THE DOLL PRINCESS

Chapter One: The Ending She Remembered

The Ending She Remembered

Melanie Cruz had always believed that dying would be loud.

She had imagined sirens, shattered glass, the screech of tires against wet pavement, or at the very least the dramatic tolling of a clock at midnight. If she had to die young, she thought the moment ought to possess some dignity. It should be memorable. It should feel like the final scene of a story worth telling.

Instead, death arrived with the soft hum of an old apartment fan and the faint smell of instant coffee.

Melanie lay curled beneath a thin blanket, one hand resting on the open book beside her. The pages had grown warm beneath her fingers. Outside her window, rain slid down the glass in trembling silver lines, blurring the city lights into pale smudges of gold and blue. Her laptop had gone dark sometime earlier, and her phone had slipped beneath the edge of the bed. The only light in the room came from the small lamp on her desk and the last page of the novel she had been rereading for the third time that month.

The book was titled The Crown of Winter Roses.

It was not a perfect book. Melanie knew that better than anyone. The political structure collapsed whenever the author needed a dramatic scene. The pacing in the middle sagged terribly. Several characters disappeared for chapters at a time, only to return at the exact moment the plot required a convenient witness. Yet the story had a strange, irresistible beauty. Its empire was full of frozen lakes, rose-covered palaces, masked balls, and people who loved one another so badly that love became indistinguishable from destruction.

Melanie had fallen in love with it at nineteen.

Now, at twenty-seven, she knew every line of the final chapter by heart.

She stared at the paragraph printed near the bottom of the page.

Catherine Zwart knelt beneath the black marble steps of the imperial palace, her white dress stained with blood. Around her, the court watched in silence. Adrian Vale stood before her, his face wet with tears and his hands wrapped around the hilt of the sword he had used to end her life.

The author had described Catherine as beautiful even in death.

Melanie hated that sentence.

She had hated it the first time she read the novel, and she hated it more with every rereading. Catherine had been the story’s villainess, the beautiful imperial princess who manipulated everyone around her and betrayed her own brother. She had been vain, cruel, and hopelessly obedient to Lucien Zwart, the supposed hero who later became emperor. Adrian, the male lead, had loved Catherine with a devotion so intense that the story treated his violence as tragic rather than horrifying.

Melanie had always thought Catherine’s ending was unfair.

Not because Catherine was innocent. She was not. In the book, she had publicly humiliated servants, threatened rival noble women, and helped Lucien forge evidence against several members of the Council of Houses. But whenever Melanie tried to imagine the girl behind those actions, she found only a child standing beside her brother, waiting for permission to breathe.

Catherine had been called the Doll Princess because she obeyed Lucien’s every command.

That nickname had amused the court until it became a warning.

Melanie turned the page.

Adrian lifted his sword.

“Perhaps,” she muttered, “you could have tried therapy instead of murder.”

She reached for her coffee, found the mug empty, and sighed. The room tilted.

At first, Melanie thought she had stood too quickly. Then a hard pressure seized her chest. Her fingers tightened around the edge of the book. She tried to inhale, but the air seemed to have vanished from the apartment. Her heart gave one heavy, painful beat, then another that felt strangely distant.

The book slid from her lap.

Melanie reached for her phone, but her arm refused to obey. The rain outside grew louder. The room narrowed to the golden circle of the desk lamp, the white letters of the title, and the final image of Catherine kneeling beneath the palace steps.

She thought of her mother, who would be furious that Melanie had not answered her messages.She thought of the half-finished grocery list on the refrigerator.

Most of all, she thought, absurdly, that she had not finished complaining about the ending.

Then the world went dark.

When Melanie opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed was the ceiling.

It was painted with pale blue clouds.

Not printed clouds. Not the uneven water stains on the ceiling of her apartment. These were hand-painted, each one edged in delicate silver and surrounded by tiny golden stars. A chandelier hung above her, its crystal branches catching the morning light. Somewhere nearby, water trickled steadily, as if a fountain stood beyond the walls.

Melanie blinked.

For several seconds, she remained very still.

The second thing she noticed was that she was not in her bed.

The mattress beneath her was too soft, the sheets too cool, and the canopy overhead was made from sheer white fabric embroidered with roses. She sat up slowly. A wave of dizziness passed through her, followed by the unfamiliar weight of long hair sliding over her shoulder.

Melanie grabbed it.

The strands were black.

Not dark brown. Not the almost-black color of her own hair after a dye job. This hair was glossy and blue-black, flowing over her lap like spilled ink. It reached nearly to her waist.

