing.

*He's testing me.*

"You seemed quite composed after the incident with the Crown Prince," he said, turning a cup of tea he had no intention of drinking. "Given the circumstances."

I had no idea what incident he meant. I had, at absolute most, a rumor of a rumor, something Mira had almost mentioned twice and then hadn't.

*Too much detail would be suspicious. Too little would be worse. What would Seraphina say?*

"I've found," I said, slowly, "that composure is usually the only thing left when there's nothing else to be done."

It meant nothing. It also meant something, if you squinted, and squinting was exactly what he was doing.

"Mm." He set the cup down without drinking from it. "That's a very different answer than the one you gave the last time someone asked."

*He knew.* Not the whole of it — he couldn't possibly know the whole of it, he had no way to know I wasn't the woman who'd woken up in this body — but he knew something had shifted, the way you know a room's furniture has been moved even if you can't say exactly which piece.

"People change their minds," I said.

"Rarely this quickly." He studied me for one more second, and I made myself hold still under it, the way you hold still for something that might lose interest if you don't move first. "Interesting. I remember you being rather certain of yourself."

Then he rose, inclined his head to Elara with considerably more warmth than he'd shown me, and left the way he'd arrived — without being escorted, without asking permission, like the garden had simply decided to let him go.

I exhaled slowly enough that I hoped it didn't show.

*That man,* I thought, *is going to get me executed before the actual execution does.*

---

"He's always been like that with you," Elara said, once he'd gone, in the gentle tone of someone smoothing over an awkward moment for a friend's benefit. "Careful. I don't think he means anything by it."

"Mm," I said, borrowing Cassian's own non-answer without meaning to.

Elara tilted her head, studying me the way he had, except softer, warmer, infinitely harder to read because there was nothing sharp in it to hold onto.

"You really don't remember, do you?"

The garden went very quiet, or maybe that was just me.

"Remember what?" I asked, as lightly as I could manage.

Elara only smiled — the same smile I'd written for her a hundred times, warm enough to disarm an entire kingdom — and reached for her tea.

"Nothing," she said. "It's not important."

Then she changed the subject, asked about the weather, asked if I'd slept well, and I sat there smiling back at her with my pulse going too fast, thinking that I had come into this garden worried about a necklace that hadn't disappeared yet, and I was leaving it with the much worse feeling that the necklace might be the smallest problem I had.