She stared at it until her fingers began to tremble.

“No,” she whispered.

Her voice sounded wrong, too. It was softer than her own, but not weak. It possessed a clear, musical quality that belonged to someone raised in rooms where people listened when she spoke.

Melanie pushed the blankets aside and stumbled toward the nearest mirror.

The woman reflected in the glass was breathtaking.

Her face was heart-shaped, framed by black hair and crowned by a delicate silver circlet. Her skin was pale, her lips naturally rosy, and her eyes were a remarkable shade of violet-blue. She wore a white sleeping gown with pearl buttons at the throat. Even frightened and disoriented, she looked like a portrait commissioned by an emperor.

Melanie touched the mirror.

The woman touched it too.

Her knees weakened.

“No,” she said again, louder this time. “No, no, no.”

The door opened behind her.

A maid entered carrying a tray of tea. She froze when she saw Melanie standing before the mirror.

“Your Highness?”

Melanie turned sharply.

The maid lowered her head at once. “Princess Catherine, forgive me. I did not realize you were awake.”

The room seemed to lose all its warmth.

Princess Catherine.

Melanie’s gaze returned to the woman in the mirror. The silver circlet. The violet-blue eyes. The face she had seen on the illustrated cover of The Crown of Winter Roses.

Catherine Zwart.

The Doll Princess.

The villainess who died beneath the black marble steps.

The tray slipped from the maid’s hands. Porcelain shattered across the carpet, but neither of them looked down.

“What year is it?” Melanie asked.

The maid’s expression changed from confusion to alarm. “Your Highness?”

“What year?”

“It is the four hundred and twenty-first year of the Aurelian calendar.”

She looked toward the tall windows. Beyond them rose white towers and pointed roofs, their stone surfaces bright beneath the morning sun. Banners bearing the imperial crest—a golden crown surrounded by winter roses—fluttered above the palace walls.

She knew that view.

The Zwart Imperial Palace.

She knew the bedroom, too. Catherine slept in the eastern wing, close enough to the Queen Mother’s apartments that Seraphine could summon her without crossing the public corridors. Melanie knew the room because the author had described it in Chapter Three, when Catherine had received a necklace from Adrian Vale.

A necklace that contained a hidden tracking charm.

A necklace Catherine wore until the day she died.

Melanie looked down everywhere.

A black velvet box rested on the dressing table.

Her stomach twisted.

She crossed the room, opened the box, and found a necklace of silver roses nestled inside. A small crystal hung from its center, clear as ice.

Melanie remembered the scene with terrible clarity. Catherine had accepted the gift with a smile because Lucien had ordered her to do so. Adrian had clasped it around her neck himself. From then on, he had known where she was at every hour of the day.

The box was not merely proof that she had entered the novel.

It was proof that the story had already begun.

A sharp knock sounded at the door.

The maid hurried to gather the broken porcelain, but the door opened before she could answer.

Lucien Zwart entered the room.

He was younger than Melanie remembered from the book’s later chapters, perhaps twenty-four, with silver-blond hair tied at the nape of his neck and eyes the deep gray of a winter sky. He wore a formal black coat embroidered with gold thread. His expression was calm, almost affectionate.

For one dizzy instant, Melanie saw the boy Catherine had once loved.

Then she remembered the man who had ordered her to sign the forged confession that destroyed her own life.

Lucien smiled.

“My Dear sister,” he said. “You are awake at last.”

Melanie said nothing.

He crossed the room and lifted one hand toward her cheek. Instinctively, she stepped back.

Lucien’s hand paused in the air.

The smile remained on his lips, but something colder appeared behind his eyes.

“Are you feeling ill?” he asked.

Melanie’s heart pounded. She knew this scene. It was not in the novel exactly, but she knew what came next. Lucien would ask her to attend a private tea with the Queen Mother. He would tell her to be gracious to Adrian Vale. He would remind her that the emperor expected her to support Lucien’s claim to the throne.

In the original story, Catherine had nodded to every request.

She had never questioned him.

She had never survived him.

Melanie looked at her beautiful reflection, at the princess who had been created to die, and understood that fear was not the worst thing waiting for her in this world.

The worst thing was that she knew exactly how the story ended.

Lucien lowered his hand.

“Catherine?”

She forced herself to meet his gaze.

“I am fine,” she said.

It was the first lie she told in the empire of Aurelion.

And it was the first line of the story she intended to rewrite.